Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), who has figured prominently in recent political news for his attempts to begin impeachment hearings against President George W. Bush, today announced that the congressional subcommittee he chairs will look into reports of peace groups being surveilled by police and private investigators.
“[M]ost people would be upset to know that police were spying on lawful citizens and infiltrating peaceful organizations, rather than chasing down real criminals,” said Kucinich in a press release delivered to RAW STORY. “At a minimum, such police spying is clearly a waste of taxpayer dollars and a diversion from the mission of protecting and serving the people.
“I want the subcommittee to determine how widespread these activities are and who ordered them,” the Ohio Democrat and former presidential candidate said.
Kucinich chairs the House Domestic Policy Subcommittee of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
The press release referred to reports that Maryland state police officers infiltrated peace and anti-death penalty groups and that private investigators working on behalf of “several large corporations” had surveilled environmental groups.
Such surveillance is apparently not limited to law enforcement and private investigators. In January 2007, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released a report showing “widespread Pentagon surveillance of peace activists.”
Among the seemingly innumerable scandal-worthy stories which have so marked the war in Iraq is one growing tragedy which has been largely ignored: shoddy electrical work by U.S. contractors at military bases leading to numerous electrical fires, troops receiving painful shocks, and even death by electrocution.
In January 2008, Staff Sgt. Ryan Maseth, a 24-year-old weapons expert, was electrocuted while showering in Baghdad’s green zone. According to a criminal investigation by the Army, an electrical water pump on the building’s roof shorted out from not being properly grounded when installed. On March 19 his parents sued the contractor, KBR Inc., for Sgt. Maseth’s death.
According to the Pittsburgh-Post Gazette:
“The Defense Contract Management Agency, we believe, authorized [the contractor] to the tune of millions of dollars to make the repairs. And they never made the repairs,” Mr. Cavanaugh said. “And we don’t know why. A simple repair — just ground the building — and Ryan would be alive today.”
On July 1, New York Times Investigative Reporter James Risen, author of the 2006 book “State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration,” took up the subject. According to Risen, General David Petraeus stated to Congress that 13 Americans had been electrocuted since the invasion of Iraq: 12 soldiers and one contractor.
As recently as July 11, KBR Inc. electricians told a Senate panel tasked to investigate the deaths that their employer used inexperienced, non-English speaking workers to install electrical systems. Many experienced contractors, they claimed, were dismissed after raising cautions over the work.
According to the Associated Press:
“Time and again we heard, `This is not the states, OSHA doesn’t apply here. If you don’t like it you can go home,’” said Debbie Crawford, a journeyman electrician with 30 years experience.
Army Times reports that the shoddy wiring and electrical risks have brought about the deaths of 11 service members and two U.S. civilians.
However, a follow-up report by James Risen in the New York Times on July 18 states that the problem is far worse than General Petraeus stated, and the military has known about the systemic problems since 2004.
Since the invasion, over 283 electrical fires on US bases have been reported, along with two deaths in 2006 at a base in Tikrit, the death of Sgt. Maseth, and innumerable painful shocks dealt to Americans.
A log of complaints compiled early in 2008 found soldiers living in just one Baghdad building complex were complaining of painful electrical shocks ‘on an almost daily basis.’
In public statements, Pentagon officials have not addressed the scope of the hazards, instead mostly focusing on the circumstances surrounding the death of Sergeant Maseth, who lived near Pittsburgh.
But the internal documents, including dozens of memos, e-mail messages and reports from the Army, the Defense Contract Management Agency and other agencies, show that electrical problems were widely recognized as a major safety threat among Pentagon contracting experts. It is impossible to determine the exact number of the resulting deaths and injuries because no single document tallies them up. (The records were compiled for Congressional and Pentagon investigators and obtained independently by The Times.)
The 2007 safety survey was ordered by the top official in Iraq for the Defense Contract Management Agency, which oversees contractors, after the October 2006 electrical fire that killed two soldiers near Tikrit. Paul Dickinson, a Pentagon safety specialist who wrote the report, confirmed its findings, but did not elaborate.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/18/world/middleeast/18contractors.html
A federal court has issued two rulings, the New York Times reports: One favoring President Bush’s indefinite detentions of “enemy combatants,” and another granting one of said “enemy combatants” the opportunity to challenge his detention in court.
The court effectively ruled that President Bush has the same right to indefinitely detain a civilian on American soil as he does an enemy soldier on a battlefield.
Ali al-Marri, the only “enemy combatant” to be held in the continental United States, is in military custody in Charleston, South Carolina. He was arrested in Peoria, Illinois on December 12, 2001 on charges of credit card fraud and lying to federal agents before being sent to Charleston in 2003. A 5-4 majority of the United States Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit, said that a sworn statement from an intelligence official as the government’s sole testimony in an earlier proceeding was “inadequate.” The official, Jeffrey N. Rapp, said that al-Marri was an al-Qaeda sleeper agent whose objective in the United States was to “commit mass murder and disrupt the banking system.”
The other ruling effectively reverses an earlier ruling by a three-judge panel with the same court that ordered that al-Marri be either charged with a crime or released.
Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse, saying that al-Marri had “already received all the process he was due,” added that the decision recognize the president’s authority to “capture and detain [al-Qaeda] agents who, like the 9/11 hijackers, come to this country to commit or facilitate warlike acts against American civilians.”
“This decision,” countered Jonathan L. Hafetz, counsel for al-Marri, means the president can pick up any person in the country–citizen or legal resident–and lock them up for years without the most basic safeguard in the Constitution, the right to a criminal trial.”
Today, on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), who has held several hearings on the Bush administration’s torture program, said that President Bush has committed “impeachable offenses”:
NADLER: If we had a just system and it weren’t overly political, the president would be impeached. I think he has committed impeachable offenses.
Yesterday, House Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers (D-MI) said that he may allow Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) to present his impeachment articles against Bush before the August recess. “We’re not doing impeachment, but he can talk about it,” he said.
KABUL—The war in Afghanistan reached a wrenching milestone this summer: For the second month in a row, U.S. and coalition troop deaths in the country surpassed casualties in Iraq. This is driven in large part, U.S. officials point out, by simple cause and effect. Marines flowed into southern Afghanistan earlier this year to rout firmly entrenched Taliban fighters, prompting a spike in combat in territory where NATO forces previously didn’t have the manpower to send troops. “We’re doing something we haven’t done in seven years, which is go after the Taliban where they’re living,” says a U.S. official.
But amid a well-coordinated assassination attempt on Afghan President Hamid Karzai and large-scale bombings last week in the capitals of both Afghanistan and Pakistan, U.S. forces are keenly aware that they are facing an increasingly complex enemy here—what U.S. military officials now call a syndicate—composed not only of Taliban fighters but also powerful warlords who were once on the payroll of the Central Intelligence Agency. “You could almost describe the insurgency as having two branches,” says a senior U.S. military official here. “It’s the Taliban in the south and a ‘rainbow coalition’ in the east.”
Indeed, along with a smattering of Afghan tribal groups, Pakistani extremists, and drug kingpins, two of the most dangerous players are violent Afghan Islamists named Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani, according to U.S. officials. In recent weeks, Hekmatyar has called upon Pakistani militants to attack U.S. targets, while the Haqqani network is blamed for three large vehicle bombings, along with the attempted assassination of Karzai in April.
Ironically, these two warlords—currently at the top of America’s list of most wanted men in Afghanistan—were once among America’s most valued allies. In the 1980s, the CIA funneled hundreds of millions of dollars in weapons and ammunition to help them battle the Soviet Army during its occupation of Afghanistan. Hekmatyar, then widely considered by Washington to be a reliable anti-Soviet rebel, was even flown to the United States by the CIA in 1985.
“He was the most radical of the radicals,” recalls former Rep. Charlie Wilson, immortalized in the recent film Charlie Wilson’s War for his role in directing U.S. military aid to anti-Soviet Afghan warlords. “He didn’t hate us as much as he hated the Soviets,” he adds, “but he sure didn’t like us much.” In his early years, the warlord distinguished himself by throwing acid in the faces of unveiled women. Today, a senior defense official says Hekmatyar is “as vicious as they come.” In 2002, the CIA shot a Hellfire missile from an unmanned drone in an effort to kill him.
U.S. officials had an even higher opinion of Haqqani, who was considered the most effective rebel warlord. “I adored Haqqani. When I was in Afghanistan, Haqqani was the guy who made sure I would get out,” says Wilson. “He was a marvelous leader and very beloved in his territory.”
Haqqani was also one of the leading advocates of the so-called Arab Afghans, deftly organizing Arab volunteer fighters who came to wage jihad against the Soviet Union and helping to protect future al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Today, U.S. military officials are not certain that Haqqani is alive, though he was featured in an undated video that recently surfaced. “Either way, the Haqqani we’re fighting now is the son”—34-year-old Sirajuddin Haqqani—says the senior U.S. military official. “He gets a lot of benefit from his father’s prestige.”
Today, the Haqqani network is driving the recent rise in violence in eastern Afghanistan, according to U.S. military officials. Haqqani “is definitely the strongest” enemy in the border provinces of Paktia, Paktika, and Khost, known among military officials as p2k. The senior U.S. military official notes that Haqqani is increasingly moving to more-asymmetric means of attack to avoid straight-on shootouts with better-armed U.S. forces, a general tactical guidance that came from Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar last year. To that end, U.S. military officials estimate that they have seen a 10 percent rise in use of roadside bombs, which now account for one third of the attacks against coalition forces in the country.
At the highest levels, Hekmatyar and the Haqqani network cooperate and find sanctuary in Pakistan, where the country’s political turmoil and suspension of operations in the lawless tribal areas have facilitated increased attacks in Afghanistan. Of the two warlords, Hekmatyar, by U.S. military estimates, “has a wider geographic coverage” and greater political credibility. A recent press release issued by Hekmatyar’s spokesman thanked the Pakistani “mujahideen” for their support in the Afghan war against American and other “occupation forces.” It noted, however, that the efforts allow the international community to blame Pakistan for meddling in Afghan affairs and requested that fighters restrict their activities for now to “U.S. installations and interests within Pakistan.”
A former politician, Hekmatyar founded the Hizb-e-Islami Gulbuddin (known as hig), an offshoot of which remains a popular party in the Afghan parliament. “There’s blue—or ‘good’—hig and red—or ‘bad’—hig,” says the senior U.S. military official. “About half of his group sides with the government; the more recalcitrant are still joining the insurgency.”
But though the Hekmatyar and Haqqani networks have loose alliances and similar goals, each has its own turf. “They are swimming in the same stream, but they are not unified. There is no Ho Chi Minh,” says the U.S. military official. “They have the same broad generic approaches, and it works. The bottom line is that if your only mission is to wreak havoc in Afghanistan, you don’t have to be coordinated—and what they’re doing is plenty good enough to stir up problems in this country.”
In the course of conducting these operations, insurgents have benefited greatly from the shortage of U.S. and allied troops here, say U.S. officials. Earlier this month, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters that he is “deeply troubled” by the increasing violence in Afghanistan but emphasized that troop levels in Iraq precluded a further increase in forces. “We need more troops there,” he said in Washington. “But I don’t have the troops I can reach for.”
There are signs, however, that the Pentagon’s priorities are shifting as conditions improve in Iraq. The Defense Department last week moved an aircraft carrier from Iraq war duty in the Persian Gulf to the Arabian Sea, shortening the distance that strike planes must fly to provide air support in Afghanistan. And the Pentagon recently announced that it is extending by one month the seven-month deployment of 2,200 of the 3,200 marines sent to Afghanistan in March.
Still, U.S. officials are in widespread agreement that there aren’t enough forces in the country. There are currently 32,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan backed by some 25,000 allied troops under NATO command, in total roughly 37 percent of force levels in Iraq. “There should be another 20,000 marines” in Afghanistan, says the U.S. official. “We’re advancing, but we’re doing it with troop levels that are unacceptably low.” Mullen, too, has raised questions about the consequences of what he calls an “economy of force” campaign. “What we’re going through right now is an ability to, in almost every single case, win from the combat standpoint,” said Mullen. He added, however, that “we don’t have enough troops there to hold. And that is key, clearly, to the future of being able to succeed in Afghanistan.” l
With Kevin Whitelaw in Washington and Aamir Latif in Pakistan
Terrorism liaison officers have been getting a lot of attention in the national press lately. But the bottom line of what they do is basically old-fashioned police work, according to the state police coordinating the effort in Arizona.
The TLOs, as they are called, keep their eyes and ears open for any suspicious activity.
The three-year-old program is part of the Arizona Department of Public Safety and its Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center, the state’s intelligence fusion center. The 75 to 80 TLOs are specially trained police officers, firefighters and police crime analysts. They report suspicious behavior they see in the course of their jobs. The reports are put in the state database for further investigation, and could be sent to federal terrorist databases.
DPS Lt. Larry Perry, the man in charge of Arizona’s TLOs, thinks they are necessary. Although he admits their jobs include a concept that all police officers and firefighters should follow, he says TLOs have learned a lot more than that during 40 hours of special training.
“This is situational awareness where people who work in critical infrastructures throughout the state are reporting suspicious activities,” Perry said. “TLOs are not getting information on private citizens in their homes. This is a speciality unit that links TLOs together for the purpose of reporting suspicious activity.”
Perry said TLOs in Arizona have reported theft of military clothing, police or fire uniforms and equipment. He added that TLOs are deployed to large public gatherings of 500 or more people where the potential for terrorism exists so they can assist law enforcement officials.
“If we were to see one person taking a lot of pictures of the power plant at Palo Verde (nuclear plant), that could be a terrorist opportunity,” Perry said.
The program has received four federal and state grants ranging from $200,000 to $500,000, according to Perry. They range from 24 months to 36 months.
Sgt. Brent Olson, a member of the Mesa Police Department emergency services and counter terrorism teams, is a TLO. He believes the program provides an important link between law enforcement and fire protection agencies.
“A lot of it is straight-up crime prevention, but with a twist,” Olson said.
“We’re focused with speciality other units. Something may happen here in Mesa and TLOs can work their counterparts in other cities to check if there’s anything going on there. We can contact each other directly and share information. We don’t have to go through others as we might have had to do. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a good program.”
Perry scoffs at the notion that the program may be likened to snooping.
“It’s not ‘Big Brother’ at all, but I can see that the ACLU might have a problem with it,” he said.
Alessandra Soler Meetze , executive director of the Arizona chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said her concern is the program might give inexperienced or undertrained volunteers the opportunity to target people because of ethnicity or religion.
“What we don’t want is a policy that encourages non-law enforcement personnel to keep tabs on their neighbors,” Meetze said. “This sounds like good police work and smart profiling based on behavior rather than racial or ethnic factors. The policy clearly targets behavior. We just need to keep tabs on DPS to make sure their officers and volunteers in practice don’t cross the line and begin replacing suspicious activity with skin color when targeting individuals.”
Perry said the reporting of suspicious information by TLOs is based upon suspicious activities and incidents, not on race or religious preference.
Suspicious activity is defined in TLO training as behavior that could lead to terrorism, such as taking photos of no apparent aesthetic value, making measurements or notes, espousing extremist beliefs or conversing in code, according to a draft Department of Justice/Major Cities Chiefs Association document.
In a secret report last year, the Red Cross found evidence of the CIA using torture on prisoners that would make the Bush administration guilty of war crimes, The New York Times reported Friday.
The Red Cross determined the culpability of the Bush administration after interviewing prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, according to the article.
Prisoner Abu Zubaydahwho said he had been waterboarded, “slammed against the walls” and confined in boxes “so small he said he had to double up his limbs in the fetal position.”
The information comes from a new book written by Jane Meyer, who has frequently published articles concerning counter-terrorism in The New Yorker.
The book is titled “The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals,” and will be released next week.
Mayer cited “sources familiar with the report” to explain the confidential document as a warning “that the abuse constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the U.S. government in jeopardy of being prosecuted.”
The report was submitted to CIA last year and concluded that American interrogation methods are “categorically” torture that violates both domestic and international law, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow reported Friday.
Although the CIA had already admitted to the use of waterboarding, Meyer says in the book that several CIA officers confirm the findings of the Red Cross, including the other forms of torture mentioned.
Maddow called George W. Bush a “torture-approver-in-chief who has yet to be held to account for anything” and said that congressman Dennis Kucinich had reintroduced his articles of impeachment against the president.
Maddow questioned constitutional law expert Johnathan Turley about the development.
“The problem for the bush admin is that they perfected plausible deniability techniques,” Turley said. “They bring out one or two people that are willing to debate on cable shows whether waterboarding is torture and it leaves the impression that its a closed question.
“It’s not. It’s just like the domestic surveillance program that the federal court said just a week ago was also not just a closed question.”
When asked by Maddow if the chances are now greater that Bush will be prosecuted now or after leaving office by the international community, Turley compared the situation to Serbia in the early 90s.
“I’d never thought I would say this, but I think it might in fact be time for the United States to be held internationally to a tribunal. I never thought in my lifetime I would say that.”
The The New York Times broke a sensational story about the Pentagon’s involvement in a secret plan to influence Iraq War media coverage through paid military pundits, yet the rest of the media has largely ignored this incredibly important revelation. This video by Free Press helps to expose some of the dishonesty of the cable news networks.
The The New York Times broke a sensational story about the Pentagon’s involvement in a secret plan to influence Iraq War media coverage through paid military pundits, yet the rest of the media has largely ignored this incredibly important revelation. This video by Free Press helps to expose some of the dishonesty of the cable news networks.
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department is considering letting the FBI investigate Americans without any evidence of wrongdoing, relying instead on a terrorist profile that could single out Muslims, Arabs or other racial and ethnic groups.
urrently, FBI agents need reasons — such as evidence or allegations that a law probably has been violated — to investigate citizens and legal residents. The new policy, law enforcement officials say, would let agents open terrorism investigations after mining public records and intelligence to build a profile of traits that, taken together, are deemed suspicious.
Although President George W. Bush has disavowed targeting suspects based on their race or ethnicity, the new rules would let the FBI consider those factors among traits that could trigger a national security investigation.
Among factors that could make someone subject of an investigation is travel to regions of the world known for terrorist activity, access to weapons or military training, along with the person’s race or ethnicity. Law enforcement officials say the policy would help them find terrorists before they strike.
“We don’t know what we don’t know. And the object is to cut down on that,” said one FBI official.
FBI agents wouldn’t be allowed to eavesdrop on phone calls or dig deeply into personal data — such as the content of phone or e-mail records or bank statements — until a full investigation was opened.
More than a half-dozen senior FBI, Justice Department and other U.S. intelligence officials familiar with the new policy agreed to discuss it on condition of anonymity.
The change, expected later this summer, is part of an update of Justice Department policies amid the FBI’s transition from traditional crime fighting to protecting the nation from attacks. Attorney General Michael Mukasey acknowledged the overhaul was under way in early June.
If adopted, the guidelines would be put in place in the final months of a presidential administration that has been dogged by criticism that its counterterrorism programs trample privacy rights and civil liberties.
Critics say the presumption of innocence is lost in the proposal. The FBI could begin investigations simply “by assuming that everyone’s a suspect, and then you weed out the innocent,” said Caroline Fredrickson of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Courts across the country have overturned criminal convictions when defendants showed they were targeted based on race. Racial profiling generally is considered a civil rights violation, and former Attorney General John Ashcroft condemned it in March 2001 as an “unconstitutional deprivation of equal protection under our Constitution.”
Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the guidelines wouldn’t give the FBI more authority than it now has.
“Any review and change to the guidelines will reflect our traditional concerns for civil liberties and First Amendment liberties and our traditional investigative emphasis on using the least intrusive means feasible,” he said Wednesday.
By Jason Leopold
Online Journal Contributing Writer
When Dick Cheney was chief executive of Halliburton in the 1990s, he urged Congress to ease sanctions against Iran and enter into diplomatic discussions with the country’s leaders so the oilfield services company could legally do business there.
“Let me make a generalized statement about a trend I see in the U.S. Congress that I find disturbing, that applies not only with respect to the Iranian situation but a number of others as well,” Cheney said at the time. “I think we Americans sometimes make mistakes . . . There seems to be an assumption that somehow we know what’s best for everybody else and that we are going to use our economic clout to get everybody else to live the way we would like.”
In March 1995, Clinton signed an executive order that prohibited “new investments [in Iran] by U.S. persons, including commitment of funds or other assets.” It also restricts U.S. companies from performing services “that would benefit the Iranian oil industry. Violation of the order can result in fines of as much as $500,000 for companies and up to 10 years in jail for individuals.”
Cheney was highly critical of the Clinton administration’s policy toward Iran.
“I think we’d be better off if we, in fact, backed off those sanctions [on Iran], didn’t try to impose secondary boycotts on companies . . . trying to do business over there . . . and instead started to rebuild those relationships,” Cheney said during a 1998 business trip to Sydney, Australia, reported by Australia’s Illawarra Mercury newspaper.
Despite assertions by the vice president that Iran has been trying to build a nuclear weapon since the 1990s, the Bush administration decided it would not punish foreign oil and gas companies that invest in Iran or other countries that allegedly sponsor terrorism.
Recently, Bush administration officials said they would not rule out military action against Iran for allegedly interfering in U.S. interests in Iraq.
Halliburton first started doing business in Iran as early as 1995. According to a February 2001 report in the Wall Street Journal, “U.S. laws have banned most American commerce with Iran. Halliburton Products & Services Ltd. works behind an unmarked door on the ninth floor of a new north Tehran tower block. A brochure declares that the company was registered in 1975 in the Cayman Islands, is based in the Persian Gulf sheikdom of Dubai and is “non-American.” But, like the sign over the receptionist’s head, the brochure bears the Dallas company’s name and red emblem, and offers services from Halliburton units around the world.”
In the February 2001 report, the Journal quoted an anonymous U.S. official as saying “a Halliburton office in Tehran would violate at least the spirit of American law.” Moreover, a U.S. Treasury Department website detailing U.S. sanctions against Iran bans almost all U.S. trade and investment with Iran, specifically in oil services. The Web site adds: “No U.S. person may approve or facilitate the entry into or performance of transactions or contracts with Iran by a foreign subsidiary of a U.S. firm that the U.S person is precluded from performing directly. Similarly, no U.S. person may facilitate such transactions by unaffiliated foreign persons.”
Wendy Hall, a spokeswoman for Halliburton, said in an interview with me last year that Halliburton may not agree with Iran’s “policies or actions” and the company makes “no excuses for their behaviors” but “due to the long-term nature of our business and the inevitability of political and social change, it is neither prudent nor appropriate for our company to establish our own country-by-country foreign policy.”
Hall added that “decisions as to the nature of such governments and their actions are better made by governmental authorities and international entities such as the United Nations as opposed to individual persons or companies. Putting politics aside, we and our affiliates operate in countries, to the extent it is legally permissible, where our customers are active as they expect us to provide oilfield services support to their international operations.”
In 1995, Halliburton paid a $1.2 million fine to the U.S. government and $261 million in civil penalties for violating a U.S. trade embargo by shipping oilfield equipment to Libya. Federal officials said some of the well servicing equipment sent to Libya by Halliburton between late 1987 and early 1990 could have been used in the development of nuclear weapons. President Reagan imposed the embargo against Libya in 1986 because of alleged links to international terrorism.
But the fact that Halliburton may have unwillingly helped Libya obtain a crucial component to build an atomic bomb only made Cheney push the Clinton administration harder to support trade with Libya and Iran.
Additionally, while Cheney headed Halliburton the company engaged in secret business dealings with Saddam Hussein’s regime by selling Iraq oil production equipment and spare parts to get the Iraqi oil fields up and running, according to confidential United Nations records.
During the 2000 presidential campaign, Cheney vehemently denied that Halliburton did business with Iraq while he was chief executive. He acknowledged that Halliburton did business with Libya and Iran through foreign subsidiaries, Cheney said, “Iraq’s different.”
“I had a firm policy that we wouldn’t do anything in Iraq, even arrangements that were supposedly legal,” Cheney said on the ABC-TV news program “This Week” on July 30, 2000. “We’ve not done any business in Iraq since U.N. sanctions were imposed on Iraq in 1990, and I had a standing policy that I wouldn’t do that.”
But it turns out that Cheney was not telling the truth.
In 1998, Cheney oversaw Halliburton’s acquisition of Dresser Industries Inc, the unit that sold oil equipment to Iraq through two subsidiaries of a joint venture with another large U.S. equipment maker, Ingersoll-Rand Co.
The Halliburton subsidiaries, Dresser-Rand and Ingersoll Dresser Pump Co., sold water and sewage treatment pumps, spare parts for oil facilities and pipeline equipment to Baghdad through French affiliates from the first half of 1997 to the summer of 2000, U.N. records show. Ingersoll Dresser Pump also signed contracts — later blocked by the United States — to help repair an Iraqi oil terminal that U.S.-led military forces destroyed in the Gulf War, the Post reported in a June 2001 story.
The Halliburton subsidiaries and several other American and foreign oil supply companies helped Iraq increase its crude exports from $4 billion in 1997 to nearly $18 billion in 2000.
U.S. and European officials have argued that the increase in production also expanded Saddam’s ability to use some of that money for weapons, luxury goods and palaces. Security Council diplomats estimate that Iraq may be skimming off as much as 10 percent of the proceeds from the oil-for-food program, according to documents obtained by the United Nations Security Council.
During his tenure as chief executive of Halliburton, Cheney pushed the U.N. Security Council to end an 11-year embargo on sales of civilian goods, including oil related equipment, to Iraq.
Under Cheney, Halliburton and its subsidiaries were one of several American and foreign oil supply companies that helped Iraq increase its crude exports from $4 billion in 1997 to nearly $18 billion in 2000 by exploiting a loophole in the law and selling Iraq spare parts for its oil fields so it could pump more oil. U.S. and European officials have long argued that the increase in Iraq’s oil production also expanded Saddam’s ability to use some of that money for weapons, luxury goods and palaces.
UN documents show that Halliburton’s affiliates have had controversial dealings with Saddam Hussein’s regime during Cheney’s tenure at the company, which played a part in helping the late dictator pocket billions of dollars under the UN’s oil-for-food program. The Clinton administration blocked one deal Halliburton was trying to push through because it was “not authorized under the oil-for-food deal,” according to UN documents. That deal, between Halliburton subsidiary Ingersoll Dresser Pump Co. and Iraq, included agreements by the firm to sell nearly $1 million in spare parts, compressors and firefighting equipment to refurbish an offshore oil terminal, Khor al-Amaya. Still, Halliburton used one of its foreign subsidiaries to sell Iraq the equipment it needed so the country could pump more oil, according to a report in the Washington Post in June 2001.
The Halliburton subsidiaries, Dresser-Rand and Ingersoll Dresser Pump Co., sold water and sewage treatment pumps, spare parts for oil facilities and pipeline equipment to Baghdad through French affiliates from the first half of 1997 to the summer of 2000, UN records show. Ingersoll Dresser Pump also signed contracts — later blocked by the United States, according to the Post — to help repair an Iraqi oil terminal that U.S.-led military forces destroyed in the Gulf War years earlier.
As secretary of defense in the first Bush administration, Cheney helped to lead a multinational coalition against Iraq in the Persian Gulf War and to devise a comprehensive economic embargo to isolate Saddam Hussein’s government. After Cheney was named chief executive of Halliburton in 1995, he promised to maintain a hard line against Baghdad.
But Cheney’s position against Iraq radically changed when he was named CEO of Halliburton. Cheney said sanctions against Iraq took a financial toll on the corporation he headed.
“We seem to be sanction-happy as a government,” Cheney said at an energy conference in April 1996, reported in the oil industry publication Petroleum Finance Week. “The problem is that the good Lord didn’t see fit to always put oil and gas resources where there are democratic governments,” he observed during his conference presentation.
Sanctions make U.S. businesses “the bystander who gets hit when a train wreck occurs,” Cheney said.
“While virtually every other country sees the need for sanctions against Iraq and Saddam Hussein’s regime there, Cheney sees general agreement that the measures have not been very effective despite their having most of the international community’s support. An individual country’s embargo, such as that of the United States against Iran, has virtually no effect since the target country simply signs a contract with a non- U.S. business,” Petroleum Finance Week reported.
“That’s exactly what happened when the government told Conoco Inc. that it could not develop an oil field there,” Cheney told Petroleum Finance Week. Total S.A. “simply took it over.”
Jason Leopold is the author of “News Junkie,” a memoir. Visit www.newsjunkiebook.com for a preview. His new website is The Public Record.
