Cheney Felt Bush Stopped Taking His Advice

Dick Cheney Hiding in the Bushes (Late Night with Conan O'Brien)

Associated Press
August 13, 2009

Former Vice President Dick Cheney believes his old boss, President George W. Bush, gradually turned away from his advice during their second term in the White House, showing a surprising independence as he started taking more flexible positions on a range of issues, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.

Cheney, often described as the most influential vice president in U.S. history, has been discussing his years in office in informal talks with authors, diplomats, policy experts and past colleagues, the Post said, as he works on a memoir due out in 2011 from Simon & Schuster's Threshold Editions.

Robert Barnett, who negotiated Cheney's book contract, passed word to potential publishers that the memoir would be packed with news, said the article published on the Post Web site, and Cheney himself has said, without explanation, that "the statute of limitations has expired" on many of his secrets.


Cheney Tells America, "Go F-ck Yourself"

The book will cover Cheney's long career from chief of staff under President Gerald Ford to vice president under Bush.

"When the president made decisions that I didn't agree with, I still supported him and didn't go out and undercut him," Cheney said, according to Stephen Hayes, his authorized biographer. "Now we're talking about after we've left office. I have strong feelings about what happened... And I don't have any reason not to forthrightly express those views."

According to the author of the Post piece, Barton Gellman, who earlier wrote a book on Cheney called "Angler," the former vice president believes Bush made concessions to public sentiment, something Cheney views as moral weakness. After years of praising Bush as a man of resolve, Cheney now intimates that the former president turned out to be more like an ordinary politician in the end, Gellman says.

"In the second term, he felt Bush was moving away from him," Gellman quoted a participant in the recent gathering, describing Cheney's reply. "He said Bush was shackled by the public reaction and the criticism he took. Bush was more malleable to that. The implication was that Bush had gone soft on him, or rather Bush had hardened against Cheney's advice. He'd showed an independence that Cheney didn't see coming."

Bush - The Decider

The Post quoted John P. Hannah, Cheney's second-term national security adviser, as saying Cheney remains driven, now as before, by the possibility of terrorists obtaining nuclear weapons from a nation hostile to the U.S.

What is new, Hannah said, is Cheney's readiness to acknowledge "doubts about the main channels of American policy during the last few years," a period encompassing most of Bush's second term.

The Bush/Cheney Legacy Examined
Cheney Uncloaks His Frustration With Bush: 'Statute of Limitations Has Expired' on Many Secrets,...

Iraq Contractor KBR Cited By Oversight Commission

Associated Press
August 11, 2009

A federal panel has accused Houston-based KBR Inc. (subsidiary of Halliburton) of resisting government oversight and failing to cut costs on support work in Iraq.

The allegation comes from the Commission on Wartime Contracting. That's an independent panel examining waste and fraud in wartime spending.

During a hearing before the commission in Washington, the contracting giant defended its performance. Its representatives told commissioners that it was under heavy pressure to meet the urgent demands of military commanders.

But commissioners say KBR's internal accounting and cost estimating systems have been inadequate since 2005. That's led to questionable billings and drawn out arguments with federal auditors over hundreds of millions of dollars in charges.

Commissioner Dov Zakheim said KBR's top managers meet regularly with the Defense Contract Audit Agency. Yet the company has been unable to come up with solutions that satisfy the agency. By comparison, he says Dyncorp International and other large contractors seem to work out their problems quickly.

Halliburton Shareholders Sue to ‘Punish’ Company Directors

The Raw Story
August 1, 2009

To settle charges that its agents bribed Nigerian officials in order to obtain billions of dollars in contracts in the country, Halliburton Co. and KBR agreed in February to pay a combined total of $579 million to the U.S. government.

And if that did not sting the company coffers enough, a group of shareholders is now suing the company in Harris County District Court, seeking to “punish” officials who allowed such lax standards that millions of dollars could be spirited away to Nigerian bureaucrats, incurring massive fines and harming shareholders’ profits.

“According to the lawsuit, ‘the defendants caused Halliburton to maintain internal controls that were so deficient that Halliburton insiders were able to divert millions of dollars of company funds to pay illegal bribes to various foreign officials in direct violation of the [Foreign Corrupt Practices Act]. Defendant’s failure in this regard has caused substantial damage to Halliburton,’” Houston Press reports.

Nearly $150 million of the $180 million given was later discovered in a Swiss bank account.

The suit adds that for bribing officials between 1994 and 2004, damages should reflect “an amount necessary to punish defendants and to make an example of defendants to the community.” It was filed by the Central Laborer’s Pension Fund, which represents almost 7,00 retired workers.

“The fund was the owner and holder of Halliburton common stock,” continued Houston Press. “It claims that as a result of the fines, which were paid to the U.S. Department of Justice and the Securities Exchange Commission, Halliburton recorded a $303 million loss due to discontinued operations in the fourth quarter of 2008, or rather, a loss of 34-cents a share.”

“KBR’s subsidiary Kellog Brown & Root LLC pleaded guilty in a Houston federal court [in February] to criminal charges of violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act,” thus incurring the deluge of massive fines, noted Market Watch.

All Africa News added:

Last September, former KBR chief executive Albert “Jack” Stanley pleaded guilty to conspiring in a decade-long scheme to bribe Nigerian government officials to obtain $6 billion in engineering and construction contracts for a liquefied natural gas plant.

Stanley acknowledged in his plea that a four-company joint venture that included KBR paid about $182 million to consulting companies that then paid bribes to several Nigerian government officials.

Under federal law, it is illegal for U.S. companies to pay bribes to win foreign business. The investigation, under the US Foreign and Corrupt Practices Act, focused on KBR’s involvement in the construction of a liquefied natural gas plant in Nigeria from 1996 onwards. At the time it was Africa’s largest ever industrial investment project.

The recent settlement for its alleged Nigerian bribery is not the first time Halliburton has been involved in shady foreign dealings, as activist group Halliburton Watch illustrates:

The Pentagon admitted that a $7 billion no-bid contract to extinguish oil fires in Iraq was awarded to Halliburton after a “political appointee” from the Bush administration recommended the company for the job. Government policy forbids politicians or their appointees from taking a role in awarding contracts to private corporations. But Vice President Cheney ignored this basic principle when his political appointees were directly involved in awarding a $7 billion contract to Halliburton to rebuild Iraq’s oil infrastructure (Cheney is former CEO of Halliburton).

Halliburton sells goods and services to Iranian companies through its Cayman Islands subsidiary. The sales appear to have violated the U.S. trade embargo against trading with Iran. The OFAC referred the case to the Department of Justice, which is conducting a criminal investigation.

The Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice issued a subpoena to a former employee of Halliburton’s KBR unit to determine whether the company criminally overcharged for gasoline imported into Iraq. KBR, along with its Kuwaiti subcontractor Altanmia Commercial Marketing Co., allegedly overcharged the government by $61 million, but Democrats in Congress say the overcharges were closer to $167 million. KBR charged the government $2.64 per gallon of gasoline while competitors were importing gasoline for less than half that price.

The Wall Street Journal on Dick Cheney's Halliburton Stock Options

Excerpt from Cassell Bryan-Low, “Cheney Cashed in Halliburton Options Worth $35 Million,” Wall Street Journal, September 20, 2000, www.wsj.com

“Richard Cheney recently cashed in options valued at about $35 million in Halliburton & Co. . . .[the Dallas oil-services company where he served as chairman and chief executive for five years before stepping down last month to become the GOP vice presidential nominee.]

“Mr. Cheney was one of five Halliburton insiders who sold a combined total of 859,232 shares for $45.09 to $53.44 a share, or about $45.4 million, between Aug. 10 and Aug. 31, according to First Call/Thomson Financial . . . . [which tracks trading activity among company insiders.]

“Mr. Cheney exercised options to sell 660,000 shares between Aug. 21 and Aug. 28, according to First Call. The sale, which was the largest by a Halliburton executive to date, insider-data analysts say, netted Mr. Cheney an $18.5 million profit after he paid about $16.4 million to exercise options. . . .[An option allows an individual to buy a stock at a pre-set, or strike, price. If the stock price goes up, that individual then can buy shares below market value.] Mr. Cheney exercised options at between $21 and $29.56 a share, and sold them for $52.28 to $53.93 each.

“Mr. Cheney also disposed of 39,200 company shares he held outright, worth $2.1 million, by transferring them to Halliburton for payment of a federal income-tax withholding obligation, according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. At the end of August, Mr. Cheney held 189,800 shares outright, and 500,000 unvested options.”