Anti-War

Defense Dept Secretly Tapped Halliburton Unit To Operate Iraq's Oil Industry In November

Months before the United States military showered Iraq with bombs and missiles, the Department of Defense was secretly working with Vice President Dick Cheney’s old company, Halliburton Corp., on a deal that would give the world’s second largest oil services company total control over Iraq’s oil fields, according to interviews with Halliburton’s most senior executives.

Moreover, classified Halliburton documents obtained over the past month prove that the war in Iraq was as much about controlling the world’s second largest oil reserves as it did about overthrowing the regime of Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein.

The deal between the Department of Defense and Halliburton unit Kellogg, Brown & Root to operate Iraq’s oil industry, which was hatched as early as October 2002, according to the documents, and could ultimately be worth $7 billion, couldn’t have come at a better time for Halliburton.

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Cheney’s Old Company Continues To Break Law’s While Profiting From Terror

Halliburton Corp., the second largest oil services company in world, is the poster child for corporate greed and terror. And it seems that nothing will stop Vice President Dick Cheney’s old company from repeatedly breaking the law to save and earn mountains of cash.

In a Securities and Exchange Commission filing this week, Kellogg Brown & Root, the Halliburton unit that won a controversial no-bid contract to extinguish Iraqi oil well fires, disclosed that it paid $2.4 million in bribes to a Nigerian tax official to obtain favorable tax treatment in the country where it’s building a natural gas plant and an offshore oil and gas facility.

The bribes were paid between 2001 and 2002 to “an entity owned by a Nigerian national who held himself out as a tax consultant, when in fact he was an employee of a local tax authority,” the company said in the SEC filing, which was discovered during an internal audit.

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U.S. Easter celebrations hail the New Caesar

As the Freep goes to press this Easter weekend, amidst the rituals of a predominantly culturally Christian nation, the perils of the Bush administration’s imperialist occupation of Iraq were thrust into the mainstream media limelight. The Columbus Dispatch ran a New York Times article on its front page pointing out that which the Free Press has been pointing out for nearly a year, that the U.S. is planning a long-term military occupation of Iraq. The Pentagon is demanding long-term access to four key military bases in Iraq.

Alas, the shroud of Iraqi liberation is ripped away and the resurrected body of the new Roman Empire exposed. As the Times explained, “A military foothold in Iraq would be felt across the border in Syria, and in combination with the continued United States presence in Afghanistan it would virtually surround Iran with a new web of American influence.”

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Michael Moore Was Right

There are no weapons of mass destruction: Bush's war was launched on a fiction. The fictional president has lied about just about every conceivable topic since he was appointed to the office, against the will of the voters of America.

I don't know if most Americans are even mildly aware of the scope of Bush administration lies. The television stations are co-opted into the propaganda stream. FOX is the worst, and Clear Channel radio stations. NBC is also horrid. They will not challenge Bush and his anti-democratic policies that favor the hugest and the richest. It's an Orwellian 1984 world out there now.

Bush and Company knew there would be no WMDs, since 1995, when Saddam's son-in-law Hussein Kamal defected and brought with him extensive documentation that the weapons programs were no more. UN inspectors knew, and they told the world that they had shut down Iraq's WMD programs, and that Iraq posed no threat at all to the superpower of the United States.

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War Fact Sheet

1. The 9-11 tragedy was used to go to war with a country that had nothing to do with the bombing! Osama Bin Ladin and his followers (the Al Quaeda) from Afghanistan were the group who caused the bombings — not Iraq. The media preyed upon Americans' lack of knowledge of Mideast geography and stacked news reports together so that every time 9-11 was mentioned, Iraq was associated with it.

2. War on Arab nations was planned prior to Bush's election. In 1997, a group of 18 men wrote a paper called PNAC (Project for the New American Century) announcing their plan to go to war on the whole Middle East. 10 are now leaders in the Bush administration, among them: Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Armitage, Bolton, Khalilzad, and Perle.

3. The American people went to war to free a country. American leaders went to war for greed. Saddam was a terrible dictator, but the U.S. helped him build weapons ... until he refused our plans to build a pipeline in his country and switched from the U.S. dollar to Euros. Politicians manipulated the nobility of the American spirit.

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Other Hearts

Nurses are digging graves in front of the Al Mansour Hospital. Baghdad University is a smoking ruin. Other disasters loom, as the Red Cross warns that Baghdad's medical system is in complete collapse, and the millions of Iraqis dependent on the old Oil-for-Food program wait for rations that are no longer being delivered . "Water first, and then freedom," said one Iraqi man on a BBC report this morning.

Two musicians, Majid Al-Ghazali and Hisham Sharaf, came to our Hotel four days ago, hoping to call relatives outside Iraq on a satellite phone. Hisham's home was badly damaged during the war. "One month ago, I was the director of the Baghdad Symphony Orchestra," Hisham said with an ironic smile. "Now, what am I?"

We joked that he could direct the telephone exchange as he tinkered with our satellite phone's solar powered battery. I told Majid we had some sheet music and a guitar for him. "What are notes?" he said, "We don't even remember."

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Company Chosen By Pentagon To Extinguish Iraqi Oil Well Fires Has History Of Supporting Terrorist Regimes

Kellogg Brown & Root, the company chosen last month by the Pentagon to extinguish oil well fires in Iraq, has a long history of supporting the same terrorist regimes vilified by the Bush administration and on at least one occasion defrauded the United States government to the tune of $2 million, according to public documents.

Halliburton, headed by Dick Cheney before he became vice president, and it’s KBR subsidiary did business with some of the world's most notorious governments and dictators - in countries such as Azerbaijan, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Libya and Nigeria. The company has routinely skirted U.S. sanctions placed on these countries and lobbied the U.S. government to lift sanctions so it could set up new partnerships and create new business opportunities in these countries.

Still, the Pentagon awarded the Iraqi oil well contract to KBR without competitive bidding; a move that some Democratic lawmakers in Congress said was based on favoritism because of Cheney’s ties to the company.