From 1995 to 2000, Cheney served as Chairman and CEO of Halliburton, a defense contractor based in Dallas Texas. During the time Cheney led the company, its defense contracts doubled to nearly $3 billion dollars. He convinced the Export-Import Bank of the U.S. to lend Halliburton and oil companies another $1.5 billion, backed by U.S. taxpayers. Some of these loans went to a Russian company with ties to drug dealing and organized crime. The company also donated over a million dollars to Republican candidates.
When Cheney left the company to become George W. Bush's running mate for vice president in the 2000 presidential elections, he agreed to a "severance" payment of around $5 million dollars, paid in $1 million dollar installments over 5 years. He also retains about $8 million dollars in Halliburton stock options. A spokesman to the vice president said, "This is money that Mr Cheney was owed by the corporation as part of his salary for the time he was employed by Halliburton and which was a fixed amount paid to him over time."
Since then, Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR) has been awarded the contract for building the Camp X-Ray detention centers for Taliban and Al-Qaeda prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In December 2001, KBR secured a 10-year deal known as the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program (LOGCAP), from the Pentagon. The contract is a "cost-plus-award-fee, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity service" which basically means that the federal government has an open-ended mandate and budget to send KBR employees anywhere in the world to run military operations for a profit - present locations include Iraq, Kuwait, Turkey, Afghanistan, Djibouti, Georgia, Jordan and Uzbekistan.
Asked whether the payments to Mr. Cheney represented a conflict of interest, Halliburton's spokeswoman, Wendy Hall, said: "We have been working as a government contractor since the 1940s. Since this time, KBR has become the premier provider of logistics and support services to all branches of the military."
In 2002, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) had begun looking into the company's methods of accounting for cost overruns on construction jobs. The commission, which regulates corporate behavior, has not filed any charges against Halliburton. Halliburton Corporation altered its accounting policies so it could report as revenue more than $100 million in disputed costs on big construction projects. Halliburton did not disclose the change to investors for over a year.
At the time of the change - overseen by Chicago-based Arthur Andersen, the company's auditor at the time as well as Enron's auditor- Halliburton was suffering big losses on some of its long-term contracts. Its stock had slumped because of a recession in the oil industry. Two former executives of Dresser Industries, which merged with Halliburton in 1998, said that they concluded after the merger that Halliburton had instituted aggressive accounting practices to obscure its losses.
CHENEY IN NUMBERS
- Cheney's 2000 income from Halliburton: $36,086,635
- Increase in government contracts while Cheney led Halliburton: 91%
- Minimum size of "accounting irregularity" that occurred while Cheney was CEO: $100,000,000 (One hundred MILLION dollars)(insert Dr. Evil laugh here)
- Number of the seven official US "State Sponsors of Terror" that Halliburton contracted with: 2 out of 7
- Pages of Energy Plan documents Cheney refused to give congressional investigators: 13,500
- Amount energy companies gave the Bush/Cheney presidential campaign: $1,800,000
* Libyan dictator and suspected anti-U.S. terrorist Moammar Gadhafi engaged a foreign subsidiary of Halliburton company Brown & Root to perform millions of dollars worth of work. According to the Baltimore Sun, Brown & Root was fined $3.8 million for violating Libyan sanctions (although Cheney wasn't leading Halliburton when these sales started, subsidiaries' sales to Libya continued throughout his tenure).
* Cheney claimed that he supported the U.S. sanctions on Iraq, but the Financial Times of London reported that through foreign subsidiaries and affiliates, Halliburton became the biggest oil contractor for Iraq, selling more than $73 million in goods and services to Saddam Hussein's regime. From 1997 through 2000, Cheney's Halliburton sold $73 million worth of oil equipment and services to Iraq through subsidiaries Dresser-Rand and Ingersoll Dresser Pump Co. to help rebuild Iraq's Gulf War-damaged infrastructure. That was more business than any other U.S. company, and Cheney later lied about his Iraqi connection in media interviews.
* In Burma, Halliburton joined oil companies in working on two notorious gas pipelines, the Yadana and Yetagun. According to an Earth Rights report, "From 1992 until the present, thousands of villagers in Burma were forced to work in support of these pipelines and related infrastructure, lost their homes due to forced relocation, and were raped, tortured and killed by soldiers hired by the companies as security guards for the pipelines. One of Halliburton’s projects was undertaken during Dick Cheney’s tenure as CEO."
http://www.guardian.co.uk
http://www.voa.com
http://www.corpwatch.com
http://www.moveon.org
http://www.newsandjava.com
http://foi.missouri.edu/usenergypolicies
mr100percent asked if Cheney has any ties to another huge defense contractor, The Carlyle Group. None that I can find yet, but I'm looking... Former U.S. President George H. W. Bush is a senior consultant to Carlyle and former British prime minister was recently named head of its European operations. Carlyle has been (secretly) linked to the bin Laden family, an interesting site with relevant information is at: http://www.tenc.net/news/bushladen.htm
Current president George W. Bush also has ties to the bin Laden family, his first company was finaced by Salim bin Laden, Osama's brother, in the late 1970s. And we all know about the CIA funnelling money to Osama during the 1980s to help in his war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.