Uh-oh. ___________ Will the French Indict Cheney? by DOUG IRELAND The Nation Yet another sordid chapter in the murky annals of Halliburton might well lead to the indictment of Dick Cheney by a French court on charges of bribery, money-laundering and misuse of corporate assets. At the heart of the matter is a $6 billion gas liquification factory built in Nigeria on behalf of oil mammoth Shell by Halliburton--the company Cheney headed before becoming Vice President--in partnership with a large French petroengineering company, Technip. Nigeria has been rated by the anticorruption watchdog Transparency International as the second-most corrupt country in the world, surpassed only by Bangladesh. One of France's best-known investigating magistrates, Judge Renaud van Ruymbeke--who came to fame by unearthing major French campaign finance scandals in the 1990s that led to a raft of indictments--has been conducting a probe of the Nigeria deal since October. And, three days before Christmas, the Paris daily Le Figaro front-paged the news that Judge van Ruymbeke had notified the Justice Ministry that Cheney might be among those eventually indicted as a result of his investigation. According to accounts in the French press, Judge van Ruymbeke believes that some or all of $180 million in so-called secret "retrocommissions" paid by Halliburton and Technip were, in fact, bribes given to Nigerian officials and others to grease the wheels for the refinery's construction. These reports say van Ruymbeke has fingered as the bagman in the operation a 55-year-old London lawyer, Jeffrey Tesler, who has worked for Halliburton for some thirty years. It was Tesler who was paid the $180 million as a "commercial consultant" through a Gibraltar-based front company he set up called TriStar. TriStar, in turn, got the money from a consortium set up for the Nigeria deal by Halliburton and Technip and registered in Madeira, the Portuguese offshore island where taxes don't apply. According to Agence France-Presse, a former top Technip official, Georges Krammer, has testified that the Madeira-based consortium was a "slush fund" controlled by Halliburton--through its subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root--and Technip. Krammer, who is cooperating with the investigation, also swore that Tesler was imposed as the intermediary by Halliburton over the objections of Technip. Tesler is a curious fellow: A veteran operator in Nigeria, he was the financial adviser to the late dictator Gen. Sani Abacha and controlled his personal fortune, while at the same time working for Halliburton. Abacha's former Oil Minister, Dan Etete--who is suspected of having used some of the alleged bribe money to buy himself fancy apartments in Paris and a chateau in Normandy--was deposed by Judge van Ruymbeke in December. According to the Journal du Dimanche (a large Sunday paper), Etete's testimony seemed to confirm the judge's suspicions that Tesler laundered the $180 million through offshore and other accounts, and that part of the money wound up in dictator Abacha's coffers. Tesler's bank accounts in Monaco, Switzerland and elsewhere have been subpoenaed in an effort to find out where the money went. Judge van Ruymbeke's authority for his transnational investigation comes from a law France passed in 2000 against "bribing foreign officials," following its ratification of a convention adopted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development prohibiting bribe-giving in the course of commercial transactions. The notion that the judge's targeting of Cheney might be in part retaliatory for the Bush Administration's exclusion of France from Iraq reconstruction contracts is unlikely: Van Ruymbeke is notoriously independent, and his previous investigations have been aimed at politicians and parties of both right and left. He's also no stranger to the unsavory world of oil-and-gas politics, having previously investigated bribe-giving by the French petrogiant Elf--indeed, it was in the course of his Elf investigation that van Ruymbeke stumbled upon the Nigerian deal. The suspected bribe money was mostly ladled out between 1995 and 2000, when Cheney was Halliburton's CEO. The Journal du Dimanche reported on December 21 that "it is probable that some of the 'retrocommissions' found their way back to the United States" and asked, did this money go "to Halliburton's officials? To officials of the Republican Party?" These questions have so far gone unasked by America's media, which have completely ignored the explosive Le Figaro headline revealing the targeting of Cheney. It will be interesting to see if the US press looks seriously into this ticking time-bomb of a scandal before the November elections.
It is amazing how the U.S. media has become this administration's lapdog. Granted, I'm sure the media didn't touch one or two of Clinton's peccadillos---I sure wouldn't touch his peccadillo (ahem)---but the media spent years selling copy over Clinton's zipper problem. So he couldn't be trusted. He lied. But this administration with its ties to American industry can, directly or indirectly, cause gas/oil/heating prices to skyrocket in California (Cheney and his energy commission), can kick thousands of workers into the street and rob them of their life savings (way to go, Kenny Boy), can virtually take over Bolivia and ratchet up the price of utilities beyond the means of the mostly-indigenous population, can almost overthrow the Venezuelan gov't (they're still trying) and put it into the hands of the oil cartel....and none of this gets reported in the U.S. media. In part, I think, because the papers don't want to appear "biased", in part because editors are more conservative than their reporters, and maybe most important, because the government probably subsidizes newspapers and thus controls at least part of the content that we see.
ease up, macbeth. i know you're fascinated with my political mind, or lack thereof..but my post hit my head as soon as i read the thread title. but i am excited that i prompted from you the shortest post in your reign here on the BBS!
You'd think, after a while, the sheer number of posts with statements like this might tend to give some people a slight clue....
That is most whacked-out, baseless bunch of conspiracy theory, call-Mulder-and-Scully horsecrap that I think I've ever read. You have to be toking on something mighty powerful to believe: 1. That Cheney would do such things. 2. that newspaper editors are more conservative than their journalists. Apparently you don't know many, because I guarantee you 90 percent of the editors of America's dailies are as liberal as you are if not more. I work in the business, I should know.
Take off the rose-colored glasses. I can't see why anyone would want to go into journalism. As an idealist you'd get crushed. To make a living you'd have to lie or get your story whitewashed or buried. Unless the story is small enough ("5th Ward housing project expects funding" etc etc) that no one will touch it. Same ole, same ole with the conservatives. You never, ever want to admit that Mommy and Daddy could do bad things. They're just perfect. I mean, Cheney the Honorable; and yet in today's paper (Chronicle, NYT, etc) we see how Halliburton gets yet another ginormous contract through cronyism, despite all the infractions and double-dealings committed while Cheney was CEO. Read Chapter 3 of The BEST DEMOCRACY MONEY CAN BUY by Greg Palast for more information about this subject. Heck, read it for ANY information about this subject: "California Reamin': Deregulation and the Power Pirates." Palast is a journalist hated by both sides because he reports whatever he uncovers, no matter which side it damages. Yes, he's a progressive. But he can cut Clinton down to size, too. And that can be the big difference: I can see the faults on my own side. You've got the rose-colored glasses on. For example: Clinton could have been impeached for accepting mucho money from Indonesian billionaires. Because a pair of Okie billionaires acted as go-betweens for this money, Clinton couldn't be impeached for it because those Okie boys pump Republican coffers with even more money. So we were left with endless re-hashings of Monica-gate. Now, you say you work in the business. You call editors liberal. When I have posted on this board, your posts have often seemed way out there on the right wing. So maybe what is normal probably seems liberal to you and conservative to me? In having to look elsewhere for news that no one will print, I will say that our government, under whatever President, manages to keep a lot of what really happens out of the papers. They just don't want anyone to know what's really happening out there. Keep the world in the dark, keep us talking about Bennifer and Britney kissing Madonna and such.
It's just not a sexy story. A story about oil-and-gas kickbacks in Nigeria isn't going to sell newspapers. It isn't going to get people to tune into the news to see how it turns out. But tell a good sex story and people are interested. Add to it the whole problem that the American reporters have to understand where the problem is before they can report and explain it, and you find yourself in a situation where there are very few American reporters available to even write the story. By the by, I would disagree that editors are less liberal than reporters. Most editors are former reporters and are just as liberal or conservative as those under them. The issue is more one of finance. It recent years as media conglomerates have taken over more and more media outlets, the standards of profitability for these news outlets has changed. Ratings and news-stand sales have become more and more important. And the way to ratings is not stories about financial shenanigans in far away countries committed by old, boring people (even if one of those people is the Vice President). The way to raitings is shark attacks and Michael Jackson and all the other infotainment crap that passes for news these days. If this same story happened in 1995 with Al Gore instead of in 2004 with Dick Cheney, the news coverage would likely be the same. It's not a liberal vs. conservative thing. It's a ratings thing. It's not that the press has become Bush's lapdog. It's that the Bush Administration gets involved in "scandals" that won't generate ratings.
Maybe will something will be done about this now. http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-01-23-scalia-cheney_x.htm Dems question Cheney, Scalia ties in letter to Rehnquist WASHINGTON (AP) — Two senators have written Chief Justice William Rehnquist to raise concerns about Justice Antonin Scalia's impartiality in a case that involves the White House's energy task force. By Ted Warren, AP; Tim Dillon, USA TODAY Vice President Dick Cheney and Justice Antonin Scalia socialized in November and January. Scalia went on a hunting trip to Louisiana with Dick Cheney, a longtime friend, shortly after the court agreed to review a lower court's decision that required White House to identify members of the vice president's task force. Scalia has said there is no reason to question his ability to judge the case fairly. But in their letter, Democratic Sens. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, a presidential candidate, and Patrick Leahy of Vermont questioned whether the court can disqualify a justice who declines to withdraw from a case. The lawmakers asked if the court has issued any guidelines about accepting gifts or travel. "When a sitting judge, poised to hear a case involving a particular litigant, goes on a vacation with that litigant, reasonable people will question whether that judge can be a fair and impartial adjudicator of that man's case," the senators wrote. Scalia also had dinner with Cheney in November, two months after the administration asked the justices to overrule the lower court. A court spokeswoman, Kathy Arberg, could not confirm whether Rehnquist had received the letter Thursday.
Where do you get this data from bamaslammer? Intuition? Name five nationally syndicated left wing op ed writers. Right wing extremists dominate the op ed page. If there was some sort of left wing bias on the part of editors, don't you think they would spike this stuff before it got printed? The press can't wait to get on it's knees before the Bushies - they let him off with a ton of lies and misrepresentation of the facts during the 2000 primaries and elections because, you know, he's just stupid not malicious. Right wing nuts dominate talk radio with the one exception of Howard Stern, who is no leftie, either.
I doubt it. Rehnquist was the one who approved Paula Jones right to sue while Clinton was still in office, insisting that it would not interfere with the duties of the President to have to fight a civil suit while trying to rule the most powerful counry on earth... until the President is a Republican I bet...
And at least position 2 could possibly be supported by something akin to data. How exactly does bama know it is out of this world to suggest Cheney is capable of corruption? That's the one that had me laughing.
