quo vadis coalition of the killing..., page-5

Don't disagree with what you say but George W failed in the oil industry and bought a baseball club to make money. His old man was a successful oil man. Then there is Cheney,

UNITED NATIONS, June 23 (UPI) -- Halliburton Co., the oil company that was headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, signed contracts with Iraq worth $73 million through two subsidiaries while he was at its helm, the Washington Post reported.

During last year's presidential campaign, Cheney said Halliburton did business with Libya and Iran through foreign subsidiaries, but maintained he had imposed a "firm policy" against trading with Iraq.

"Iraq's different," the Post quoted him as saying.

Oil industry executives and confidential U.N. records showed, however, that Halliburton held stakes in two companies that signed contracts to sell more than $73 million in oil production equipment and spare parts to Iraq while Cheney was chairman and chief executive officer, the Post reported.

Two former senior executives of the Halliburton subsidiaries said they knew of no policy against dealing with Iraq. One of them said he was certain Cheney knew about the deals, though he had never spoken about them to the vice president directly.

If he "was ever in a conversation or meeting where there was a question of pursuing a project with someone in Iraq, he said, 'No,' " Mary Matalin, Cheney's counselor, said.

"In a joint venture, he would not have reviewed all their existing contracts," Matalin told the Post. "The nature of those joint ventures was that they had a separate governing structure, so he had no control over them."

The deal was legal, the Post said, and they showed how U.S. firms use foreign subsidiaries and joint ventures to avoid doing business with Baghdad. The practice is not a violation of U.S. law and falls within the U.N.-run oil-for-food program.

The Post said U.N. records showed that the dealings were more extensive than originally reported and than Cheney had acknowledged, however.

According to the report, the Halliburton subsidiaries, Dresser-Rand and Ingersoll Dresser Pump Co., sold material to Baghdad through French affiliates. The sales lasted from the first half of 1997 to the summer of 2000. Cheney resigned from Halliburton in August.

"Halliburton and Ingersoll-Rand, as far as I know, had no official policy about that, other than we would be in compliance with applicable U.S. and international laws," said Cleive Dumas, who oversaw Ingersoll Dresser Pump's business in the Middle East, including Iraq.

Cheney's spokeswoman, Juleanna Glover Weiss, referred the Post's calls to Halliburton, which in turn, directed them back to Cheney's office.

In a July 30, 2000, interview on ABC-TV's "This Week," Cheney denied that Halliburton or its subsidiaries traded with Baghdad. Three weeks later, on the same program, he modified his response after being informed that a Halliburton spokesman had said that Dresser Rand and Ingersoll Dresser Pump traded with Iraq.

Cheney said he did not know the subsidiaries were doing business with the Iraqi regime when Halliburton purchased Dresser Industries in September 1998.

The firms traded with Iraq for more than a year under Cheney, however. They signed nearly $30 million in contracts before he sold Halliburton's 49 percent stake in Ingersoll Dresser Pump Co. in December 1999 and its 51 percent interest in Dresser Rand to Ingersoll-Rand in February 2000, the Post quoted U.N. records as saying.

Cheney has long criticized of unilateral U.S. sanctions, which he says penalize American companies. He has pushed for a review of policy toward Iraq, Iran and Libya.