This is from the January 25, 2003 program of
60 Minutes.

This piece is riveting from beginning to end. Don't miss a second of it.

I've made the files available as a single download or in three smaller parts.

Doing Business With The Enemy
(60 Minutes - January 25, 2004)

Leslie Stahl is my new hero. She's been taking her responsibility of reporting for one of the best rated news programs in the United States very seriously by going out of her way to fill us in on things we need to know about what the Shrub Administration and its good friend, Corporate America, have been up to lately. Specifically, doing things behind our backs with our own money.

And it's not pretty. In this piece, we learn that virtually anyone in the U.S. with a pension plan could unknowingly have their money invested in one of several "terrorist" countries.

Turns out that the reason companies like Halliburton, GE, and Conoco are allowed to do business with these "terrorist" driven countries to begin with, is that they have operations located in the Cayman Islands.

So Leslie goes to the Cayman Islands to check out Halliburton's offices there, but it turns out that Halliburton's Cayman island office doesn't really exist. Not a single employee of Halliburton actually works there and all of the mail is re-routed to Texas. (Leslie sneaked in a hidden camera to interview the manager of the bank in the Caymans where Haliburton rents space to find all this out.)

The hidden camera gets some priceless footage of the bank president explaining that a lot of American companies do this, and some of them actually do hire people to sit in the office and push paper, and others (such as Halliburton) don't.

This story was produced by Richard Bonin and Adam Ciralsky.

Here's Leslie Stahl's opening statement:

When President Bush said "Money is the lifeblood of terrorist operations," did it ever occur to you that the money he's talking about is, in large part, yours, mine, and every other American's?

Turns out, just about every one of us with a 401K, pension plan, or mutual fund, has money invested in companies that are doing business with so called "rogue states."

In other words, there are U.S. companies that are helping drive the economies of countries like Iran, Syria, and Libya, that have sponsored terrorists.