Cheney has offered contradictory accounts of how much
he knew about Halliburton's dealings with Iraq. In
a July 30, 2000 interview of ABC-TV's "This Week", he
denied that Halliburton or its subsidiaries traded with
Baghdad.
"I had a firm policy that we wouldn't do anything in
Iraq, even arrangements that were supposedly legal,"
he said. "We've not done any business in Iraq since
U.N. sanctions were imposed on Iraq in 1990, and I had
a standing policy that I wouldn't do that."
Cheny modified his response in an interview on the same
program three weeks later, after he was informed that
a Halliburton spokesman had acknowledged that Dresser
Rand and Ingersoll Dresser Pump traded with Iraq.
He said that he was unaware that the subsidiares were
doing business with the Iraqi rgime when Halliburton
purchased Dresser Industries in September 1988.
"We inherited two joint ventures with Ingersoll-Rand
that were selling some parts into Iraq," Cheney
explained, "but we divisted ourselves of those interests."
The divestiture, however, was not immediate. The
firms traded with Baghdad for more than a year under
Cheney, signing nearly $30 million in contracts before
he sold Halliburton's 49 percent stake in Ingersoll
Dresser Pump Co. in December 1999 and its 51 percent
interest in Dresser Rand to Ingersoll-Rand in February
2000, according to U.N. records.
"Contradictory accounts" and "modified his response",
eh? One wonders what phrases would be used if Clinton
or even Gore were involved instead.
One doesn't wonder for even a moment what Dan Burton
would do if rumors were made up on the spot that
Clinton was involved with a firm that'd made deals with
both Iran and Iraq in the last decade, or if Chelsea
had been sighted saying the word "Iraq" without spitting immediately afterward, or if she'd been
sighted spitting in public for that matter.
