http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rick-jacobs/halliburton-and-cheney-_b_29635.html

09.17.2006

Halliburton and Cheney: War Profiteers in Chief Fight to Keep Their
Wallets Fat

By Rick Jacobs


Halliburton woke up Friday, determined to debunk a film by Robert
Greenwald that it has not seen.
http://www.halliburton.com/default/main/halliburton/eng/news/source_files/news.jsp?newsurl=/default/main/halliburton/eng/news/source_files/press_statement/2006/kbrnws_091406.html

You have to wonder just what Halliburton's CEO and department of
agitation and propaganda are thinking.

The reaction to "Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers"
http://iraqforsale.org/ is similar to CEO David Lesar's ads in which
he says that Halliburton is doing a great job in Iraq:

Both are without first hand knowledge, based on fantasy and hearsay.

It's worth pausing to recall the insidious nature of Halliburton's
role in the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

As with so much related to the Bush/Cheney Administration, the truth
is stranger than fiction.

We did not need Oliver Stone for this one; Robert Greenwald's
fact-based documentary tells it better than any novelist could
imagine.

We all by now know that ***** Cheney retired from the Pentagon in 1993
to accede to the thrown of Halliburton, an oil field services company
based in Houston.

Under Mr. Cheney's reign, Halliburton acquired Dresser Industries
which included the Kellogg Company (the K of KBR), a major engineering
firm.

True to form, Mr. Cheney's acquisition did not include much due
diligence.

After Mr. Cheney left Halliburton with tens of millions of dollars in
his pocket largely earned because of his connections to Middle East
dictators, Halliburton had to cough up $2.3 billion in cash, about
$1.2 billion in stock and another $55 million in IOUs to help pay off
the tens of thousands of people in this country who had suffered
and/or died of asbestos poisoning at the hand of Dresser,
http://www.insurancejournal.com/news/southcentral/2002/12/19/24988.htm
which Mr. Cheney had acquired and for which Mr. Cheney was (and
apparently still is) handsomely compensated.
http://money.cnn.com/2003/09/25/news/companies/cheney/

If this sounds a bit like Mr. Cheney's due diligence with respect to
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, it should.

He never bothered to look at what Dresser had before he bought it for
Halliburton and he never bothered to look at what Iraq had before he
broke it for the U.S.

As Messrs. Cheney and Rumsfeld planned the war in Iraq beginning
during the first year of the Bush Administration, Mr. Cheney's
Halliburton was the contractor of choice to do the work that the
military had always done in past wars.

This time, though, the war would be privatized to suit the ideology
and obfuscation of the Bush team, which wanted to pretend that the
number of people we'd need in Iraq would be small (so outsource it)
and that the government can be privatized (so outsource it to
friends).

The Iraq debacle is now the subject of at least a half a dozen books,
including the terrific Fiasco, by Tom Ricks.

Until very recently, however, there has been relatively little
penetration into the popular psyche of the role played by
Halliburton/KBR in particular and other private military contractors
in general, such as Blackwater (runs a private army in Iraq), Titan
and CACI (provided translation and interrogation services for places
such as the Abu Ghraib prison and both still provide key services to
the US military in Iraq and elsewhere).

The reason is simple:

the Bush Administration and its Congressional foot soldiers ranging
from George Allen and John Warner of Virginia to Rick Santorum of
Pennsylvania have refused at every turn to allow for any oversight at
all, even though Democratic Senators have asked for such bi-partisan
review for years.

Unlike their Republican friends, Democrats recall the historic role
that Harry Truman played in conducting such oversight during World War
II, uncovering $160 billion (in today's dollars) of waste, fraud,
abuse and profiteering. I suppose Congress in World War II did not
take bribes.

Halliburton learned the lesson and this time has gotten its money's
worth, having paid over $2 million in campaign contributions to
Republicans as hush money to keep the terms of the contracts, and the
human destruction those contracts have wrought, all locked up.

Even in Bush's America, where journalists often fear to write and
careers end for truths told, the facts eventually speak for
themselves.

Friday, CBS News
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/09/15/cbsnews_investigates/main2015060.shtml
and Bloomberg
http://bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=abMPAafZbMks&refer=us
broke the story of a lawsuit by families and survivors of the
so-called Friday Massacre in Iraq, in which seven Halliburton/KBR
truck drivers were brutally murdered because Halliburton/KBR insisted
on sending a convoy of oil tankers out on roads that the US military
had closed to all traffic due to extraordinarily high risk.

But you gotta make a buck, so Halliburton sent the trucks out.

Men died.

And more hatred between US and locals ensued, further destabilizing
the mess that is Iraq.

Iraq for Sale http://iraqforsale.org/ tells the story of that gruesome
ride for profits, probably the most egregious example of out right war
profiteering that we have yet seen in a killing field where the likes
of Halliburton/KBR reap money with men's lives.

Halliburton's stock has risen 200% since the invasion of Iraq three
and a half years ago.

David Lesar, its CEO, made over $40,000,000 (that's forty million
dollars) in 2004 alone and by some calculations, has made at least
$150,000,000 (one hundred fifty million) since the war began.

It's hard to tell just how rich he has gotten on the intestinal tracts
of our soldiers and the bodies of his former employees, but it's
probably enough money for him to live happily ever after in several
countries outside the U.S.

Let's keep following the money, though.

In May, 2006, Halliburton filed a form S-1 with Securities and
Exchange Commission announcing its intention to sell its KBR
subsidiary to the public.
http://library.corporate-ir.net/library/67/676/67605/items/199968/KBR_S1.pdf

KBR had sales in 2005 of over $10 billion and profits of over $200
million, according to the filing.

The reason for the sale of the giant subsidiary, according to the
filing, is that "the full value of KBR is not reflected in
Halliburton's stock price."

A few weeks later, Halliburton canceled its sale of KBR, saying that
it would instead explore a tax free spin off to shareholders.

In other words, the news about KBR in Iraq was getting out, so KBR's
share price, were it an independent company, would not fetch what
Halliburton wants for it, so they'll just stick it to the
shareholders.

Besides, KBR's government contracts in Iraq are on the wane, because
the government funding for Iraq is on the wane.

Mr. Lesar probably learned a lesson from his mentor, Mr. Cheney, who
bought Dresser and with it billions of dollars of liabilities.

With the truth coming out and law suits pending, Mr. Lesar may well
think that by dumping KBR, he can shove the liabilities into the hands
of new owners of KBR (think pension plans, index funds and individual
investors), of which Halliburton will not be one.

And there's another related reason:

Publicly traded companies such as Halliburton and Wal-Mart do not like
"headline risk."

That's the term for fear instilled in the hearts of stock pickers and
analysts when they see a company's name all over the news, and not for
saving the world.

Who wants to own the stock of a company that might lose one of its
major clients (the US Government) and that might face tens of millions
or more in potential liability claims?

It's clear why Halliburton CEO David Lesar and his hyperbole machine
attacked Iraq for Sale on Friday without even seeing it.

On Monday, 18 September in Washington, Senator Dorgan, a crusader for
truth and oversight of companies such as Halliburton, together with
Senators Reid and Bingaman, is holding hearings with four witnesses
from the film who will talk about the "Friday Massacre."
http://gobnf.org/i/ifs/press_conference.pdf

The senators know that Halliburton has been profiteering at the
expense of taxpayers, soldiers and its own employees.

Mr. Lesar is scared that finally, with a film that everyone can see
and hearings that everyone will watch, his reliance on the federal
trough may come to an unhappy end.

Having looked across town at his former Enron neighbors, even Mr.
Lesar has to remember the old Wall Street adage:

Bulls have their day.

Bears have their day.

But pigs always get slaughtered.

_____________________________________________________________

Harry