Colin Challen MP
First, buy your senator
It wasn’t long after their election in 2000 that the business backgrounds of George W. Bush and Richard Cheney became mired in controversy. Cheney’s business career was not as long as Bush’s, but it personifies the role of crony capitalism endemic to U.S. politics. Cheney’s role as Halliburton’s (1) Chief Executive between 1995 and 2000, was but one connection among many in the long history of Halliburton’s intimate reliance on politicians and government.
In appointing his Vice Presidential running mate, Bush was said to have employed a thorough vetting procedure, including an exhaustive questionnaire. But one part of the procedure which was denied to all the unsuccessful candidates was a good word from the future president’s father. Cheney’s return to government he ran the White House staff under Gerald Ford, and was Secretary for Defence under Bush Senior was hailed as a wise choice of Bush Junior’s: here was an elder statesman, who demonstrably knew the ropes and how to pull them. Halliburton had been stumbling along before Cheney’s arrival and he was credited with turning it into one of the world’s largest oil construction and engineering services companies. But the stories underpinning Cheney’s reputation at the helm of Halliburton largely emanate from his political allies, the same small circle of well-connected mutual back-scratchers who have done well out of the military-industrial complex. By other standards, Halliburton was actually not quite so successful, as the following New York Times comment makes clear:
‘Over all, the Cheney years saw Halliburton stock under perform most stocks in its industry. From the time he became chief executive through the announcement he was leaving, Halliburton shares rose 110 per cent, while the average oil service company share price rose 158 per cent and the Standard and Poor’s 500, an index of large company stocks, was up 151 per cent…….. If Mr Cheney has a track record as a chief executive that is mediocre against the backdrop of American business, his candidacy is nevertheless supported by almost all of the executives that worked with him, even those who disagreed with how he led the company.’ (2)
Cheney was not hired for his management expertise, but for his political connections, which have always been central to Brown and Root/Halliburton’s success. The foundation of this success was Brown and Root’s close relationship with Lyndon Johnson over a period of forty years. That relationship blossomed with Johnson’s expansion of the Vietnam war, with the company building everything from airstrips to roads, harbours to military bases.
Much of Johnson’s own early political progress, leading up to his success in the 1948 Senate Primary for Texas, was due to the financial backing of the Texas construction firm and Johnson’s friendship with George and Herman Brown, the brothers who ran it. The success of the company was secured when Johnson helped to steer through Congress the Marshall Ford Dam (now known as the Mansfield Dam) project, construction on which had commenced without all the legal niceties having been dealt with. Built in the 1930s, the dam was the largest project Brown and Root had ever worked on, grossing more than all their previous twenty years’ worth of activity. Johnson went on to ensure that they got other work such as the Texan Corpus Christi naval base once again dwarfing the scale of anything Brown and Root had previously built. Another example was an order to build four ships for the navy. As George Brown said, ‘We didn’t know the stern from the aft I mean the bow of the boat. [We] needed a name to put on the contract, and I said, “Brown Shipbuilding.” That was all there was to it.’ During the Second World War Brown Shipbuilding’s naval contracts alone were worth $357,000,000. (3)
By 1942 the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) had mounted a major investigation into Brown and Root’s tax affairs specifically to track down hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Johnson-controlled campaign funds which appeared to have been fraudulently paid. The tax officials suspected that Brown and Root and its subsidiaries were funnelling money to Johnson through fictitious staff bonuses and ‘attorney fees’. These were tax deductible, whereas campaign donations were not. (4) The amount which the IRS estimated Brown and Root had underpaid taxes on stood at $1,099,944. They faced paying a penalty of 50%, with the additional danger that they could be charged with fraud. The dangers for Johnson were evident: publicity about the case could have ended his career. Johnson saw President Roosevelt in January 1944 to discuss the case. Shortly after the investigation was brought to a close; Brown and Root, setting a precedent, made a quiet settlement with the IRS for $372,000.
One of the companies involved in the Brown and Root consortium building the Corpus Christi Naval Base gave Johnson $100,000. It was a common tactic of Brown and Root to make sure that their suppliers, partners and subsidiaries also contributed to the cause. In response to IRS questioning, George Brown said:
‘We have certainly not directed anybody to give campaign funds. We knew it was not legal to give any political funds, and if anybody working for Brown and Root gave any political funds, it was without our knowledge. Certainly I don’t think it has been charged to Brown and Root. If it has, it certainly shouldn’t have been.'(5)
Brown and Root’s senior executives never quite seemed to know what their junior colleagues were getting away with.
The opportunities afforded by the Second World War greatly increased the scope of Brown and Root’s work. Having started out in 1919 as a hand-to-mouth builder of roads in the Texas outback, they had by 1945 become a major national construction business. Their connections to and knowledge of government continued to be highly beneficial after the war. At the close of the war, the U.S. government found itself with 26,000 surplus aeroplanes, most of which it determined should be scrapped. By working with other friendly companies, Brown and Root evaded rules designed to prevent all the planes falling into the same hands, and they obtained them all for a bid of $6,582,157. They recouped their money many times over, not least due to the fact that with the advent of the Korean War the U.S. government found it had an urgent need for spares. Brown and Root’s sales back to the government topped $30 million. (6) The company’s biographer wrote of the post-war period:
‘The Browns had experienced employees and associates in Washington D.C., reporting back regularly on possible opportunities, and these men systematically canvassed federal agencies for coming opportunities. Personal connections with mid-level officials in the navy or Corps of Engineers could be just as useful at times as contacts with a senate majority leader [i.e. Lyndon Johnson].’ (7)
One of Johnson’s most important accomplishments on behalf of his friends was to ensure that the Senate refused to confirm the reappointment of Federal Power Commission (FPC) Chairman Leland Olds. The FPC was responsible for the regulation and licensing of power generation and its sale to the public. In the eyes of oil and gas businessmen like the Brown brothers, the FPC was keeping prices, particularly of gas, artificially low and the main culprit was Olds, who was portrayed as a liberal. ‘There is nothing more important to the welfare of the natural gas industry in Texas than that Olds be defeated’, Charles I. Francis, a Brown and Root attorney, declared. (8) Olds, a New Dealer and Roosevelt’s nominee, was originally considered as unlikely to be refused another term as Chairman of the FPC. But that was before Johnson took charge of the confirmation hearings. By the end of them Olds’ reputation had been roundly trashed in a McCarthy-style personality assassination. Olds’ desire to see ‘social responsibility’ ahead of profit made him a ‘communist’. His appointment was rejected, much to the delight of the oil and gas lobby, cementing Johnson’s position as their chief mouthpiece in the legislature. Following Olds’ rejection in 1949 and the creation of a more pliable FPC, were boom times for the producers. The price of gas rose from six cents per one thousand cubic feet of gas to ten cents by 1955. The value of the producers’ stock rose accordingly, in the case of the Brown brothers’ Texas Eastern Commission, from $12 in 1949 to $28 in 1955. By 1959, the price of gas had risen to twenty-one cents. (9)
Critics of the relationship between Johnson and Brown and Root were never short of evidence. But Johnson claimed: ‘I never recommended them for a contract in my life.’ George Brown said a little less clearly:
‘In a material way there was no way for him to help us because we had to be low bidder on everything that we got from government. So the only thing he could do at all would be to give us information that might become available to him as to what appropriations they were thinking about.’
‘The most wide-open lobby in America’
In an interview with the company biographer, ‘Brown acknowledged in the same interview, numerous projects were not awarded strictly on the basis of the lowest bid but rather on the more subjective judgement of which company would do the best job at a reasonable cost.’ (10) The relationship between the Browns and Johnson extended to business in another way. When the Johnsons (in the name of Lady Bird) purchased the Austin radio station KTBC in 1953, it was first located in the Brown Building, and later moved to the Brown-owned Driskill building for which. KTBC did not have to pay. (11)
The Texas political culture of the time was described thus:
‘What must surely be the most wide-open lobby in America moves into Austin every two years to entertain and coerce the men who write the laws. Bribery, cajolery, pheasant hunts, Mexican vacations, airplane junkets to the Kentucky horse races, bus junkets to border brothels you name it the legislators have had it.’ (12)
Brown and Root was seen as the doyen of the system. Herman Brown’s personal pilot said,
‘If it wasn’t hunting season, why, it was always political season. That is to say we’d go by Austin and pick up a group of congressmen or senators or something and go out and spend the weekend at Fort Clark and they’d have their big powwows.’ (13)
It is not difficult to imagine what was discussed at these big ‘powwows’. Much will have focused on the development of Texas’ economic transformation, something that local businesses and politicians could point to with pride. But they could also note with satisfaction that they were becoming the new focus of national politics, that their power was no longer regional, but could permanently assert itself in Washington, even after the demise of Lyndon Johnson.
Normal rules do not apply
In 1992, during Richard Cheney’s time as Secretary of Defense,
‘……the Pentagon……..paid Brown and Root $3.9 million to produce a classified report detailing how private companies like itself could help provide logistics for American troops in potential war zones around the world. Later in 1992, the Pentagon gave the firm an additional $5 million to update its report….. That same year, the company won a five-year logistics contract from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to work alongside American GIs in places like Zaire, Haiti, Somalia, Kosovo, the Balkans, and Saudi Arabia.’ (14)
The Pentagon had long been one of Halliburton’s most trusted customers and as we shall see, the Department of Defense never seemed to demur from paying over the odds for their services. Take, for example, the story of ex-Halliburton worker Dammen Campbell, who sparked off a criminal investigation into Brown and Root regarding the orders he had received to inflate the price of work ‘capture the budget’ was the actual expression used on closing down a U.S. Army base, Fort Ord, in the mid-1990s. Arising from Campbell’s whistleblowing, the Justice Department claimed that Brown and Root ‘defrauded the government in its billings for more than 200 job orders during the closure of the Northern California base’. (15) According to Campbell, the amount involved was $6 million. The company denied the allegations but then came to an out of court settlement of $2 million ‘to avoid further litigation’. In a prepared statement, the company said: ‘It expects to continue its work as a major contractor to the United States government in numerous projects.’ Even though Halliburton settled out of court, Cheney’s spokeswoman Juleanna Weiss saw it as a different kind of conspiracy altogether, saying, ‘The voters are bound to question the timing of this investigation. The timing is suspicious, given the Clinton-Gore administration’s proclivity to manipulate the Justice Department for their own political well-being.’ (16)
Campbell’s whistleblowing was not entirely in vain. But such cost overruns, or ‘capturing the budget’, are common problems. Another whistleblower, Ernest Fitzgerald, this time based in the Pentagon, gave one description of how the system worked:
‘The pressures to ignore cost overruns also affected the civilian employees, who were quickly socialized to the advantages of large contracts for both defense industries and their Pentagon counterparts. For example, Ernest Fitzgerald was told early in his career as a Defense Department cost analyst that Pentagon civilian and military officials wanted defense contractors to earn high profits. These would not only ensure attractive opportunities for retired officials but also create a long-term relationship with a favored list of large corporations that employed experienced lobbyists to assist in obtaining congressional approval for large military budgets.’ (17)
The 1992 contract, which led to Brown and Root being paid $1.2 billion dollars for its work with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers between 1992 and 1999, with later work bringing that total up to $2 billions, sounded eerily familiar in 2002 by which time similar concerns were being raised about parallel cases of ‘advise and audit’ exemplified in the activities of the big five accountancy firms. When Cheney arrived in 1995, Halliburton’s Defense Department work was worth $300 million a year; by 2000 it had doubled to $600 million a year, all under the aegis of a Democratic presidency.(18)In one particular way the business way Cheney the CEO had dispensed with political partisanship.
That he is a man of few words is well known but what he does come out with reveals his amoral, corporate ‘doability’ philosophy anything for a buck. This philosophy is most evident in his and Halliburton’s dealings with ‘rogue’ foreign states. As Cheney said, ‘The problem is that the good Lord didn’t see fit to always put oil and gas resources where there are democratic governments’ such as Libya, or Burma for example. (19)
In 1986, having launched from a British airfield his bomber raid on Colonel Gadhafi’s family, President Reagan described the Libyan despot as a ‘unique threat to free peoples’, a ‘rogue regime that advances its goals through the murder and maiming of innocent civilians’. Sanctions followed, but not for Halliburton. As Robert Bryce wrote in the Austin Chronicle:
‘Since the mid-1980s, Gadhafi’s “rogue regime” has paid Brown and Root more than $100 million to oversee engineering work on the Great Manmade River project, a massive $20 billion pipeline project that will provide water for Tripoli and other Libyan cities. To get round the U.S. sanctions, Halliburton transferred the engineering work to Brown and Root’s overseas offices.’ (20)
The work was transferred to Brown and Root Ltd, a UK subsidiary, whose operations head, Duncan Guy, when asked if they had taken on the work to avoid sanctions replied, ‘Presumably, yes’. (21) It was reported that Brown and Root had been fined $3.8 million for reexporting U.S. goods indirectly to Libya.
When Cheney took the helm at Halliburton, he clearly wasn’t going to let sanctions get in the way of a better bottom line. In 1998 he described his anti-sanction stance as his ‘hobby-horse’. After completing his first year at Halliburton, he said, ‘The reality is those kind of sanctions, unless they are part of an international effort…………are in fact self-defeating.’ (22) Self-defeating for whom? The oppressed, or the companies that might see their competitors getting a bigger slice of the action? But sanctions can cut both ways. After the 2003 Iraq war, the U.S. was accused of drawing up a blacklist of foreign companies which under the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act of 1996 would not be allowed to bid for reconstruction contracts because they had done work in ‘axis of evil’ countries.(23) It could only be an impertinence to ask whether any subsidiaries of Halliburton would be banned, not least since Halliburton was one of the major corporations on a closed shortlist of five U.S. companies allowed to bid for Iraq reconstruction work.
Halliburton, through its Brown and Root subsidiary, has also carried out work on behalf of the Burmese military dictatorship, working on the Yadana pipeline in the 1990s, along with Alfred McAlpine of the United Kingdom. The pipeline’s cost could be measured not only in dollars, but in rape, death and pillage, according to the human rights group Earthrights International. Earthrights list other dubious projects carried out by Halliburton: in Azerbaijan, where sanctions were imposed because of ethnic cleansing; in Indonesia, where ‘Kellogg Brown and Root (Halliburton’s engineering division) [used] collusive, corruptive and nepotistic practices with former president Suharto’s family’; in Iran Cheney lobbied against the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act, which even when it was in place didn’t stop Halliburton contracts there; Iraq since the war, Halliburton has helped to reconstruct Iraq’s oil industry, more than once (more about that below); in Nigeria Halliburton was accused of ‘complicity in the shooting of a protester by Nigeria’s Mobile Police Unit, playing a similar role to Shell and Chevron in the mobilization of this “kill and go” unit to protect company property’. (24)
In addition to the exotic locations listed in the Earthrights report, Washington-based journalist Wayne Madsen would add: Algeria, Angola, Bosnia, Croatia, Haiti, Kuwait, Russia, Rwanda and Somalia, in all of which Halliburton played a logistical role in support of the U.S. military, or indeed somebody else’s military. (25)
What is of chief interest in the dealings of Halliburton/ Brown and Root is their dependence on government contracts and loans to keep them going. Halliburton, for all its big business, global reach bravado, had not changed its spots since the days of the Marshall Ford Dam in the Texas outback. They still depends on the government to provide them with lucrative contracts which can underpin their business in good times as well as bad, much as the state doles out welfare benefits to those in need although with tax-cutting ‘small government’ administrations, corporate welfare never seems to whither.
According to a report from the Center for Public Integrity, Halliburton received $3.8 billions worth of government contracts and guaranteed loans while Cheney was CEO. (26) In that period their donations to candidates and parties totalled $1.2 million, as opposed to the $534,750 in the previous five years.
In the UK
In 1995, Brown and Root’s donations of £16,000 a year to the Conservative Party (presumably making them an honoured member of the Party’s ‘Team One Thousand’ initiative for donors of a £1,000 or more) was not the particular cause of Gordon Brown’s ire. (27) In his Daily Record column he wrote:
‘A leaked memo from Devonport has revealed that when the dockyard is privatised, the main owner will be the American company Brown and Root. A few years ago, the Government was so worried about foreign control that it banned foreign stakes above 30 per cent in our dockyard companies. Now, for all his nationalism, Michael Portillo is about to relent. Brown and Root will move its stake to over 50 per cent.’ (28)
Mr Brown thought that some of our ‘military leaders would turn in their graves to find our most important nuclear weapon being refitted by a foreign country’, albeit an ally. Maybe so; but Brown and Root’s nuclear capacity had an exceptional engineering quality the ability to engineer greater profits from government contracts, which would not always be delivered as intended. Indeed, it was rather symbolic in the battle between Rosyth and Devonport for the right to refit Britain’s Trident nuclear submarines, that in 1994 the House of Commons Defence Select Committee became ‘perturbed’ by the number of breakdowns of TCHD Mark II transporters, carrying Trident warheads to Scotland. The breakdowns were attributed to ‘design faults, poor quality components and operator error’. Tractor units had to be replaced at least twice, costing the taxpayer £60,000. The transporters were made by Brown, Root Vickers. (29)
Brown and Root’s presence in the ‘contractorisation’ market in the former state-run nuclear industry in the U.K. was already significant. John Major’s government opened up more of the U.K’s sensitive defence-related nuclear industry to privatisation. A consortium including Brown and Root had taken over the Aldermaston Weapons Establishment (AWE) in 1993, and one of the founders of that consortium had in 1994 been appointed director of the Dounreay Nuclear Establishment.(30) The AWE decision was roundly attacked in the Commons by Labour MP Frank Cook, who claimed that Brown and Root’s record in the U.S. running nuclear contracts was abysmal. He pointed to the South Texas Nuclear Project, which was $5 billion over budget and 9 years late, and on which Brown and Root, whilst denying all the allegations, had nevertheless paid £469 million in an out-of-court settlement. Problems encountered included unacceptable welding, inadequate heating, ventilation and air conditioning. At another site, Comanche Peak, the company was accused of using intimidatory behaviour towards workers who raised health and safety questions, firing an employee who met with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), and of paying an electrical foreman £9,375 not to tell federal officials of his safety concerns at the plant. (31) One worker, Dobie Hatley, who had raised safety concerns, was pressed to take part in the falsification of records required by the NRC:
‘My boss called me in and told me that we had to get the books to match [the NRC audit requirements]. If we did it right, it probably would have taken a year. So what were we going to do? We had to pass the audit and the only way to do that was to rewrite the documentation. We destroyed the records and wrote new ones to match what we needed. That’s falsification of documentation. The supervisor promised us that after the audit we were going to make all of this right. We just did not have the time now because the audit committee was coming. We passed with flying colours.’ (32)
But these problems, all vehemently denied by Brown and Root in the U.K. (basically: this was long ago and far away) (33) did little to dent the UK government’s desire to install the Brown and Root consortium in charge of Devonport. It was an interesting decision, since it proved to be the most costly, set against the alternative proposal at Rosyth, which had already had £100 million of pounds taxpayers’ money pumped into it in expectation of carrying out the Trident refit work. After the decision in favour of Devonport was made on the basis of a bid from the Brown and Root consortium valued at £162 million as against a final, second bid within the deadline from Rosyth of £147 million the real costs began to mount. (34)
By 1997, the final cost of the Devonport decision was to be nearer £360 million excluding the abortive £100 million spent at Rosyth. Naturally, angry exchanges took place between the Ministry of Defence and the Brown and Root consortium, along the usual, well-established lines: i.e. that the government should have been more precise about its requirements, and that contrarily, the contractors should have been more adept at anticipating and factoring in such requirements, without having to be told. (35)
But government money comes from a bottomless pit, which is what Brown and Root was metaphorically digging. Most commentators seemed to agree that the decision had not a little to do with saving the seats of south western Conservative MPs at the ensuing general election. Perhaps Gordon Brown should have the last word:
‘A year ago when I warned that we all had to pay £100 million more to subsidise Devonport, government Ministers scoffed and said Devonport was cheaper. When I asked that the nuclear installations inspectorate scrutinise Devonport, they point-blank refused…….and now they are having to admit that the betrayal of Rosyth is also costing the British public a packet.’ (36)
On the other hand, perhaps Mr Cheney should have the last word, since in April of 2000, three years into the Labour government, in one of his last duties as CEO of Halliburton, Cheney enjoyed a tour of the Devonport dockyards, before meeting Ministers and military officials at a conference on military privatisation in Oxford. He told his audience,
‘My general impression is that our British colleagues are far ahead of us in the U.S. in the extent to which they have adopted changes in culture, attitude and style of operation required for successful privatisation efforts.’
By 2002, the Devonport costs had ballooned by 50 per cent,and the National Audit Office was conducting an inquiry. (37)
In the former Soviet Union
At the same time as Brown and Root were drilling for oil in H. M.Treasury, what has been described as the twentieth century’s last great oil rush was taking place in the former Soviet Union. Once again Cheney’s arguments against U.S. sanctions would come to the fore. Once again, humanitarian concerns would be secondary to corporate rights. With an estimated $4 trillion worth of oil at stake in the newly rediscovered Caspian Sea oil patch, it is easy to see why Cheney would be so concerned that less scrupulous fellows then he should get to it first. And he was not alone. Other members of the military-civil political elite were also actively engaged in lobbying the government for a change in its sanctions regime, which operated against Azerbaijan and in Armenia’s favour, following a war between the two newly independent states. Apart from Cheney, those high placed lobbyists included: former National Security Advisors Brent Scowcroft employed by Pennzoil, a partner in the Azerbaijan International Operating Company (AIOC), and with whom Scowcroft earned well over $100,000 in consulting fees; Zbigniew Brzezinski consultant to Amoco, also a partner with AIOC; former White House Chief of Staff John N. Sununu; former Treasury Secretary and Vice Presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen, shareholder in oil services company Frontera Resources, which is chaired by former Deputy Secretary of Energy, William H. White; others with interests are former Secretary of State James Baker III; former Congressman Charles Wilson, former Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Armitage and Major General Richard Secord, who was described as the ‘chief covert operative’ for Colonel Oliver North in the Iran-Contra scandal. (38) Thus, from across the political spectrum, we can see a rare unanimity of interests working at the top of the military-civil-political establishment, to secure the United States’ economic interest in the region. To back up their commitment, 500 members of the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, led by Marine General John Sheehan, dropped in on Kazakhstan in 1997 in a ‘joint’ military exercise to show how deep that commitment was to the region. Whilst the U.S. troops numbered 500, Russian paratroops numbered just 40. General Sheehan hung up his boots a year later when he joined the major U.S. construction firm Bechtel and won a seat on Bush’s Defence Policy Board. (39) To put all this in context, the Caspian’s known yield of oil, 178 billion barrels, would be enough to keep California in gasoline until the 23rd century, or the whole of the United States for 30 years.
The broader geopolitical problem of doing deals in Central Asia is compounded by the hell-for-leather race in former Soviet Union republics to become westernised, capitalist economies in the shortest space of time. Corruption is rife. Dealings with Russian companies can be fraught with danger, such as waking up and finding that your assets have disappeared, that the legal system is unresponsive, that political responsibility is absent. In such circumstances, U.S. companies have the benefit of a copper-bottomed guarantor, the Export-Import Bank which plays a similar function to that of the U.K’s Export Credit Guarantee Department (ECGD) to insure your business against loss should your overseas customers and partners go belly up. For Halliburton, of course, the existence of the Ex-Im Bank is just another way of doing business with the taxpayer, should the need arise, obviating any need to worry about business risk. Between 1990 and 2000 Halliburton’s overseas projects were underwritten (or had loans) to the tune of $1,632,805,788 for work in Algeria, Angola, Mexico, Nigeria and Russia by the Ex-Im Bank. (40)
A particularly controversial example of Ex-Im Bank support for Halliburton took place in July, 1999 when the Bank agreed to a $292 million loan guarantee to Halliburton and several other companies to revitalise the dormant Siberian Samotlor oil field. Progress on the development was stalled when the Russian partner, Tyuman Oil, bought out the remainder of the field in a questionable deal, leaving previous owners BP Amoco and financier George Soros fuming. The sale took place when the previous Russian part-owner went bankrupt, and Tyumen bought the lot. BP said the bankruptcy was just a ruse so that Tyumen could take over the company ‘and that local judges were in Tyumen’s pocket’.(41) The loan was held up by the State Department due to Tyumen’s alleged corruption, and Cheney is credited with ensuring that it was finally approved in April the following year. But whilst Cheney, still head of Halliburton, wanted the deal to go ahead, ironically this was in the run-up to the presidential elections the following year all the leading Republican candidates for the presidency had called on President Clinton to stop all Ex-Im Bank loans to Russia.(42) The taxpayer will therefore still underwrite the risk and Halliburton’s profits. But the taxpayer was doomed not to see all of their rightful return on Halliburton’s profits, since between 1995 and 2002, most of which time Cheney was Chief Executive, the number of tax havens used by Halliburton and its subsidiaries rose from 9 to 58, saving an estimated $70 million.(43) Through such ‘foreign tax credit utilisation,’ Wendy Hall, Halliburton’s PR person, was able to tell The International Herald Tribune that Halliburton’s federal income tax liability in 2002 was just $15 million. (44)
Arthur Anderson
Yet even the profits they did make have been challenged as, presumably on the advice of their auditor, Arthur Anderson, their accounting procedures were changed during Cheney’s time to include uncollected payments on disputed contracts. According to The Financial Times:
‘The company maintains that the issue is simply an honest and legitimate dispute over accounting practices. Those familiar with the company say Mr Cheney was not involved in any decisions about how to treat the disputed contracts for income purposes.’ (45)
The ‘honest and legitimate dispute’ about accounting practices at Halliburton eventually landed in the investigative hands of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). According to Halliburton, they had changed from using a ‘cost-plus’ method of accounting (which allowed them to add a small profit on top of the contract price) to a ‘fixed price’ system, which meant contracts had to be finished by a certain time and at an all-inclusive cost, that is, inclusive of their profit margin. Although Cheney denied being involved in the decision (which came to light after he became Vice President) he did sing the praises of the accountancy company which had suggested the change, Arthur Anderson. ‘I get good advice, if you will, from their people based upon how we’re doing business and how we’re operating over and above just the normal by-the-books arrangements’, he gushed on an Arthur Anderson promotional video discovered by the Wall Street Journal.(46) David Lesar, a partner at Anderson’s followed Cheney as CEO.
Several employees must have misunderstood what Cheney implied on the video, for in Nigeria, working for Kellogg Brown Root (KBR) several members of staff had made improper payments to an ‘entity owned by a Nigerian national who held himself out as a tax consultant, when in fact he was an employee of a local tax authority’. The bribes, made over 2001/2, were paid to obtain ‘favourable tax treatment’, against company rules. The company had itself unearthed the payments in an internal audit, according to its spokesperson, and was now faced with a $5 million tax bill. What the spokesperson didn’t explain was how the employees none at a senior level had become so devoted to the company that they felt they had to commit the offence on its behalf in the first place. (47) While these payments had been made after Cheney’s stint at the helm, it later emerged that other, rather larger payments had been allegedly paid during his time as CEO. Halliburton was part of a consortium which was responsible for the construction of a $4 billion liquefied gas plant on Bonny Island, Nigeria. Construction started in 1995, and according to press reports, ‘retrocommissions’ of $180 million were paid to Nigerian officials between 1995 and 1999.(48)
The UK’s Export Credit Guarantee Department had given guarantees worth £130 million to Halliburton’s UK subsidiary, MW Kellogg, and it too had started an investigation. Who took the leading role in the construction project seemed to be a matter of doubt. Halliburton said their French partners Technip led the contract and referred the press to Technip’s senior vice president, Jean Deseilligny. But Technip’s press spokesperson said that Halliburton was the leader of the joint venture. (49) Halliburton meanwhile had hired the law firm Baker Potts to represent them. The firm, headed by James Baker III, former Secretary of State to George H.W. Bush, gave Wendy Hall, Halliburton’s director of P.R. cause to reassure the public: ‘Baker Potts is our primary outside counsel and represents the company in many such circumstances.’ (emphasis added) (50) However, if some of the mud should stick, Mr Cheney could always reflect on the success of a previous Halliburton brush with the law, for the company, according to the Daily Telegraph, ‘made electoral contributions to three Texas Supreme Court justices while a case important to the company was pending.’ The court later let a ruling favourable to Halliburton stand. (51) That’s par for the course in Texan justice, where Halliburton’s rules seem more elastic than in Nigeria: Halliburton and its subsidiaries have been party to 20 petitions seeking Texas Supreme Court review since 1993. The court declined to review all but one of the 12 cases (eight per cent) appealed by Halliburton’s opponents. Meanwhile, the court accepted three of eight cases (27 per cent) appealed by Halliburton, ruling for the company two out of three times. This is an enviable track record in a court that accepts about 11 per cent of all petitions filed. (52)
The norm in corporate America
The two common strands throughout Cheney and Halliburton’s approach are clear: use the government to a) provide a regular and sometimes (always?) inflated source of income and b) remove as much regulation as possible, not least those sanctions designed to protect human rights. Perhaps the most scandalous evidence of Cheney’s duplicity emerged when it was found that Halliburton subsidiaries, Dresser-Rand and Ingersoll-Dresser, had won $30 million worth of contracts to help rebuild Iraq’s oil industry between 1998 and 1999.(53) These were the largest contracts awarded to any company. Although the sanctions regime had been slightly eased in 1998, Cheney denied on television in August 2000 that Halliburton had anything to do with Iraq. He was quoted as saying ‘No. No. I had a firm policy that I wouldn’t do anything in Iraq even arrangements that were supposedly legal.’ (54) Three weeks later, and despite the forthcoming elections, Cheney was forced to eat his words, saying that Halliburton had divested itself of the subsidiaries. Even then it was found that the companies’ sale had not taken place until a year after Cheney had taken over at Halliburton. For once, Halliburton’s PR spokesperson was more upfront, referring to more recent revelations about Halliburton’s dealings with Iran:
‘We do not always agree with policies or actions of governments in every place that we do business, and we make no excuses for their behaviour. It is neither prudent nor appropriate for our company to establish our own country-by-country foreign policy.'(55)
Nor, it seems, does Halliburton expect the government to do the same. ‘Investment and trade can do more to open up a country then reams of cables from our State Department’, said Cheney. (56)
Halliburton’s purchase of Dresser Industries, the company of which Prescott Bush Snr. was once president, and for whom George Bush Snr. started work, was considered by Cheney as one of his greatest achievements whilst boss of Halliburton: ‘One of the most exciting things I’ve ever done’, he said. Yet this great deal, the due diligence of which on Halliburton’s part has now been questioned because of massive asbestos related disease claims against Dresser, could leave Halliburton open to an uncapped liability. Cheney’s famed business acumen clearly wasn’t in evidence on the day of his greatest business achievement. In 2002 it was reckoned that the $7.7 billion deal had dented Halliburton’s stock value by $4.5 million, and that Halliburton’s own estimate of its asbestos liability was $2.2 billion. (57) But once again Halliburton’s estimate was hopelessly wrong a rare case of underestimation. At the end of 2002, the company made a settlement in cash and stock worth $4 billion. (58)
‘I am your idea’
Whilst Cheney left Halliburton with a retirement package worth $30-plus million, others felt that he had left them out of pocket, and two Halliburton shareholders, with the support of U.S. independent watchdog Judicial Watch began a law suit against Halliburton directors. They named Cheney’s successor, David Lesar, who had previously been a partner at Arthur Anderson, as one of the defendants. The two shareholders’ complaint, makes for a sober but informative read. It contains a quote from an Arthur Anderson document entitled Cracking the Value Code: How Successful Businesses Are Creating Wealth in the New Economy:
‘Value creation that is, future value captured in the form of increased market capitalisation is how successful businesses are creating value in the New Economy. In the pages that follow, you will find a new set of tools that we have developed to help you create in the New Economy. It is called Value Dynamics, and it is based, in part, on an intensive three-year, 10,000-company research project by professionals at Arthur Anderson.’ (59)
(Or to put it in the words of the post-Enron incarnation of Arthur Anderson ‘accenture’ advertisement:’I am your idea. One day you’ll look for me and I’ll be gone.'(60) ) Hopefully, there will not be another 10,000 Enrons (for whom Arthur Anderson were also consultants) waiting to happen as a result of ‘Value Dynamics’. As Dick Cheney said barely a month after the lawsuit against him was filed:
‘In the past 18 months, the United States has gone through a serious economic slowdown, a great national emergency, a war abroad, and a series of scandals in corporate America. Acts of fraud and theft are outside the norm in corporate America. But when those acts do occur….. the wrongdoers must be held accountable.'(61)
Ten months later, in June 2003, Halliburton paid $6 million to settle various shareholder lawsuits that had challenged the company’s accounting practices whilst under Cheney’s reign. (62) But far from being held to account for a ‘scam’ which allegedly boosted Halliburton’s profits by $234 million, Cheney remains at or near the helm of an inseparable government/ business which in another hemisphere is embarking on its biggest adventure yet.
In Iraq
Halliburton/Brown and Root and other U.S. companies in particular, like Bechtel are in an unrivalled position to help the Iraqis overcome the destruction of war. This is partly because they are being called upon to rebuild many of parts of Iraq’s ruined infrastructure that they helped build in the first place, but also because in Halliburton’s case the company was contracted by the government to write the contingency plan, the ‘Logistics Civil Augmentation Plan (LOGCAP III)’ for the army’s role in Iraq. This 10-year deal, struck in December 2001, was a contract of the ‘cost-plus-award-fee, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity service’, which sounds a lot like the kind of contract Halliburton’s profits thrive on. Between December 2001 and March 2003, the contract produced revenues for Halliburton of $830 million,(63) thus benefiting the company before the war even started.
After Cheney left the CEO’s office and entered the VP’s office, stock values showed outstanding increases. In 2002 Halliburton was Standard and Poor’s 500 number six top performer, and in the first half of 2003 its share price rose 24 per cent. Some of this good fortune can be accounted for by the news that Halliburton had signed another deal with the Army Corps of Engineers to extinguish oil well fires in Iraq: when the news came out of the open-ended nature of this contract in March 2003, Halliburton’s shares rose by 15 per cent.(64) The contract could be worth up to $7 billion, equivalent to around half of one year’s turnover for the whole Halliburton group, although because less damage was done to Iraq’s oil infrastructure then was feared, it will probably be a lot less. But whilst the deal pleased shareholders, it didn’t please congressional critics, who pointed out that Halliburton’s record of overcharging would hardly be stopped by the fact that the contract was issued without an open-tender process, and was shrouded in secrecy. Cheney was once again forced on to the defensive about his role, saying in September 2003, ‘I have absolutely no influence of involvement of, knowledge of in any way, shape or form of contracts led by the Corps of Engineers or anybody else in the federal government.’ (65) But his denials have done little to appease his critics, not least since friends of Cheney, like fellow Halliburton board member Lawrence Eagleburger, painted a rather different picture of Cheney’s value to the company: ‘Dick was good at opening doors. I don’t mean that pejoratively. He had contacts from his former life and he used them effectively.’ Eagleburger should know: he was also Bush Snr’s Secretary of State. (66) Another Halliburton director, Ray Hunt, of Dallas based Hunt Oil Co. and a major Bush donor, serves on George W. Bush’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. (67) Other directors include Hunt’s son who served on Bush’s energy transition team, along with fellow director C.J. ‘Pete’ Silas. (68) In the circumstances, it is hard to see how the doors were ever closed!
By pure coincidence, Halliburton’s Washington lobbying efforts were cut in half when Cheney left the company and joined the government. In the last two years of Clinton’s administration, Halliburton spent $1.2 million; the following two years it spent $600,000. This at a time when its federal income grew from a maximum of $1 billion per annum to $8 billion with much more in the pipeline. (69) Halliburton’s chief lobbyist is General Charles ‘Chuck’ Dominy (Retd.), formerly of the Army Corps of Engineers. His appointment underscores the ever closer relationship Halliburton has developed with the government. Indeed, they are in many respects indistinguishable from government. In theory, their contracts are awarded by civil servants; but civil servants, like military officers, know that if their expertise is of value, they will find greater rewards in the private sector. Take Admiral Joe Lopez for example, the former commander in chief of U.S. forces, southern Europe. When Cheney left Halliburton, Lopez took a job there as a go-between for the company with the government. As a military commander for southern European U.S. forces, Lopez will probably have been aware of the vastly inflated prices charged by Brown and Root in their $2.2 billion contract to support the military in the Balkans, where, for example, $14 sheets of plywood were marked up to $84.98, where excess costs of $72 million were found.(70) The Admiral’s example is replicated down the hierarchy, as Dina Rasor noted:
‘The major problem with having a military officer in charge of procurement is his vulnerability. It turns out that not everyone can make general or admiral and our “up and out” policy forces people to retire. The average age of an officer at retirement is 43 years …..At the age of 43 he probably has kids in or ready for college and a big mortgage and can’t afford a large cut in his income. Besides, he is at the peak of his intellectual powers, is emotionally involved, and doesn’t want to quit……Many of these officers…..do not have the skills which are readily marketable in the civilian sector. This nice man then comes around and offers him a job at 50K – 75K per year. If he stands up and makes a fuss about high cost and poor quality, no nice man will come and see him when he retires.’ (71)
Not only does Halliburton have its foot in the door at all levels to win contracts, its intimate relationship with government ensures that when things go wrong as they often spectacularly do at Halliburton they generally get off lightly.
Halliburton’s record of overcharging and unusual accounting has been greatly extended in its execution of its Iraq contracts giving the lie to the suggestion that this company, above all others was so uniquely skilled that not only was it employed at great cost under Cheney as Defense Secretary in the early 1990s to determine whether privatisation was a good idea, but by 2002 under Cheney as Vice President was uniquely offered no-bid contracts to aid the war and reconstruction effort. A contract (part of the overall no-bid contract) to supply fuel to Iraq, between May and September 2003 had allegedly led to overcharging by $61 million. The contract is likely to continue to April 2004, despite the fact that the government’s Defense Energy Support Center is drawing up an alternative, cheaper contract. At the request of Halliburton, the Army Corps of Engineers issued a waiver absolving Halliburton of the need to provide ‘any cost and pricing data’ relating to their contract. (72) Meanwhile, the Defence Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) had begun its own investigation into ‘suspected irregularities’ which had been discovered in a routine audit. Whether this investigation was tied to an earlier revelation that two Halliburton staff had been allegedly engaged in taking bribes from Kuwaiti officials to the tune of $6 million is unclear. What is interesting is that there seems an abundance of confusion about the role of audit at Halliburton. In this case, Halliburton claim to have found the problem themselves: ‘We have diligent internal controls and a strong corporate Code of Business Conduct. We have a fiduciary responsibility to our clients to carefully monitor every transaction. I am extremely proud of the work the auditors did in this particular case’ said Randy Harl, Vice President and CEO of Kellogg Brown and Root. (73)
Perhaps a Halliburton audit is not designed to detect overcharging. This would seem abundantly to be the case with the contract to deliver food to U.S. troops fighting in Iraq. Once again, the DCAA had been carrying out a ‘routine’ audit of Halliburton’s catering contracts, and soon discovered that potential overcharging of some $27 million was evident. As ever the company presented an innocent explanation: ‘the issue is how to improve meal planning, not how much was charged’. (74) But matters got much worse. By February the company was forced to delay billings of $140 million. ‘It is important to understand that this is not any sort of admission. As a responsible government contractor, it is the right thing to do’, said Randy Harl. (75) By March it appeared that the company was somewhat more contrite. It was reported that Halliburton had ‘acknowledged to Pentagon auditors that it provided faulty cost estimates last year for $2.7 billion in services to U.S. troops in Iraq and Kuwait’. (76) Protesting that such problems would not affect its cash-flow, the company nevertheless cancelled two contracts and was accused by one of its suppliers of not paying its bills. (77) By late March Halliburton was threatened with the withholding of $300 million of payments under the Logcap contracts. Halliburton PR person Wendy Hall brushed off the threat saying that it would have ‘little or no effect’ on liquidity ‘because the company would delay its own payments to subcontractors by an equivalent amount’. (78) At the time of writing this particular case remains unresolved. One wonders if Halliburton has taken care to book its future profits on this contract.
Immunity from prosecution
‘Halliburton’s Iraq role is expanded to oil products distribution’ and ‘Halliburton and Bechtel push to use future Iraq oil cash for rebuilding’ were two headlines in the Financial Times in May, 2003 which revealed intentions of a greater purpose for the U.S. private sector’s presence in Iraq’s new destiny. The accompanying stories told of Halliburton’s growing role in controlling the oil supply and how the companies were seeking to mortgage Iraq’s future oil sales to pay for their work.(79) This latter issue was raised by a persistent Iraq-policy critic, Congressman D. Waxman, a Californian Democrat, who said it raised ‘significant questions about the administration’s intentions regarding Iraqi oil’. The administration’s response, through Scott Saunders, spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers, was that Halliburton’s contract did not allow it to export oil, but ‘when a second competitive contract is awarded …..the winning American bidder may be allowed to export Iraqi oil for a limited time.’ (emphasis added) (80 The ‘limited time’ of the second contract is unspecified, but for its duration, the hands of any new Iraqi regime would be tied, and it would be unlikely to renege on the deal, since it will no doubt rely heavily on U.S. forces for its own security and survival. It would therefore have no control over possible oil exports worth up to £15 billion a year, along with what is already a given: no control over the reconstruction of Iraq, and little influence over the course that the U.S. has charted for the beleaguered country. To add to the powerlessness of the defeated state, George W. Bush signed executive order 13303 in May, 2003, which builds creatively on U.N. resolution 1483, by giving U.S. corporations immunity from prosecution from any dealings they have with Iraqi oil. (81)
This is all very distant from the ‘war against terrorism’, but is the natural outcome of the newly defined U.S. energy policy drawn up by Dick Cheney. This policy was developed before 9/11:
‘…..evidence that Cheney played an early planning role is contained in a previously undisclosed National Security Council document, dated February 3rd, 2001. The top-secret document, written by a high-level N.S.C. official, concerned Cheney’s newly formed Energy Task Force. It directed the NSC staff to cooperate fully with the Energy Task Force as it considered the “melding” of two seemingly unrelated areas of policy: “the review of operational policies towards rogue states” such as Iraq, and “actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields.”‘ (82)
These ‘operational policies’ and ‘actions’ are the foundations for the new society George W. Bush envisages for the Middle East, ‘replacing corruption and self dealing with free markets’ in a ‘U.S.-Middle East free-trade area’ within ten years. The vision was fleshed out by Richard Perle, former Reagan Assistant Secretary of Defence and former chair of the Defence Policy Board (he resigned that position due to a conflict of interests but stayed on as a member of the Board) who said:
‘We have a responsibility, a stewardship, not to turn [Iraq] over to institutions incapable of seeing this through to a successful conclusion….the last thing Iraqis need is French statism or German labour practices.’ (83)
In order to ensure that Iraq’s transition to an ultra trade-liberalised state moves swiftly on, it has been essential that corporations such as Halliburton be active in the occupation from the start. Indeed, the speed with which Halliburton was given its no-bid contracts, despite its record, shows how important the role of privatisation is in bringing ‘order’ to the occupied state. An invasion by the military alone could not achieve all the objectives of this occupation, and would have mitigated against it. Military forces are still the ultimate representation of statehood. There is now an ever clearer distinction between what is classed as ‘military’ and what is classed as ‘security’. Passing ‘security’ over to the client regime should in theory be much easier if it is less identifiably carried out by somebody else’s national army. Better that Iraq’s U.S.-installed authorities can pretend to be ‘in control’ of the occupying forces, which it demonstrably could not be if they were wearing the uniform of the United States or some other army. Hence, for example, the following:
‘The UK’s largest private security firm in Iraq, Global Risk Strategies, is helping the coalition provisional authority and the Iraqi administration to draft new regulations. It is expecting to increase its presence from 1,000 to 1,200 staff this spring, and could reach 1,800 this year. [2004]’ (84)
When private businesses are writing the rules for their new state, we can see why ordinary Iraqis may feel some sense of ingratitude to their liberators. But Global Risk Strategies are just one amongst many ‘private military organisations’ or mercenary groups, with tens of thousands of recruits, operational in Iraq. The senior staff of Bechtel and Halliburton chose not use them for their own protection, preferring instead to employ 500 Gurkhas for that task.(85)
Halliburton, the largest contractor in Iraq, can act with relative impunity. Contracts have been issued regardless of previous infractions and most observers agree that the company has become indispensable to the war effort in Iraq as well as the U.S. military’s wider world role. Whilst direct government contracts still form the smaller part of its turnover, those contracts have increasingly been the means to future income. Its future earning capacity in Iraq will be dominated by oil service contracts, where it is in pole position, first by being there with the U.S. invasion, and secondly by being there even when Iraq was run by Saddam.
Has crony capitalism evolved since the days when Brown and Root pump-primed LBJ for special treatment? Whilst the Brown brothers set out to win government business by developing what by today’s standards would be judged corrupt means, and to influence policy by whatever means, they were still outsiders trying to influence politicians. Their successors are not willing to leave it to ‘us and them’. They have developed a form of crony capitalism which makes them both commissioner and commissioned. More of government is in private hands through the process of privatisation (and reductions in audit and oversight allows more of the privatised sphere to be a law unto itself) and more of government is in private hands because the most senior elected officials think their duty is to serve corporate interests, either because of their own career histories or the appointments they make to crucial policy-making bodies which primarily represent private interests. While it is difficult to imagine Johnson thinking of Brown and Root’s ambitions as the prime reason for going to war in Vietnam, it is entirely plausible to assume that Bush and Cheney’s ambitions were largely motivated by their desire to promote the interests of Halliburton et al in the new ‘free trade Middle East’. The merging of these ambitions represents the greatest threat to the political domain’s ability to cope with world problems in the 21st century; it emboldens its ‘anti-political’ opponents, such as fundamentalists and terrorists, whilst ignoring more profound threats such as global warming.
Notes
1 Various names appear in this article covering the Halliburton saga. Brown and Root is the name of the original business, set up in 1919 by brothers George and Herman Brown. The ‘Root’ component reflects the involvement of a silent partner who never took an active role in the company. In 1965 Brown and Root was sold to Halliburton.
2 The New York Times 24 August 2000
3 Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent, (London: Pimlico, 1990) p.664.
4 The trail of some of the money was made harder to follow because while it may have started out as checks, it was soon converted into cash. See the example in Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson:The Path To Power (New York: Vintage Books, 1990) at p.746
5 Ibid p.749
6 Joseph A. Pratt and Christopher J. Casteneda, Builders: Herman and George R. Brown (Texas A&M University Press, College Station, 2002) pp.100/101
7 Ibid. p.191
8 Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate, (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2002) p.659
9 Ibid. p.9
10 Pratt and Casteneda, see note 6, p.177
11 D. Jablow Hershman, Power Beyond Reason: The Mental Collapse of Lyndon Johnson (New Jersey: Barricade, 2002) p.60
12 Pratt and Casteneda, see note 6, p.171
13 Ibid. p.172
14 Robert Bryce, ‘The Candidate From Brown and Root’, Austin Chronicle 28 August 2000
<www.weeklywire.com>
15 The Los Angeles Times, 8 February 2002
16 The Washington Post, 25 October 2000
17 Myron Peretz Glazer and Penina Migdal Glazer, The Whistle Blowers: Exposing Corruption in Government and Industry (New York: Basic Books, 1989) p.21
18 Bryce, see note 14
19 Kenny Bruno and Jim Vallette, Halliburton’s Destructive Engagement: How Dick Cheney and USA-Engage Subvert Democracy at Home and Abroad (Washington D.C.: Earthrights International, 2000).
20 Bryce, see note 14.
21 The New York Times, 27 December 1993
22 Bruno and Vallette, see note 20.
23 The Financial Times, 29 March 2003. The act was renewed in 2001.
24 Bruno and Vallette, see note 20.
25 Wayne Madsen, ‘Cheney at the Helm: At Halliburton oil and human rights do not mix’, The Progressive, <www.progressive.org/wm0900.htm>
26 The Guardian, 5 August 2000
27 The Sunday Times, 21 May 1995
28 The Daily Record, 14 December 1995
29 The Daily Mail, 18 May 1994
30 The Herald (Glasgow), 7 April 1994
31 The Guardian, 1 April 1993
32 Glazer and Glazer, see note 18
33 The Herald (Glasgow), 8 January 1996.
34 The Scotsman, 29 January 1993.
35 The Sunday Times, 16 February 1997.
36 The Daily Record (Glasgow), 4 April 1996
37 Solomon Hughes, ‘Halliburton Milks British Nuclear Submarines for Millions’, Corpwatch 25th July 2003, <www.corpwatch.org/issues/PRT.jsp?articleid=7729>
38 The Washington Post, 6 July 1997
39 Los Angeles Times, 23 February 1998
40 Knut Royce and Nathaniel Heller, ‘Cheney Led Halliburton To Feast at Federal Trough: State Department Questioned Deal With Firm Linked to Russian Mob’, <www.apfn.org/enron/halliburton.htm>
41 The Washington Post, 19 December 1999
42 The Chicago Tribune, 10 August 2000: The Philadelphia Inquirer 26 July 2000
43 Mother Jones, July/August 2003 p.25; Lee Drutman and Charlie Cray, ‘Halliburton, Dick Cheney and wartime spoils’, Citizen Works <www.citizenworks.org/corp/halliburton.php> Halliburton’s profits were sheltered in such places as Vanuatu, a group of islands in the South Pacific.
44 The International Herald Tribune, 31 January, 2004
45 The Financial Times, 13 July 2002
46 The Australian Financial Review, 11 June 2002
47 The National Post (Canada) 10 May 2003
48 The Washington Post, 21 January 2004
49 The Independent on Sunday, 25 January 2004
50 <www.allAfrica.com allafrica.com/stoires/printable/200402230840 .html> Note 50 continued: Baker was also the President’s emissary to countries owed £127 billion by the Iraqis, seeking its cancellation. Renowned for his networking abilities, he managed to convince several countries to forgive debts of $40 billion, including France which opposed the war, but whose business community would like to win reconstruction contracts in Iraq. Halliburton’s affairs in Nigeria are being investigated primarily by the French, so any allegations of a conflict of interests laid at Baker’s door seem to be not entirely misplaced.
51 The Daily Telegraph, 20 November 2000
52 ‘Dollar Docket,’ Texans for Public Justice <www.tpj.org/payola/docket22.html>
53 Pratap Chatterjee, ‘Dick Cheney, Soldier of Fortune’, Corpwatch
<www.corpwatch.org/issues/PID.jsp?articleid+2469>
54 Martin A. Lee, ‘USA: Cheney Made Millions Off Oil Deals with Hussein’, Corpwatch, < www.corpwatch.org/news/PND.jsp/artcileid+1791>
55 The Philadelphia Inquirer, 13 January 2004
56 USA Today, 25 June 1998
57 The Washington Post, 11 August 2002
58 The Financial Times, 21 December 2002
59 <www.judicialwatch.org/cases/92/complaint.htm>
60 Fortune,17 March 2003
61 Stephen Pizzo, ‘USA: Cheney Dodges Halliburton Questions’, Corpwatch , <www.corpwatch.org/news/PND.jsp?artcileid+3468>
62 The Guardian, 2 June 2003
63 Pratap Chatterjee, ‘Halliburton Makes a Killing on Iraq War’, Corpwatch, <www.corpwatch.org/issues/PRT.jsp?articleid+6008>
64 The Los Angeles Times, 1 June 2003
65 Jane Mayer, ‘What did the Vice President do for Halliburton’ The New Yorker, 16 February 2004 < www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/040216fa_fact> Cheney’s modus operandi has recently been described thus:
‘O’Neill, [Paul O’Neill, former Economic Secretary to George Bush] like others who served with Cheney under different presidents, was almost always in the dark about his actual beliefs. But they’d sometimes pick up his method: quietly select an issue, counsel various participants, manufacture the exchange of seemingly impromptu letters or reports the bureaucratic version of a media event and then guide unfolding events toward the intended outcome.
‘This was the puppeteer’s craft, all done with strings and suggestions. In the end, there were no fingerprints. No accountability.’ Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004) p.120
66 The Washington Post, 10 February 2004
67 The Guardian 15 April 2003
68 ‘The Windfalls of War’, The Center for Public Integrity, <www.publicintegrity.org/wow/bio.aspx?act=pro&ddlC=31
69 The Boston Globe, 27 March 2004
70 The Financial Times, 9 April 2003; ‘Know your profiteers card deck’ <www.warprofiteers.com/cards/clubs/king.html>
Here’s another fine example:
‘A September 2000 report by the General Accounting Office….. found that Brown and Root were providing nearly twice the electricity to the Army’s facilities in Kosovo at a cost of some $17 million a year. The same report found that Brown and Root ordered $5.2 million worth of furniture for camps in Kosovo, an amount so excessive the Army struggled to find space for all the furniture and spent $377,000 just processing the order.’ Mother Jones, 23 May 2002.
71 Dina Rasor, The Pentagon Underground (New York: Times Books 1985) p.144, quoted in Glazer and Glazer (see note 18).
72 ‘Army Corps Clears Halliburton in Iraq Fuel-pricing Probe’, Dow Jones Newswire, 6 January 2004 <www.quicken.com>
73 Business Wire, 23 January 2004
74 USA Today, 4 February 2004
75 The Washington Post, 17th February 2004
76 ‘Halliburton admits to faulty costs’, Middle East North Africa Financial Network 13 March 2004 <www.menafn.com/qn_print.asp?StoryID=44131&subl=true>
77 ‘Utah company waiting for Halliburton to pay bills’, 9 March 2004 <www.ksl.com tv.ksl.com/index.php?sid=80023&nid=5&template=print >
78 The Financial Times, 18 March 2004
79 The Financial Times, 8 May 2003 and 30 May 2003
80 The Chicago Tribune, 8 May 2003
81 ‘Repeal Bush Immunity for Oil Companies in Iraq’, 23 July 2003 Corpwatch <ww.corpwatch.org/bulletins/PBD.jsp?articleid=7648>
82 Mayer, see note 66
83 The Observer, 29 June 2003
84 The Independent, 28 March 2004
85 Ibid.