Cheney's Lamest Excuse Yet (The Nation article)

http://www.thenation.com/thebeat/index.mhtml?bid=1&pid=1892

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Additionally, Cheney's old company, Halliburton, the top oil services corporation in the U.S., filled its coffers with Iraqi money during the heyday of the Oil for Food program. When Cheney's was Halliburton's CEO, the company did not collect vouchers; rather, its subsidiaries took advantage of the opening created by the "Oil-for-Food" program to cut deals with Saddam Hussein's government that allowed it to take money directly from Iraq. During 1998 and 1999, Halliburton's Dresser Rand and Ingersoll Dresser Pump subsidiaries signed contracts to provide roughtly $73 million in oil production equipment and spare parts to Iraq.

The services provided by Halliburton's subsidiaries during the period when Cheney was chairman and chief executive officer of the Dallas-based company helped rebuild Iraq's oil production and distribution infrastructure. That work, which got Iraqi oil flowing, was, of course, necessary for the implementation of the "Oil-for-Food" program -- and, presumably for the abuses about which Cheney is now so concerned.

Under Cheney's leadership, the contracts obtained by Halliburton subsidiaries were among the most substantial awarded any U.S. firm doing business with Saddam Hussein. But they were not as ambitious as the company would have liked. A scheme to have Halliburton subsidiaries repair an Iraqi oil terminal that had been destroyed during the 1991 Gulf War was blocked by the U.S. government because it was determined to violate the sanctions regime.

Might Cheney have been unaware of the Halliburton Iraq tie -- as he tried to claim in one 2000 interview? Not likely. James Perrella, former chairman of Ingersoll Rand told the Washington Post that based on his knowledge of how Halliburton and its subsidiaries worked, Cheney had to have known. "Oh, definitely," Perrella said of Cheney, "he was aware of the business."
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http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0410/S00132.htm

Under Cheney, Halliburton Helped Saddam Hussein Siphon Billions from UN Oil-for-Food Program

By Jason Leopold
When the Iraqi Survey Group released its long awaited report last week that said Iraq eliminated its weapons programs in the 1990s, President George W. Bush quickly changed his stance on reasons he authorized an invasion of Iraq. While he campaigned for a second term in office, Bush justified the war by saying that that Saddam Hussein was manipulating the United Nation's oil-for-food program, siphoning off billions of dollars from the venture that he intended to use to fund a weapons program.

The report on Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction, prepared by Charles Duelfer, a former U.N. weapons inspector and head of the Iraqi Survey Group, said Saddam Hussein used revenue from the oil-for-food program and "created a web of front companies and used shadowy deals with foreign governments, corporations, and officials to amass $11 billion in illicit revenue ( http://www.registerguard.com/news/2004/10/07/a2.nat.oilfood.1007.html ) in the decade before the US-led invasion last year," reports The New York Times.

"Through secret government-to-government trade agreements, Saddam Hussein's government earned more than $7.5 billion," the report says. "At the same time, by demanding kickbacks from foreign companies that received oil or that supplied consumer goods, Iraq received at least $2 billion more to spend on weapons or on Saddam's extravagant palaces."

The oil-for-food program was supervised by the U.N. and ran from 1996 until the war started in Iraq last year. It was designed to alleviate the effects sanctions had on Iraqi citizens by allowing limited quantities of oil to be sold to buy food and medicine.

But the one company that helped Saddam exploit the oil-for-food program in the mid-1990s that wasn't identified in Duelfer's report was Halliburton, and the person at the helm of Halliburton at the time of the scheme was Vice President Dick Cheney.