GOVERNMENT / THE ELITE - LOOKING GLASS NEWS |
"Three Decades of Absolute Power … the Story of CEO VP Dick Cheney … and Iraq" |
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from TMPress – United News & Press Features
Entered into the database on Sunday, November 27th, 2005 @ 00:09:04 MST |
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With even attachments to the shadowy Carlyle Group, the Vice-President’s
history begins: Born on January 30, 1941, in Lincoln, Nebraska, Richard Bruce
Cheney moved and was raised in Casper, Wyoming by his parents Richard H. and
Marjorie Cheney. A robustly handsome and popular boy whose future was apparent,
young Dick was a popular sort in Football, etc. at Natrona County High School,
served as senior class president, represented the school at Boys State, and
played halfback on the football team. Beginning the summer after high school
graduation in 1959 and during the next six years, Cheney worked on power lines
and was a member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers union.
Cheney would win a scholarship to prestigious Yale University, but upon finding
the academic culture there to be cliquish and self-congratulatory (in that supposedly
unbearable New England way), Cheney would boycott his classes. In time, Yale
officials would come to believe that Cheney’s academic performance was
too poor to justify his continued enrollment, and would ask him to leave. Little
did they know that the joke was on them – that Cheney’s apparent
`failure’ was in fact a brilliant protest against the inherently isolated
nature of Ivy League world. Cheney returned to Wyoming, where he would earn
his Bachelors and Masters degrees in Political Science – amongst people
capable of forming opinions of him based on more than any conspicuous contempt
for so-called `debate’ and `didacticism.’ He later attended the
University of Wisconsin-Madison as a doctoral candidate, but he left and entered
politics before completing his doctorate. Cheney was selected for a one-year
fellowship in the office of House Representative William Steiger, a Republican
Congressman from Wisconsin. During the Vietnam War from 1959 through 1966, Cheney
received a total of five military service draft deferments. Four were S-2 student
deferments granted because of his university student status, and one 3-A deferment
was granted in 1966 because of his wife’s pregnancy – it his here
that his rise within the power-elite of the GOP takes off and his early White
House appointments. Dick Cheney’s public service career began under the Nixon administration
in 1969. He served in a number of positions at the Cost of Living Council, at
the United States Office of Economic Opportunity (as a special assistant to
Donald Rumsfeld), and within the White House. Under President Gerald Ford, Cheney
became Assistant to the President and White House Chief of Staff. He was campaign
manager for Ford’s 1976 presidential campaign, while James Baker served
as campaign chairman. From 1978 to 1989, he served as a U.S. House Representative
from Wyoming and rose into some of the highest ranks in the GOP Congressional
Caucus. In Congress, Rep. Cheney (R-Wyoming) opposed the Equal Rights Amendment,
was an anti-abortion advocate, and supported federal enforcement of prayer in
school. While serving in Congress, he was one of 21 members opposing the sale
ban of armor-piercing bullets; was one of only four to oppose the ban on guns
that can get through metal detectors; opposed sanctions against the apartheid-era
South Africa in the mid-1980s along with voting against a resolution calling
for the release of Nelson Mandela; voted for a constitutional amendment to ban
school busing; voted against Head Start; and voted against extending the Clean
Water Act in 1987. Thus he winds down his not so distinguishable House career
and begins his `true rise to power’ in the executive branch. From March 1989 to January 1993, Cheney served as the Secretary of Defense
under then President George H.W. Bush and directed` Operation Just Cause’
in Panama and `Operation Desert Storm’ in the Middle East. In 1991 he
was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for `preserving America’s
defenses at a time of great change around the world.’ After the Bush I
Presidential loss in 1992, Cheney joined the American Enterprise Institute after
leaving office in 1993. In 1995 he became Chairman and CEO of Halliburton Company,
a worldwide energy services corporation with a long history of service to the
government and federal no-bid contracts – some Halliburton subsidiaries
even served as private military contractors and covertly worked to develop Iranian
and Iraqi oil-field reserves through these subsidiaries. He also sat on the
board of Procter & Gamble, Union Pacific, and EDS. In 1997, he, along with
Donald Rumsfeld and other neo-cons, founded the non-profit educational organization
called the `Project for the New American Century’ whose goal was to `promote
American global leadership and hegemony of the global economic structure.’
At this time and as a neo-conservative (aka `the Falcons’) … he
was also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Cheney is also at this
period the CEO of Halliburton Company, which greatly benefits from contracts
with the U.S. government, especially the second war with Iraq. Cheney has still
maintained his ties to the Carlyle Group, and was a former Senior Fellow with
the American Enterprise Institute, while serving on the Advisory Board of the
Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), and his founding member
status within the `Project for the New American Century’ (PNAC). Starting
in 1995 and as the CEO of Halliburton/KBR over five years, Cheney nearly doubled
the size of Halliburton’s government contracts, totaling a whopping $2.3
billion. He convinced the Export-Import Bank of the U.S. to lend Halliburton
and oil companies another $1.5 billion, backed by U.S. taxpayers – most
of the of these loans went to a Russian company with ties to the Russian mafia
underworld. Cheney’s rule at Halliburton was characterized by a ruthless
geopolitical strategy that put aside political beliefs whenever they were inconvenient.
In a number of cases, Halliburton and its subsidiaries supported or even ordered
human rights violations and broke international laws. Some glowing examples
include direct dealings with Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi – which engaged
the now famous foreign subsidiary of the Halliburton Company, KBR to perform
millions of dollars worth of work. According to the Baltimore Sun, Kellogg Brown
& Root was fined $3.8 million for violating Libyan sanctions. (Although
Cheney wasn’t leading Halliburton when these sales started, subsidiaries’
sales to Libya continued throughout his tenure.) Another glaring Halliburton
blunder came when Cheney claimed that he still supported the U.S. sanctions
on Iraq after the Gulf War, but the Financial Times of London reported that
through foreign subsidiaries and affiliates, Halliburton became the biggest
oil contractor for Iraq from the mid-1990s forward, selling more than $73 million
in goods and services to Saddam Hussein’s regime. 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. In the spring of 2000, while still serving as Halliburton’s CEO, he headed
George W. Bush’s Vice-Presidential search committee. After reviewing Cheney’s
findings, Bush surprised pundits by asking Cheney himself to join the Republican
ticket. Cheney resigned as CEO on July 25, and put all of his corporate shares
and stock options into a charitable trust. However, as of July 2004 Cheney still
received severance payments from Halliburton in the millions USD. This raised
questions in America about a possible conflict of interest, since Halliburton
was granted over $10 billion in no-bid contracts for the rebuilding effort following
the war in Iraq. Mr. Cheney is still drawing a $1,000,000 per year paycheck
from Halliburton while serving as the Vice President and evidently sees no conflict
of interest between taking this paycheck, and participating in White House decisions
that have allocated billions of dollars of no-bid contracts to Halliburton that
have not gone on to open tender. His persistent imbroglio in the Junior Bush
regime has been with his so-called `Energy Task Force’ through which during
the early months of 2001 he was taking dictation from the now defunct and corrupt
Enron Corporation and studying petro-maps of Iraq, Cheney has maintained all
of those notes to his activities as a secret and unreleaseable under `Executive
Privilege.’ Vice-President Cheney has been perhaps the most influential
and powerful VP in United States history. During his 2001-2004 term with George
W. Bush, since September 11, Vice-President Dick Cheney has kept a low profile
and for months, he rarely appeared at all, emerging only to sell his political
ideas, especially on Iraq and cable news channels or to dismiss allegations
of corporate wrongdoing. Many in fact claim that Cheney has more control in
the Bush White House than Bush himself. Even now, Cheney mostly stays in `secure
locations,’ ready to spring into action – if he is somehow called
to respond. Unlike most politicians, Cheney actually enjoys working in the background
and by his own account, he doesn’t relish campaigning, and he’s
hardly a natural spokesman, but rises to the occasion when needed and Cheney
excels at assembling and managing teams of people to `get stuff done.’ As VP, Cheney championed Donald Rumsfeld for Defense Secretary, insisted, over
fierce objections by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, on placing Paul Wolfowitz
in the number two position at the Pentagon, insisted, again over Powell’s
misgivings, on making another neo-con, the ultra-unilateralist John Bolton,
then vice-president of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), undersecretary
of state for arms control and international security, and reportedly played
a key role in the appointment of another controversial neo-conservative, Elliott
Abrams, to head the Middle East office on the National Security Council. The
VP has visited the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) several
times (nearly the record of all VP’s in U.S. history … in the run-up
to the war in Iraq, in what was seen as pressure on CIA analysts to take a darker
view of Saddam Hussein’s alleged ties to Al-Qaeda and weapons of mass
destruction. Cheney’s staff, headed by another neo-con extremist …
and now indicted I. Lewis Scooter Libby … who had a major hand in pre-writing
Colin Powell’s February 2003 speech to the United Nations and Cheney himself
was the patron of the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans and those officials
tied to the nurturing of those polices of torturing combatants and non-combatants
in Afghanistan and most recently Iraq. In fact his assertions that he did not
pressure the CIA to send someone like Joe Wilson to Africa are totally false
– he in fact demanded that then CIA Director Tenet and others do just
that. The only thing they did not count on was Joe Wilson coming back with `empty
Intel and then later an Iraq War critic.’ Many Presidential historians and experts have pointed out that this all-too
powerful VP is too closely tied and beholden to the corporate world of the oil
industry and military-industrial complex, and maintain that Cheney strongly
influenced the decision to use military force in Iraq. On and off camera he
was and still remains as one of the biggest defenders of the Iraq War, WMD claims
and Saddam’s dubious ties with Al-Qaeda – although most assertions
have now been proven to be outright falsities and manipulations of truth, seemingly
pushed by the ever aggressive VP Cheney, his office and his neo-con allies.
He continues to this day to make these claims! – By John Osborne, Sr.
Political Editor – TMPress International Newswire © 2005 TMPress International Newswire. Reprint granted without fee
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