Busted!

Two months before America invaded Iraq last year, a particularly massive contract to rebuild the Iraqi oil infrastructure was awarded to Halliburton by the Army Corps of Engineers. The award was under most unusual circumstances: there was no competitive bidding and no ceiling to the payment amount, both of which were contrary to the usual process. In a nutshell, a multi-billion dollar contract was simply given away.

By a staggering coincidence, Halliburton’s CEO had left the company in 2000 to become Vice President of the United States. Despite Dick Cheney’s repeated denials that he had anything to do with the deal, there has always been more than a whiff of cronyism about it. (It did not help that since becoming Vice President, Cheney has annually received hundreds of thousands of dollars in “deferred compensation” from Halliburton.) It was blatantly obvious that Halliburton could never have gotten the contract under such conditions in a million years without its former boss now being VP, but it could never be proved.

Until now.

Time is now reporting that Cheney, far from keeping his old company at arm’s length, actively coordinated the sweetheart deal. The magazine obtained a copy of an internal E-mail message, dated March 5, 2003 and written by a Corps of Engineers official, saying that the contract had been approved and that the White House would be officially informed the next day.

“We anticipate no issue,” the message goes on to say, “since action has been coordinated w[ith] VP’s office.”

Cheney’s spokesman Kevin Kellems responded to the article by claiming the E-mail was just “a heads-up...in anticipation of controversy over the award of a sole-source contract to Halliburton.” This does not, however, sound like much of a heads-up to me. Rather, it says loud and clear that the deal was engineered to benefit Cheney’s old cronies, ethics be damned.

Anyone else would instantly recognize that it’s just plain wrong for a government official to be actively involved in the awarding of a contract to one’s former colleagues. The fact that the contract was awarded under such ludicrously favorable terms makes it all the more clear that Cheney simply doesn’t get it. Does he really believe that the rules don’t apply to him, that the normal ethics laws are, to steal a phrase from Leona Helmsley, “for little people?”

As the fiascos keep piling up with no end in sight, Cheney has become a major liability to the Bush re-election effort. But since this Administration never holds anyone in power accountable for anything, don’t expect any consequences.