Wednesday, January 22, 2003

There's a discussion going on down the page in the Comments section about Dick Cheney's connections with Halliburton and Iraq. I googled "cheney halliburton iraq" and figured that these five articles from relatively respectable sources, National Review, UPI, the Washington Post, the Observer, and the Nation, summed up the story pretty well. Even the Nation admits that the two deals Halliburton did with Iraq, involving oil equipment worth some seventy million bucks, while Cheney was its boss during the period of the embargo, were legal under the oil-for-food arrangement. The deals were never a secret nor were they covered up by anyone. Regarding financial matters, Cheney's Halliburton pushed the law pretty close to its limit and got caught breaking it once, for which it was fined. In general, it looks to me like Cheney's conduct was not pure as the driven snow but not outrageously out of line for the boss of a big company. They've got nothing on him, which is why the matter has been dropped. A comment, by the way, is that Cheney has consistently opposed sanctions and embargoes as a part of US policy.

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