Sunday, February 22, 2004

AMY DAVIDSON: Vice-President Cheney insists that he's broken all ties to Halliburton, his old company. Has he?

JANE MAYER: To crib from the previous Presidency, the answer depends on what your definition of "ties" is. Is there any evidence that Vice-President Cheney personally directed the government to give contracts to Halliburton? No. Is there any evidence that he personally has been enriched by those contracts? Not directly. But Cheney's insistence that he has no ties to the company is rather legalistic, and misleading. He still earns approximately a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year in deferred compensation from Halliburton. He also still holds some eighteen million dollars in stock options, although he has pledged this bounty to charity. But, beyond the immediate financial ties, there is the larger question of what, over time, he has done for the company, and what it has done for him. Cheney earned some forty-five million dollars from Halliburton during his five-year tenure there, from 1995 to 2000. And Cheney is, in many ways, the architect of the contract that gave the company its signal role with the U.S. military today.

When Cheney was Secretary of Defense, during the first Bush Administration, he oversaw a redesign of the way that corporate America services the military. Halliburton was paid $3.9 million to draw up a plan for the way a private company could provide military support to U.S. troops all over the world. Then, in the last months of that Administration, Halliburton was awarded the Army's contract to provide those very same services. The company's familiarity with the process, the experts I spoke to said, gave it the inside track on what has turned out to be billions of dollars of government business. Cheney is unlikely to have been involved in choosing Halliburton in any detailed way, but even his supporters acknowledge that he oversaw the shift to providing so much business to a single company. This ties him to the story today.

9:25 PM |