When Illinois Senator Fitzgerald announced that he would not run again,
he reiterated his campaign pledge: "I will never give up my efforts
to expose and nail political corruption wherever it may lie." Presently,
the Senator would find it most intriguing if he joined in the ongoing
congressional scrutiny of Vice President Cheney's involvement with Halliburton,
a diversified energy services company.
As its president and CEO from 1995 till 2000, the former Defense Secretary
was in charge of an enterprise with a market value of $18 billion and
a workforce of about 100,000 in over 120 countries. In 1998, Halliburton
acquired rival Dresser Industries for $7.7 billion, thus making the
corporation the world's leading provider of oilfield services.
Under Cheney, Halliburton jumped from 73rd to 18th on the list of the
Pentagon's top contractors. It also received some $3.8 billion in non-military
contracts and taxpayer-insured loans. The number of the company's offshore
tax havens grew from 9 to 44 at a time when the IRS claimed losing some
$70 billion in revenues annually through offshore tax sheltering.
At Halliburton, Cheney signed contracts with Saddam Hussein's Iraq--
worth $73 million--through the subsidiaries Ingersoll Dresser and Ingersoll
Rand. They in turn operated through foreign subsidiaries. In the same
manner, Halliburton did business with Iran and Libya in violation of
the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act. One of the company's subsidiaries had
to pay a fine of $15,000 to settle allegations by the Commerce Department
that it had violated the anti-boycott provisions of the U.S. Export
Administration Act. "The good Lord did'nt see fit," Cheney
once said. "to put oil and gas only where there are democratic
regimes friendly to the United States."
In 2000, the General Accounting Office charged that the Army had done
nothing to curb cost overruns in a Halliburton subsidiary's $2.2 billion
engineering support program in the Balkans. Recently the Securities
and Exchange Commission alleged that Halliburton had inflated its revenue
statements by $234 million over four years.
The war in Iraq had hardly begun when KBR, another Halliburton subsidiary,
received a no-bid contract to extinguish oil fires and keep the oil
in the occupied country flowing. Not so long ago, the Defense Department
had fined KBR $2 million for fraud. According to the Washington Post,
the contract for KBR's services in Iraq was granted under a presidential
waiver allowing "government agencies to handpick companies for
Iraqi construction projects." That was in January when Mr. Bush
had already decided that the U.S. would eliminate Saddam Hussein's regime.
The Vice President's many detractors claim that he has a serious conflict
of interest when Halliburton and its subsidiaries receive U.S. government
contracts, even though he retired from the company and now holds his
investments in a blind trust.
Halliburton's "golden handshake" for its departing president
consisted of a $20 million retirement package. The New York Times also
reported at the time that during his five years at the helm of the company,
Mr. Cheney made $12.5 million in salaries and received nearly $39 million
in stock and options. Hence, if Halliburton gets lucrative government
contracts and its stock does well, the Vice President is bound to profit
accordingly.
When President Bush formed a task force to develop a national energy
policy, he asked the Vice President to chair it. Mr. Cheney chose to
keep its proceedings secret, but soon found himself accused of violating
the Freedom of Information Act. As one of the numerous parties demanding
the publication of the records, the Government Accounting Office (GAO),
an agency of Congress, sued the Vice President in an effort to identify
the executives, including some from Enron, whom the Task Force consulted.
The President promptly asked the court to squash the GAO's suit but
a three-judge federal appeals panel saw no legal justification for secrecy.
It seems Messrs. Bush and. Cheney have yet to get used to the kind of
transparency that so much distinguishes true democracy.