[dissention]

Originally Posted by gldstwmn

Apparently the Kofi Annan, France and Russia weren't the only ones in on the scam:

(excerpt from a long article)

However, it is not only UN officials who could be embarrassed by the oil-for-food corruption scandal.

In November 2000, the San Francisco Bay Guardian reported that while Dick Cheney was its CEO, the Halliburton oil services company engaged in illegal business dealings with Saddam Hussein’s regime under the UN oil-for-food program, and assisted his regime to earn an extra $1 billion that year through selling oil on the black market.

These deals were being carried out by Halliburton at the same time as Cheney and his associates in the Project for a New American Century — Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith and Luti — were lobbying the Clinton administration to invade Iraq and open the way to US oil companies plundering Iraq’s huge oil resources.

“Most American companies were blacklisted [by Iraq]”, a UN diplomat with the oil-for-food program told the February 16 New Yorker magazine. “It’s rather surprising to find Halliburton doing business with Saddam. It would have been very much a senior-level decision, made by the regime at the top.”

It would certainly not be beyond Halliburton executives to have used bribery to gain contracts with Hussein’s regime. In May 2003, Halliburton admitted that one of its subsidiaries had paid millions of dollars to a Nigerian official in 2001 in return for tax breaks. In early February this year, the US Justice Department began a criminal investigation into claims that Halliburton was involved in a $180 million bribery scheme to secure a contract from Nigerian officials for construction of a natural gas plant during the late 1990s, when Cheney was running the company.

Wow. I can't wait to see Rove's face on election night.

Thanks for posting that, it was a great read.