Pentagon Opens Criminal Fraud Investigation Into Halliburton
House of Representatives - February 25, 2004

I appreciate this opportunity to come talk, because I think that we saw on Sunday that the campaign we are about to enter into is one in which, one of the themes of this administration is going to be integrity. Integrity is a very interesting thing for them to run on. As one of the earlier speakers said, it is a good thing the White House is not made out of glass, because they would be sitting in shattered glass all over the place by the time this campaign is over. The issue you started on, you stopped. You did not tell the whole story. "60 Minutes" said, okay, so there is nothing going on in the Cayman Islands. Where is this being run from? Then they get a letter from Halliburton that says, well, the Cayman Islands subsidiaries actually run out of Dubai. So they get on a plane, they fly to Dubai, and they learn that this office shares office space and phone and fax lines with a division of the U.S. parent company which raises all kinds of questions about how independent is that. You put that there with the statement that the Vice President made, ``I have a firm policy that I wouldn't do anything in Iraq even in arrangements that were supposedly legal. We've not done any business in Iraq since the sanctions were imposed and I have a standing policy that I wouldn't do that.''

That is a quote from 8/27/2000. This is while he is in the middle of the campaign. This is the man who wants to run on his integrity. According to oil industry executives, this is from The Washington Post. That is a minor newspaper that has a little something to say about what is going on in this town. According to oil industry executives and confidential U.N. records, however, Halliburton held stakes in two firms that signed contracts to sell more than $73 million in oil production equipment and spare parts in Iraq while CHENEY was chairman and the chief executive of the Dallas-based company. Two former senior executives say that, as far as they know, there is no policy against doing business with Iraq.

You tell me that a company that is running a billion dollar operation has people who are executives and do not know that there are sanctions on Iraq? How bald can you be in what you are willing to say, whether it has any connection to what the facts are or not? Those Halliburton subsidiaries joined dozens of American and foreign-owned supply companies that helped Iraq increase its crude oil exports from 4 billion in 1997 to 18 billion in 2000.

The Vice President made a flat statement, I have a firm policy I would not do anything in Iraq. Meanwhile his company is helping Iraq quadruple its export of oil. This is the man whose integrity really runs deep, and he says I have nothing to hide or anything, but when it comes to meetings that they had in the White House on developing an energy policy, closed meetings, only invited the industry in, and they are developing the energy policy for the United States of America, a country that is addicted to oil, and when the Congress says we would like to see what those papers are that you did in there, he says, oh, no, that is executive privilege, I cannot show you what we are doing.

They took us to war, at least in part, on the basis of oil and the United States wanting to control oil. All we have to do is look at the machinations of Unical bringing a pipeline down through Afghanistan and then putting Hamid Karzai as the President who was, imagine that, an old Unical guy. He made $600,000 off Unical. And then we go over to Iraq and we see all the machinations there, and here is Halliburton in there, in the oil business, before the war started. And then we have the audacity to be told sitting in this room that there is an axis of evil out there, Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, and the very people sitting here have been doing business with Iraq and Iran.

Tell me about integrity. How are the American people going to believe any of that stuff? Still drawing pay from them, sitting in this room, occupying a seat of honor and importance, and doing business with the axis of evil. This is the man who says, I want to run on integrity.

And then just to complicate it further, the court case to try to get those reports away from him goes up to the Supreme Court. So he calls up his friend over at the court, Justice Scalia, and says, hey, how would you like to go duck hunting? Come on over and get over on Air Force II, and we will fly down to Louisiana. I have got a place down there, and I will put you up for the weekend, and we can shoot ducks.

Now, how can anybody have any belief in integrity when people stand up there and say there is not an appearance of impropriety with the Vice President, with a case before the Supreme Court, taking one of the Justices down on a private hunting trip for the weekend? What do my colleagues think they talked about, ducks? Maybe. Maybe they talked about the New Orleans Saints, or Mardi Gras is coming. I am sure business never come up. They spent 3 or 4 days down there, and they never talked about any of the problems that the country faces. Can one imagine that, that the Vice President of the United States and one of the Justices on the Supreme Court would sit and talk about fluff for 4 days and never discuss how this man can have the gall to say I want to run on integrity when he makes these kinds of flat statements?

The whole career, the whole business of the issue, if we could ever get an investigation in the House into what went on in giving us the information about weapons of mass destruction, we will find his fingers all over it from trips he made out to Langley to the CIA, and then everybody stands around and says we were misled. We were given all this bad information. Come on, give me a break. You are big boys, and you cannot have it both ways. You cannot talk out of both sides of your mouth.

Ultimately the people will figure it out. Abraham Lincoln said, ``You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.'' The end is coming for this integrity of the oil destiny.