Category Archives: Bye-Bye Cheney

Halliburton Subpoenaed On Nigerian Payments

I saw this in the November 9, 2004 NY Times on page C4 of the Business Section. But I couldn’t find it online, so I decided to just retype it here.
From the NY Times (From Reuters):

The Halliburton Company, the oil services company, has disclosed in a regulatory filing that one of its joint ventures may have improperly paid Nigerian officials to win a multibillion-dollar contract. The company also said the United States officials had issued subpoenas to current and former employees of Kellogg Brown & Root, its engineering and construction unit. Halliburton said in September that an internal investigation has found that members of the TSKJ consortium, which it helps lead, may have considered bribing Nigerian officials a decade ago. Nigeria is also investigating allegations that the consortium paid as much as $180 million to secure a contract for the TSKJ liquefied natural gas project. (Reuters)

Jon Stewart Nails Cheney In An Outright Lie

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This is from the June 21, 2004 program.
Stewart: “Mr. Vice President, I have to inform you: You’re pants are on fire.”
Cheney said he never stated that it was “pretty well confirmed” that meetings had taken place between Saddam’s Officials and Al Queda members. The Daily Show dug up the Meet the Press coverage from December 9, 2001 that proves otherwise.
As a blogger and “traditional” journalist, I always hesitate to throw the word “lie” around unless I can validate my statement. How wonderful that we live in an age where I can present my case and back it up with evidence all on one interactive medium (for those that have quicktime, anyway…)
I also had the luxury of having the Daily Show With Jon Stewart to do my homework for me.
Here’s the Complete Video Clip of the contradicting statements as presented within this larger daily show clip. (The larger clip also contains footage of the Shrub and Rummy making excuses for their past inaccurate statements.)
Here’sa tiny clip of Cheney denying he ever said the meeting was “pretty well confirmed.
(Source: CNBC)
CNBC: “You have said in the past that it was quote “pretty well confirmed.”
Cheney: “No, I never said that. Never said that. Absolutely not.”
Here’s a little clip of the Meet the Press footage
where he clearly did say just that such a meeting was “pretty well confirmed.”
(Source: Meet The Press, December 9, 2001)
Cheney: “It’s been pretty well confirmed, that he didn’t go to Prague and he did meet with a Senior Official of the Iraqi Intelligence service.”

The Daily Show (The best news on television.)

Eric Idle Says “Fuck You Very Much” To The Shrub, The FCC, Cheney, Condi, Arnie, and the Lot of Them

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This just in from Eric Idle:

The FCC Song.
Here’s
My mirror of the song, in case you have trouble with the first link.
Lyrics:
Here’s a little number I wrote the other day while out duck hunting with a judge.
Fuck you very much the FCC
Fuck you very much for fining me
Five thousand bucks a fuck
So I’m really out of luck
That’s more than Heidi Fleiss was charging me
So fuck you very much the FCC
for proving that free speech just isn’t free
Clear Channel’s a dear channel
So Howard Stern must go
Attorney General Ashcroft doesn’t like strong words and so
He’s charging twice as much as all the drugs for Rush Limbaugh
So fuck you all so very much
So fuck you very much, Dear Mr. Bush
For heroically sitting on your tush
For Halliburton, Enron, all the companies who fail
Let’s send them a clear signal and stick Martha straight in jail
She’s an uppity rich bitch
and at least she isn’t male
So fuck you all so very much
So fuck you dickhead Mr. Cheney too
Fuck you and fuck everything you do
Your pacemaker must be a fake
You haven’t got a heart
As far as I’m concerned you’re just a pasty-faced old fart
And as for Condoleeza she’s an intellectual tart
So fuck you all so very much
So fuck you very much, the EPA
For giving all Alaska’s oil away
It really is a bummer
When I can’t fill my hummer
The ozone’s a nogozone now that Arnold’s here to say:
“The nuclear winter games are going to take place in LA”
So fuck you all so very much
So what the planet fails
Let’s save the great white males
And fuck you all so very much

Joseph Wilson On Meet The Press

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This is from the May 2, 2004 program of
Meet the Press.
This directory contains the entire interview in one big file and three smaller files:

Joseph Wilson On Meet The Press.
Check out Joseph Wilson’s new book:
The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity: A Diplomat’s Memoir.
One thing Joseph said that sticks out in my mind is that daddy Shrub said whoever leaked the information about Wilson’s wife was an “insidious traitor.”
Does anyone know where he said this or when? Update: Oh okay. He said it in 1999. But it still applies — to Karl Rove and the Cheney gang in this case:
“I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the names of our [intelligence] sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious of traitors.”

New Searchable Database Charts Bush/Cheney Lies

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This just in from a friend of mine:

As the September 11th Commission grills President Bush and Vice President Cheney about their contradictory statements today, we wanted to alert you to a powerful new tool to help journalists, activists and the public compare the Bush administration’s claims against well-documented facts.
The Center for American Progress today launched a comprehensive

Claim vs. Fact database that documents statements from conservatives like President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Members of Congress and Fox News personalities, and compares those statements to the facts.
Each fact is sourced, and in many cases includes a web link directly to that source.

60 Minutes Exposes Halliburton’s Fake Subsidiary In The Caymans

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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.

Air Force One Phone Records Subpoenaed – White House Implicated Over CIA Agent Outing

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Air Force One Phone Records Subpoenaed
By Tom Brune for Newsday.

The federal grand jury probing the leak of a covert CIA officer’s identity has subpoenaed records of Air Force One telephone calls in the week before the officer’s name was published in a column in July, according to documents obtained by Newsday.
Also sought in the wide-ranging document requests contained in three grand jury subpoenas to the Executive Office of President George W. Bush are records created in July by the White House Iraq Group, a little-known internal task force established in August 2002 to create a strategy to publicize the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.
And the subpoenas asked for a transcript of a White House spokesman’s press briefing in Nigeria, a list of those attending a birthday reception for a former president, and, casting a much wider net than previously reported, records of White House contacts with more than two dozen journalists and news media outlets.
The three subpoenas were issued to the White House on Jan. 22, three weeks after Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney in Chicago, was appointed special counsel in the probe and during the first wave of appearances by White House staffers before the grand jury.
The investigation seeks to determine if anyone violated federal law that prohibits officials with security clearances from intentionally or knowingly disclosing the identity of an undercover agent…
White House implicated
The subpoenas underscore indications that the initial stages of the investigation have focused largely on the White House staff members most involved in shaping the administration’s message on Iraq, and appear to be based in part on specific information already gathered by investigators, attorneys said Thursday.

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Bill Moyers On The Shrub Administration’s Unprecedented Veil Of Secrecy

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This is from the December 12, 2003 program of NOW With Bill Moyers.
Bill Moyers:

Everywhere you look today, or try to look, our right to know is under assault. In the name of fighting terrorists, the government is pulling a veil of secrecy around itself. Information that used to be readily accessible is now kept out of sight.
To cover this story, NOW is collaborating with U.S. News and World Report. Their five month investigation finds that, although the government regularly cites 911 as the basis for secrecy, the true reasons, in many cases, have nothing to do with the War On Terror.


INVESTIGATIVE REPORT: The untold story of the Bush administration’s penchant for secrecy
How the public’s business gets done out of the public eye
Here’s the t r u t h o u t archive of the complete U.S. News and World Report article: Keeping Secrets, written by Christopher H. Schmitt and Edward T. Pound.
This segment was produced by David Brancaccio and Peter Meryash.
Veil of Secrecy – Complete (Small – 40 MB)
Veil of Secrecy – Part 1 of 3 (Small – 11 MB)
Veil of Secrecy – Part 2 of 3 (Small – 16 MB)
Veil of Secrecy – Part 3 of 3 (Small – 13 MB)
Here’s some technical information about getting quicktime going to watch these movies.

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Feds Ready To Nail Cheney Staff Members Hannah and Libby For Outing Joseph Wilson’s Wife

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Cheney’s Staff Focus of Probe
By Richard Sale for Insight.
The Feds have announced that they’ve got hard evidence against Cheney staff employees John Hannah and Lewis “Scooter” Libby that they were involved in the leak that outed Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s CIA operative wife.
About time! Hip hip hooray and all that kinda thing!
But wait a minute! They were undoubtedly just following Cheney’s orders. How come he’s not being held responsible for the actions of his personal staff?
Bogus.

Federal law-enforcement officials said that they have developed hard evidence of possible criminal misconduct by two employees of Vice President Dick Cheney’s office related to the unlawful exposure of a CIA officer’s identity last year. The investigation, which is continuing, could lead to indictments, a Justice Department official said.
According to these sources, John Hannah and Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, were the two Cheney employees. “We believe that Hannah was the major player in this,” one federal law-enforcement officer said. Calls to the vice president’s office were not returned, nor did Hannah and Libby return calls.
The strategy of the FBI is to make clear to Hannah “that he faces a real possibility of doing jail time” as a way to pressure him to name superiors, one federal law-enforcement official said.

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Newsweek: How Dick Cheney Sold The War

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An interesting Newsweek feature explaining how Dick Cheney bought into the Shrub War and then proceeded to sell it to everyone else.
Of particular interest is the quote below where Cheney says that “we believe that he [Saddam Hussein] has in fact reconstituted nuclear weapons” and then Newsweek clarifies that “Cheney later said that he meant “program,” not “weapons.”
However, in Donald Rumsfeld’s Meet The Press Interview, Rumsfeld claims that “they [Iraq] had programs relating to nuclear weapons that they were reconstituting. Not that they had nuclear weapons. No one said that.
So it looks like somebody did say that Saddam had nuclear weapons, and it was Dick Cheney.

Cheney’s Long Path to War
By Mark Hosenball, Michael Isikoff and Evan Thomas (With Tamara Lipper, Richard Wolffe and Roy Gutman) for Newsweek.

Of all the president’s advisers, Cheney has consistently taken the most dire view of the terrorist threat. On Iraq, Bush was the decision maker. But more than any adviser, Cheney was the one to make the case to the president that war against Iraq was an urgent necessity. Beginning in the late summer of 2002, he persistently warned that Saddam was stocking up on chemical and biological weapons, and last March, on the eve of the invasion, he declared that “we believe that he [Saddam Hussein] has in fact reconstituted nuclear weapons.” (Cheney later said that he meant “program,” not “weapons.” He also said, a bit optimistically, “I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators.”) After seven months, investigators are still looking for that arsenal of WMD.
Cheney has repeatedly suggested that Baghdad has ties to Al Qaeda. He has pointedly refused to rule out suggestions that Iraq was somehow to blame for the 9/11 attacks and may even have played a role in the terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. The CIA and FBI, as well as a congressional investigation into the 9/11 attacks, have dismissed this conspiracy theory. Still, as recently as Sept. 14, Cheney continued to leave the door open to Iraqi complicity. He brought up a report–widely discredited by U.S. intelligence officials–that 9/11 hijacker Muhammad Atta had met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in April 2001. And he described Iraq as “the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault for many years, but most especially on 9/11.” A few days later, a somewhat sheepish President Bush publicly corrected the vice president. There was no evidence, Bush admitted, to suggest that the Iraqis were behind 9/11.

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