----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Pollak" <mpollak at panix.com>
Austin Chronicle
The Candidate From Brown and Root
Bush Doesn't Know Dick
By Robert Bryce
<...>
Going Global
Johnson then steered all kinds of federal projects to Brown & Root --
including airports, pipelines, and military bases. During the Vietnam
War, the company built roads, landing strips, harbors, and military
bases from the Demilitarized Zone to the Mekong Delta. But the
company's relationship with the government would continue long after
LBJ was laid to rest along the banks of the Pedernales.
And Brown & Root enjoyed especially great success attracting military
contracts during Cheney's tenures, first as Secretary of Defense, then
at Halliburton.
In 1992, the Pentagon, then under Cheney's direction, paid Brown &
Root $3.9 million to produce a classified report detailing how private
companies -- like itself -- could help provide logistics for American
troops in potential war zones around the world. Later in 1992, the
Pentagon gave the firm an additional $5 million to update its report.
That same year, the company won a five-year logistics contract from
the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to work alongside American GIs in
places like Zaire, Haiti, Somalia, Kosovo, the Balkans, and Saudi
Arabia. According to data from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers,
between 1992 and 1999 the Pentagon paid Brown & Root over $1.2 billion
for its work in trouble spots around the globe.
=========================== http://www.progressive.org/wm0900.htm
Cheney at the Helm At Halliburton, oil and human rights did not mix
By Wayne Madsen
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In 1998, while I was in Rwanda conducting research for my book, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa 1993-1999 (Edwin Mellen, 1999), a number of U.S. military personnel assigned to that country raised questions about Brown & Root's activities. "Brown & Root is into some real bad shit," one told me. The U.S. Army Materiel Command has confirmed that Brown & Root was in Rwanda under contract with the Pentagon. One U.S. Navy de-mining expert told me that Brown & Root helped Rwanda's U.S.-backed government fight a guerrilla war. Brown & Root's official task was to help clear mines. However, my research showed it was more involved in providing covert military support to the Tutsi-led Rwanda Patriotic Army in putting down a Hutu insurgency and assisting its invasion of the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo (Cheney and Halliburton declined numerous opportunities to comment on this story.)
Cheney was no stranger to covert activities in Rwanda. In 1990, during his tenure as Secretary of Defense, Rwandan strongman Major General Paul Kagame, then a colonel in the Ugandan People's Democratic Force, attended the U.S. Army's Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Kagame, with the likely knowledge of the U.S. Army and Cheney, suddenly dropped out of the school to assume command of the nascent Rwanda Patriotic Army, which later that year launched a full-scale invasion of Rwanda from rear bases inside Uganda. U.S. military advisers were present in Uganda at the time of the invasion, another fact that would have been known to Cheney and his Pentagon advisers.
While three separate commissions appointed by Belgium, France, and the Organization of African Unity have charged their own officials with complicity in central Africa's turmoil, no American panel has ever probed the involvement of the U.S. government, military, and defense contractors in central Africa's woes. If there were such a panel, Dick Cheney, the man in charge of both the Pentagon and Halliburton during various invasions of Rwanda and the Congo, would certainly have to be called and asked, "What did you know about covert U.S. military operations in central Africa and when did you know about them?"
But that's not all of Halliburton's questionable involvements. The other most serious charge against Halliburton comes from a group called Environmental Rights Action based in Harcourt, Nigeria. "In September of 1997, eighteen Mobile Police officers . . . shot and killed one Gidikumo Sule at the Opuama flow station at Egbema in Warri. . . . Several other youths were injured during a protest," said the group in a report dated October 16, 1998. It implicated Halliburton in this repression, saying that the company was in collaboration with the police. Cheney was at the helm of Halliburton at the time.
Halliburton has worked with Chevron and Shell in Nigeria, which have been implicated in gross human rights violations and environmental devastation there.
Leaders like Equatorial Guinea's Obiang Nguema Mbasogo and Congo (Brazzaville) President Denis Sassou-Nguesso also use the revenues generated from Halliburton-built offshore oil platforms to enrich themselves and their families while ruthlessly suppressing ethnic and political opposition.
In Burma, Halliburton began work in the oil sector a decade ago. Oil company ties to the repressive government there have drawn criticism from human rights groups around the world.
Halliburton also has some unsavory ties in Russia. "Halliburton was a beneficiary of $292 million in loan guarantees extended earlier this year by the U.S. Export-Import Bank for a Russian company's development of a Siberian oilfield," The Washington Post reported. "The deal was a major embarrassment for Halliburton because the Russian company that is Halliburton's partner, Tyumen Oil, has been accused of committing a massive fraud to gain control of the oilfield."
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