The Next Time Dick Cheney Opens His Fat Mouth Remember This

The Next Time Dick Cheney Opens His Fat Mouth Remember This, originally uploaded by thepetecom.

This is semi-old news, but with Cheney making the rounds again

recently I felt this story would be good to conjure up--it's from 2004

but important to think about when Dick Cheney goes on and on about

"protecting America."



In an October 12, 2004 article on CommonDreams.org, Jason Leopold

wrote about how Dick Cheney was

helping Iraq break international law:The report on

Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction, prepared by Charles

Duelfer, a former U.N. weapons inspector and head of the Iraqi Survey

Group, said Saddam Hussein used revenue from the oil-for-food program

and "created a web of front companies and used shadowy deals with

foreign governments, corporations, and officials to amass $11 billion

in illicit revenue in the decade before the US-led invasion last

year," reports The New York Times.



Sure, $11 billion is chump change compared to what we've actually

spent on the invasion and occupation of Iraq, but that was, to

use the old cliche, a lot of money back then. Leopold goes on,

however, later in the article, to say:But the one

company that helped Saddam exploit the oil-for-food program in the

mid-1990s that wasn't identified in Duelfer's report was Halliburton,

and the person at the helm of Halliburton at the time of the scheme

was Vice President Dick Cheney. Halliburton and its subsidiaries were

one of several American and foreign oil supply companies that helped

Iraq increase its crude exports from $4 billion in 1997 to nearly $18

billion in 2000 by skirting U.S. laws and selling Iraq spare parts so

it could repair its oil fields and pump more oil.



Leopold cites UN documents in the article as his source for this

story. While he doesn't link to the docs themselves in his article, in

the face of evidence like this, if true, it's hard to give any

credibility to Cheney at all and I find it very frustrating that the

media gives a man like this, who is no longer in power, a voice on TV

and on the radio. Frankly, it makes me question the entirety of

mainstream media.



As if there wasn't already enough reasons to mistrust the mainstream media.

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