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Edited on Wed May-07-08 05:07 PM by happydreams
Now we have doe-eyed dipshit Laura at Press conferences talking about the Burmese junta needing to open up to relief efforts. Sure Laura, the junta your hubby has condemned with words while with deeds has supported, even ignoring the use of slave labor by Halliburton. "We go where the oil is", Cheney once quipped when asked about Halliburton's role in Burma. ....Explaining his opposition to sanctions against even the most heinous violators of human rights and environmental laws, Cheney wrote in a 1997 oil-industry newsletter: ‘The good Lord didn’t see fit to always put oil and gas resources where there are democratic governments.’ Low cunning:Be prepared for some tactical evasion in the Vice-President’s media scrums. During his stint as Defense Secretary with Dubya’s dad, Cheney played the press like an accomplished concert pianist. Looking back he says: ‘I did not look on the press as an asset in doing what I had to do. Frankly, I looked on it as a problem to be managed.’
Sources:Wall Street Journal, 27 Oct 2000; American Journalism Review, Oct 2000; New York Times, various issues; ; The Texas Observer, 6 Oct 2000.
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....In Burma, Halliburton joined various oil companies in working on two notorious gas pipelines, the Yadana and Yetagun for the Burma (now Myanmar) military juntas that occasionally seized power a half-dozen times. According to an Earth Rights report, `From 1992 until the present, thousands of villagers in Burma were forced to work in support of these pipelines and related infrastructure, lost their homes due to forced relocation, and were raped, tortured and killed by soldiers hired by the companies as security guards for the pipelines.’ One of Halliburtonís projects was undertaken and continued during Dick Cheneyís tenure as CEO right up to the 2000 Presidential election....
http://www.williambowles.info/guests/2005/cheney.html
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One can only wonder why while the chimp is mouthing opposition to the Junta Cheney is opposed to sanctions against the country.
...The Bush administration might be unsympathetic to a more robust policy towards Burma. Burma has always been a lefty cause; GOP lawmakers, sympathetic to the oil lobby, fought a losing battle against the Clinton administration's policy of imposing sanctions. Meanwhile, Vice President Cheney, himself an opponent of economic sanctions, probably isn't hot to draw attention to Burma. Halliburton, the petroleum and energy services company Cheney once ran, made extensive joint venture investments in Burma during the 1990s. According to court documents, the Burmese military used forced labor on a pipeline project in which Halliburton was involved. ...
Despite some sanctions on Burma, Burmese exports to America have risen by roughly 800 percent in the past eight years, providing the junta with ready sources of cash. The U.S. could use moral and political suasion to encourage American companies to cut links to Rangoon. It could stop handing out government freebies to corporations that engage Burma (Halliburton has received over $2 billion in Export-Import Bank aid). And it could quietly pressure Japan, the largest source of investment and aid to Southeast Asian nations, to stop investing in the country. America also should be willing to provide some humanitarian aid to the Burmese people, but only when the regime opens the door to the opposition and the aid comes with proper oversight that ensures dollars aren't diverted into generals' golf bags. ....
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0204.kurlantzick.html
....Adventures in Burma...
'We don’t do business in Burma,' claims Halliburton spokesperson Wendy Hall. But while the company may have no current direct investments in Burma, it has participated in a number of energy development projects there, including the notorious Yadana and Yetagun pipelines. Prior to the gas pipeline’s construction, the Burmese military forcibly relocated towns along the onshore route. According to the US Department of Labor, 'credible evidence exists that several villages along the route were forcibly relocated or depopulated in the months before the production-sharing agreement was signed.'76 According to an Earth Rights report: 'From 1992, until the present (2000), thousands of villagers in Burma were forced to work in support of these pipelines and related infrastructure. They lost their homes due to forced relocation and were raped, tortured and killed by soldiers hired by companies as security guards for the pipelines.'77 In addition, as the largest foreign investment project in Burma, the pipelines will provide revenue to prop up the regime, perhaps for decades to come.
Shortly before the US presidential election, Dick Cheney admitted on the Larry King Live! show that Halliburton had done contract work in Burma. Cheney defended the project by saying that Halliburton had not broken the US law imposing sanctions on Burma, which forbids new investments in the country. 'You have to operate in some very difficult places and oftentimes in countries that are governed in a manner that’s not consistent with our principles here in the United States,' Cheney told Larry King. 'But the world’s not made up only of democracies.' Halliburton’s engagement in Burma predates Dick Cheney’s tenure as CEO. Halliburton had an office in Rangoon as early as 1990, two years after the military regime took power by voiding the election of the National League for Democracy, the party of Aung San Suu Kyi. In the early 1990’s, Halliburton Energy Services joined with Alfred McAlpine (UK) to provide pre-commissioning services to the Yadana pipeline. In 1997, after Dick Cheney joined Halliburton, the Yadana field developers hired European Marine Services (EMC) to lay the 365-kilometer offshore portion of the Yadana gas pipeline. EMC is a 50-50 joint venture between Halliburton and Saipem of Italy. From July to October 1997, EMC installed the 360-inch diameter line using its pipelaying barges. The route followed by Halliburton and Saipem was chosen by the Burmese government to minimize costs, even though the onshore pipeline path would cut through politically sensitive areas inhabited by ethnic minorities in the Tenasserim region of Burma. Given the Burmese military’s well-documented history of human rights violations and brutality, human rights groups say the western companies knew or should have known that human rights crimes would accompany Burmese troops into the onshore pipeline region. They say there was ample evidence in the public domain that such violations were already occurring when Halliburton chose to lay pipe for the project. As Katie Redford, a lawyer with EarthRights International puts it, 'To be involved in the Yadana pipeline is to knowingly accept brutal violations of human rights as part of doing business.'.....
http://www.corporatewatch.org.uk/?lid=275#burma
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This article is a must read for anyone interested in the subject:
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/Cheney-Myanmar-Pipeline.htm
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