Cheney's Oil-for-Food Switcheroo

[shraby]

October 12, 2004 by Jason Leopold

(snip)

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

But the one company that helped Saddam exploit the oil-for-food program in the mid-1990s that wasn't identified in Duelfer's report was Halliburton, and the person at the helm of Halliburton at the time of the scheme was Dick 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 skirting U.S. laws and selling Iraq spare parts so it could repair its oil fields and pump more oil. Since the oil-for-food program began, Iraq has sold $40 billion worth of 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. Security Council diplomats estimate that Iraq was skimming off as much as 10 percent of the proceeds from the oil-for-food program thanks to companies like Halliburton and former executives such as Cheney.

UN documents show that Halliburton's affiliates have had controversial dealings with the Iraqi regime during Cheney's tenure at the company and played a part in helping Saddam Hussein illegally 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.

(more)
<http://www.antiwar.com/orig/leopold.php?articleid=3767>

[MissMarple]

1. I wonder what else Halliburton did for Iraq, in the 90's.

Why was Cheney so ready to go to war? It does give one pause to think of the possibilities.