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Make Sure To Watch
This Weekend:
The Unauthorized Biography of Dick Cheney Produced and Broadcast by CBC TV in Canada 10/06/04 - 41 minutes "In
Dick
Cheney's World, what he says is frequently more fiction than fact"
This is the story of Dick Cheney's vision of America. The free Real
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video
Dick Cheney's ASCENT TO POWER
JANUARY 30, 1941:
1962 NOVEMBER 19: Cheney is arrested for drunk
driving. (see the police court docket on the Smoking Gun website ) 1963 JULY 23: Cheney applies for his second draft deferment after enrolling at the University of Wyoming. 1964
1969 1974 1975 1978 Cheney is elected as a congressman from Wyoming. 1981 1986 1988 Cheney undergoes quadruple by-pass surgery to clear clogged arteries.
THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE 1989 Cheney, when asked why he sought draft deferments during the Vietnam war said "I had other priorities in the '60s than military service."
AUGUST 2: Iraq invades Kuwait. AUGUST: Cheney flies to Saudi Arabia to convince King Fahd to allow US troops into his country. SEPTEMBER: The Pentagon says that 250,000 Iraqi
troops with 1500 tanks are massed on the Saudi border. The photos are
never made public. 1991 In the wake of Desert Storm, Cheney hires Halliburton to put out 320 well-head fires and engage Halliburton subsidiary Brown and Root to rebuild courthouses, schools, utilities, police stations, and computer systems in Kuwait. JUNE 10: Cheney and the troops who fought in Desert Storm are honored with a ticker tape parade up Broadway in New York. JULY 3: Secretary Cheney is awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George H.W. Bush for his work on the Gulf War. 1992Cheney pays Halliburton, Brown and Root $8.9 million for two studies on how to downsize the military. AUGUST: Halliburton is selected by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to do all the work needed to support the military for five years. This is the same plan it had itself drawn up. NOVEMBER: Bill Clinton elected president. Cheney's term as Secretary of Defense is over.
HALLIBURTON YEARS
1993 1994 1995 MAY 6: President Clinton imposes a near total U.S. economic embargo on Iran. OCTOBER: Cheney becomes CEO and Chairman of Halliburton.During his five year stint at Halliburton, the company wins $2.3 billion in federal contracts, almost double the total of the previous five years, and another $1.5 billion in taxpayer-insured loans. Halliburton is fined almost 4 million for selling products to Libya that could be used to trigger a nuclear program. 1996 Cheney tests the waters for a presidential run, but manages to raise only $1 million.
JULY 22: Abdulamir Mahdi, an Iraqi who'd come to Canada in his 20's owned a business that supplied oil fields in Iran with North American parts. His Toronto office places an order for $41,000 worth of Halliburton spare parts for a cementing unit in Iran. He says before before the deals, he consulted with lawyers and Canada Customs who told him that the US embargo didn't apply to Canadians. SEPTEMBER 25: Halliburton Energy Services prepares an invoice for spare parts that have been sold to Abdulamir Mahdi. The invoice puts Kuwait as the final destination for the parts. In fact, the equipment is headed for Kala Naft in Iran. OCTOBER 7: In a purchase separate from the Mahdi transaction, Kala Naft’s London office, the purchasing arm for the National Iranian Oil Company asks Halliburton subsidiary in Dubai to send a price quote for purchases for the Iranian oil industry. OCTOBER 16: Mahdi’s office receives a statement
of compliance from Halliburton Energy Services in Texas saying the
parts he ordered has been inspected and meet Halliburton and industry
standards.
1998 1999 NOVEMBER 22: Abdulamir Mahdi receives a 51-month
sentence on one count of conspiracy to evade export regulations for
sending equipment to Iran and Iraq. (read about the case )
JULY: Cheney says he never voted against releasing Mandela from jail. He says he was only voting against imposing sanctions, even though sanctions were never mentioned in the House vote. JULY 25: Bush tells the press that he has chosen Cheney to be his running mate. JULY 30: Cheney says he actually wanted Mandela out of prison"Well, certainly I would have loved to have Nelson Mandela released. I don't know anybody who was for keeping him in prison. Again, this was a resolution of the U.S. Congress, so it wasn't as though if we passed it, he was going to be let out of prison." AUGUST 16: Cheney quits Halliburton to run as Bush’s vice-president. He exits Halliburton with a stock payoff worth $30 million. MR. VICE-PRESIDENT
2000 OCTOBER 25: Halliburton announces it is under a grand jury investigation for over-billing the government of California. NOVEMBER: Cheney suffers his fourth heart-attack. NOVEMBER 13: It is reported that Halliburton
stock has lost between $3 and $4 billion of its total market value. During the election campaign Cheney tells ABC
News. “I had a firm policy that we wouldn’t do
anything in Iraq, even arrangements that were supposedly legal.”
2001 JANUARY 29: President Bush announces the formation of the National Energy Policy Development Group in Cheney’s office. He announces that Cheney will chair the group. FEBRUARY 2: Wall Street Journal publishes expose
on Halliburton’s Tehran office. (read the article ) MARCH 5: Cheney has balloon angioplasty performed at George Washington University Hospital after suffering chest pains. APRIL 19: Representatives John Dingell and Henry Waxman, Ranking Members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, send a letter to the General Accounting Office, seeking to obtain information about National Energy Policy Development Group. They wanted to find out who had participated in the report. MAY 16: Cheney presents to President Bush a report entitled National Energy Policy, which recommended the adoption of the national energy policy that had been developed by the NEPDG. (read the National Energy Policy )
AUGUST 2: Cheney sends a letter to the Senate and
House of Representatives, stating “actions
undertaken by an agent of the Congress, the Comptroller General, which
exceeded his lawful authority and which, if given effect, would
unconstitutionally interfere with the functioning of the executive
branch.” SEPTEMBER 11: Al Qaeda attacks in New York and Washington. In the wake of the attacks, Dick Cheney reportedly is taken to Raven Rock, a top-secret military base. He orders U.S. military fighters to shoot down any civilian planes that may have been hijacked.
JANUARY: Sierra Club sues Cheney, et al, to get documents related to the National Energy Development Group. (read a report from the Sierra Club ) FEBRUARY: Ambassador Joe Wilson is told by the CIA that Cheney is interested in an allegation that Iraq had tried to purchase Yellow Cake uranium from Niger. Wilson goes to Niger to investigate and concludes the rumour is false. FEBRUARY 22: David Walker, the Comptroller of the General Accounting Office, files a lawsuit in U.S. District Court to get access to records relating to the activities of the National Energy Development Group. (see the document .pdf file) JUNE 22: A memo written by INC (Iraqi National Council) lobbyist Entifadh Qunbar to a U.S. Senate committee lists John Hannah, a senior national-security aide on Cheney's staff, as one of two "U.S. governmental recipients" for reports generated by an intelligence program being run by the INC and which was then being funded by the State Department. The letter shows Cheney's office was getting intelligence from a highly suspect source. AUGUST 26: Cheney tells an audience of veterans "There’s no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of
mass destruction [and that he will use them] against our friends,
against our allies and against us.” DECEMBER 9: U.S. District Court Judge John Bates
dismisses the high profile lawsuit filed by David Walker, the
Comptroller of the General Accounting Office, against Vice President
Dick Cheney.
MARCH: Cheney declares "we believe that he [Saddam Hussein] has in fact reconstituted nuclear weapons." Cheney publicly states mid-March that U.S. troops would be "greeted as liberators” in Iraq. MARCH 5: Army Corps of Engineers writes in an e-mail that a contract for restoring Iraqi oil fields is being coordinated with Cheney’s office. Three days later a Halliburton subsidiary was awarded the $7 billion contract. MARCH 19: U.S. begins Operation Iraqi Freedom. Baghdad is bombed. APRIL 7: Newsweek reveals that Cheney is still receiving annual compensation from Halliburton for his tenure as the company CEO. This while the U.S. military was giving contracts worth potentially billions of dollars to Halliburton.
JULY 6: Ambassador Joe Wilson writes an article for the New York Times criticizing the Bush’s state of the the Union address for including the allegation that Iraq had tried to obtain yellow cake uranium from Niger. (read the article ) JULY 14: Syndicated columnist Robert Novak reveals that Ambassador Joe Wilson’s wife is a CIA operative. That information, he writes, came from two senior administration officials. This leak violates U.S. law. (read the article ) AUGUST 25: The GAO releases a report called Energy Task Force: Process Used to Develop the National Energy Policy.” (read the report .pdf file) SEPTEMBER 14: Cheney repeats widely discredited
report that 9/11 hijacker Muhammad Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence
officer in Prague in 2001. DECEMBER 15: U.S. Supreme Court agrees to hear
Cheney appeal a lower court order that Cheney turn over documents
related to the Bush administration’s Energy Task Force. Cheney had been
fighting efforts to disclose the documents for three years.
2004 Halliburton states in an SEC filing "Since [Cheney's] nomination as vice president,
Halliburton has been and continues to be the focus of allegations, some
of which appear to be made for political reasons by political
adversaries of the vice president and the current Bush administration. FEBRUARY 3: Halliburton is accused of overcharging the U.S. military $36 million for meals at a U.S. base in Kuwait. FEBRUARY: Justice Department investigation into allegations that Halliburton paid $180 million in bribes to Nigerian officials to get contract to build a natural gas plant in the late 1990s, when Cheney was still CEO. Halliburton, in its annual report, says U.S. government contracts accounted for 26 percent of its revenues in 2003. That is up from 10 percent the year before. MARCH: The Pentagon asks the justice department to help investigate allegations that Halliburton overcharged for fuel in Iraq by more than $80 million. MARCH 18: Scalia releases a 21 page memo refusing to recuse himself from the Cheney appeal on the Energy Task Force lawsuit. Scalia had been asked to recuse himself because of a duck-hunting trip he took with Cheney in January. (read the memo)
JUNE: U.S. media reports that Dick Cheney had been questioned about the leak of the identity of Valerie Plame, the CIA-officer married to Joe Wilson. JULY: A federal grand jury in Houston subpoenas documents for Halliburton as it investigates allegations that the company may have violated the US embargo against dealing with Iran.AUGUST: Halliburton settles with the Security and Exchange
Commission, agreeing to pay $7.5 million for not disclosing a change in
its accounting practices that allowed it to report higher earnings in
1998 and 1999. The SEC accused Halliburton of hindering its
investigation.
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