If we had a REAL media: How Kellogg,Brown and Root and Dick Cheney were brought down

[zulchzulu]

Looking at the AIG scandal and how the mainstream media seems to have woken up to look at where the money is going, you'd think they would have done the same thing with the BILLIONS squandered and weapons lost from the players at Halliburton and Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR).

Actually, the stories were barely reported and the Senate and House barely did anything and lives were lost, billions were squandered and an unknown amount of weapons were lost. Imagine that kind of scale with the banking industry.

August 17, 2004

When the secret $7 billion Restore Iraqi Oil (RIO) contract the Pentagon gave Halliburton KBR was revealed in March 2003, Bush administration critics began accusing the Pentagon of cronyism, because of the Cheney-Halliburton connection.

http://www.halliburtonwatch.org/about_hal/tappan.html

Imagine if this story got the same scrutiny as the current economic story...

1992

Halliburton subsidiary Brown & Root is paid $9 million by the Pentagon (under Cheney's direction as Secretary of Defense) to produce a classified report detailing how private companies (like itself) could provide logistical support for American troops in potential war zones around the world.

1995

Halliburton pleads guilty to criminal charges of violating a U.S. ban on exports to Libya by selling Col. Qaddafi six pulse neutron generators, devices that can be used to detonate nuclear weapons. Halliburton pays a $3.8 million penalty to settle alleged violations of the U.S. trade ban.

1997

Even with the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act in place, Halliburton continues to operate in Iran. It pays the Department of Commerce $15,000 to settle allegations that the company has broken anti-boycott provisions of the U.S. Export Administration Act for an Iran-related transaction, without admitting wrongdoing. Halliburton also continues to do business in Libya throughout Cheney's tenure.

The GAO (General Accounting Office), the auditing arm of Congress, reports that KBR overbilled the Army for costs associated with its work in Kosovo. It is revealed that the firm used more workers and equipment than necessary to clean offices and provide electricity and backup power supplies to bases, and charged nearly $86 per sheet for plywood that it bought for $14.06.

Halliburton's KBR division is re-hired by the military, after being fired in 1997, for a $180 million a year contract to supply U.S. forces in the Balkans with logistical support. The company is also working on major contracts to build oil infrastructure in Brazil and Nigeria for companies like Chevron, Petrobras and Shell.

2002

Brown & Root received $1.3 billion for services to the U.S. government. These services include a $115 million contract to design and construct an embassy compound in Afghanistan; $37.3 million to build 816 detention cells at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; and $2 million to reinforce the U.S. embassy in Uzbekistan.

2003

May 8: Halliburton admits having paid 2.4 millions of dollars in bribes to a Nigerian official in return for tax breaks.

Sept. 14, 2003: On NBC's Meet the Press, Cheney said, "And since I left Halliburton to become George Bush's vice president, I've severed all my ties with the company , gotten rid of all my financial interest. I have no financial interest in Halliburton of any kind and haven't had, now, for over three years." But the vice president conveniently forgot to mention that he continues to receive from the company deferred salary of over $150,000 per year while maintaining 433,333 shares of unexercised stock options.

January 30, 2004: New York Times columnist, Bob Herbert, details how Halliburton evades U.S. taxes and export bans by establishing foreign subsidiaries. Halliburton’s Wendy Hall admits the company paid only $15 million in taxes in 2002 even though the company earned $339 million in profits from continuing operations and $12.5 billion in total revenue.

http://www.halliburtonwatch.org/about_hal/chronology.html

You get the point. If the mainstream media gave the same scrutiny to Halliburton/KBR and the Cheney link as they are now with AIG, we would have seen a vice president frogmarched out of the White House by Election Day, 2004.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_qKMKzTXkbf0/R-WKFmJA0SI/AAAAAAAAA2E/5HndK35DVSA/s400/Cheney+Halliburton+Circles.....gif

[FrenchieCat]

1. The contrast is stark!

The extra scrutiny of every move Obama makes is being rationalized by the media as the answer to the fact that they let the Bush administration get away with just about everything up until now. That's why Cheney can come on air and say outlandish things, and it is only a story from the point of how this reflects on Barack Obama, and not how bad for this country for Cheney to be saying such things.

Really sick.

[soothsayer]

2. Better late than never

[Arctic Dave]

3. If they want to be taken seriously they should be a little more

retroactive with their scrutiny. Otherwise, they still look like the lazy douche nozzle hacks they were under b*sh.