This is semi-old news, but with Cheney making the rounds again recently I felt this story would be good to conjure up--it's from 2004 but important to think about when Dick Cheney goes on and on about "protecting America."
In an October 12, 2004 article on CommonDreams.org, Jason Leopold wrote about how Dick Cheney was helping Iraq break international law:
The report on Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction, prepared by Charles Duelfer, a former U.N. weapons inspector and head of the Iraqi Survey Group, said Saddam Hussein used revenue from the oil-for-food program and “created a web of front companies and used shadowy deals with foreign governments, corporations, and officials to amass $11 billion in illicit revenue in the decade before the US-led invasion last year," reports The New York Times.
Sure, $11 billion is chump change compared to what we've actually spent on the invasion and occupation of Iraq, but that was, to use the old cliche, a lot of money back then. Leopold goes on, however, later in the article, to say:
But the one company that helped Saddam exploit the oil-for-food program in the mid-1990s that wasn’t identified in Duelfer’s report was Halliburton, and the person at the helm of Halliburton at the time of the scheme was Vice President Dick Cheney. Halliburton and its subsidiaries were one of several American and foreign oil supply companies that helped Iraq increase its crude exports from $4 billion in 1997 to nearly $18 billion in 2000 by skirting U.S. laws and selling Iraq spare parts so it could repair its oil fields and pump more oil.
Leopold cites UN documents in the article as his source for this story. While he doesn't link to the docs themselves in his article, in the face of evidence like this, if true, it's hard to give any credibility to Cheney at all and I find it very frustrating that the media gives a man like this, who is no longer in power, a voice on TV and on the radio. Frankly, it makes me question the entirety of mainstream media.
As if there wasn't already enough reasons to mistrust the mainstream media.
One other thing about Cheney: this is more proof that our leaders are just corrupt businessmen who couldn't care less about human life and just want to make money. If he really thought that Saddam was a bad guy, why did the company he was CEO of do business with him? Because he doesn't care who is bad or not. It's all about the green.
Democracy? Republic? Free country?
Nah, it's called a Corruptocracy.
