Cheney Dodges a Bullet

[splat@14]

It still may come out, though not the center of the investigation.

By Timothy Noah
Posted Friday, Oct. 28, 2005, at 3:13 PM PT


In yesterday's column, I speculated mischievously that Vice President Cheney's terrible week would have gotten even worse had Paul Volcker's commission looking into the U.N. oil-for-food scandal printed the word "Halliburton" anywhere in its new report naming companies that bribed Saddam Hussein in order to do business in Iraq. Fortunately for Cheney, I wrote, it did not. That statement, I am now informed, while literally true, is not quite right.

The words I should have been entering into Adobe's search engine were "Dresser Rand" and "Ingersoll-Dresser Pump." These are the specific Halliburton subsidiaries—joint ventures, to be more precise, with Ingersoll-Rand—that signed contracts with Iraq for nearly $30 million while Cheney was chief executive at Halliburton. (Halliburton had a 51 percent stake in Dresser Rand and a 49 percent stake in Ingersoll-Dresser Pump.)

Cheney's Iraqi blood money became an issue, naturally, during the 2000 campaign. At first Cheney denied outright that Halliburton had traded with Saddam, but when Sam Donaldson presented detailed evidence on ABC News' This Week, Cheney conceded his error and claimed he'd been unaware of the deals:

Well, the fact of the matter is, Sam, that when I acquired Dresser Industries, we acquired our interest in those two joint ventures with Ingersoll-Rand, and we've sold both of those joint ventures to Ingersoll-Rand, so we had no involvement, don't have any involvement to this day. Shortly after we took control of Dresser, we divested ourselves of those two companies.

Actually, the divestitures occurred more than a year after the Dresser acquisition. That's when the roughly $30 million in contracts were signed. After the 2000 election, Ingersoll-Rand's former chairman, James E. Perrella, told the Washington Post that all Halliburton (therefore, presumably, Cheney) had cared about at the time of the transactions was that they not violate the law, which they appeared not to have done.

http://www.slate.com/id/2129005/?nav=fo

[rodeodance]

1. well, he did dodge the draft. "other priorities' I think was his comment.

[splat@14]

2. Yep, others can die, he was busy.

[WhiteTara]

3. hatching up plans on how to kill

other people and steal all their money.

[cliss]

4. I thought it was interesting,

Lynne Cheney made some visit, I think it was to Japan a few years ago. Some school children asked Lynne Cheney if her husband had served in the military.

Lynne had said, "No, Mr. Cheney was doing other things". I thought, how incredibly accurate. These kids ask a perfectly innocent question, and it highlights how Dick was able to get out of his military service, and a few decades later, was eager to have young people go and die for his plans.

Amazing that they even included it in the article.