Vice (22 page)

When Cheney left the hospital just two days after the attack, he was determined to make one thing clear: This setback would not deal him out of a return to the White House. Cheney's will and ambition were too strong for that, just as they had been back in Wyoming with the first heart attack during the first congressional campaign. But Cheney's heart attack this time was more severe than has previously been reported, according to a source knowledgeable about his case. The immediate care he received at the hospital—care not available to most Americans—probably saved his life.

He told reporters outside George Washington University Hospital that Bush had vetted his health before he joined the ticket. "Nothing has happened subsequent to that that changes their judgment with respect to my ability to be able to perform the responsibilities of that office," he insisted.

Yet Cheney was not a healthy man. In March, the same artery clogged again, requiring yet another procedure to reopen it. Then in late June, doctors implanted under the skin near Cheney's collarbone the latest in heart technology. The Medtronic GEM III DR monitors the heart and can both speed or slow down its rhythm when necessary. Described as having "an emergency room in your chest," the device is implanted only in patients who are at risk of sudden death from heart failure.

There is one school of thought in Washington that holds that Cheney's health problems have contributed to a change in his personality. Those who ascribe to this theory point to Al Haig. James Cannon helped prepare Haig for his Senate confirmation hearing for secretary of state in the Reagan administration. Cannon had known Haig before he received his triple bypass surgery prior to the confirmation. "Haig was a different person," he recalls. "He was messianic and had completely blotted out Watergate."

Haig himself has always denied that his health problems altered his personality, as would Cheney, no doubt. But as Cannon observes, "We don't see change in ourselves."

It is unknown if Cheney suffered any brain damage from his numerous heart attacks. A heart attack occurs when a clot forms in any of the coronary arteries. When this happens, a portion of the heart no longer receives oxygen and vital nutrients and stops functioning properly. End organs such as the brain and kidneys may have decreased blood flow from this reduction in heart function, especially during the acute phase of the heart attack or during subsequent episodes. Since the blood is responsible for transporting oxygen to all the tissues, cells may begin to die in the brain and other organs. Cheney has long suffered from high cholesterol and hardening of the arteries, which has the potential to create areas of plaque around the body, restricting the flow of blood in the circulatory system, including to the brain. The possibility that Cheney's health problems and the medications his doctors prescribe for them affect his mental state is real. Yet the vice president has never released his full medical records for public review. Nor will he give the media the precise list of medications he takes. And when
Nightline's
Ted Koppel pressed him in 2001, Cheney bristled at the idea that he has not been forthcoming. He cited at least three press conferences given by his doctors. "I'm probably the best known heart patient in America," he said. "I think we've provided a vast amount of information."

On November 24, the day Cheney left the hospital, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear
Bush v. Gore.

Doctors had suggested that Cheney could return to work in a few weeks, but he didn't have that kind of time. A long absence would feed speculation that he was unfit for the job. And he was doing much of the thinking for the campaign. Not only did he have to plan for a transition, he needed to do it with private funding, as public money would not be available until the election was conclusively decided. He was back at work in three days. He opened the
Bush-Cheney Presidential Transition Foundation, Inc.
, in a suite of an office in McLean, Virginia, not far from his house.

The Transition Foundation existed in the kind of pre-Watergate legal gray area tailor-made for Cheney's needs. The law permitting such a foundation dated to a legislative fix passed after the contested election of 1960 between
John F. Kennedy
and Richard Nixon. Donors were not subject to the Freedom of Information Act or any other disclosure or
oversight
requirements. By mid-December the Bush-Cheney foundation had raised $3 million. Funding was assumed to come from corporate executives, including energy industry stalwarts. A number of the Bush-Cheney campaign's top corporate donors called "pioneers" sat on the
transition team
s that handled the various agencies that regulated their businesses. Company executives picked lobbyists to fill regulatory positions. Long after the election was decided, the foundation continued. Its new function was funding policy groups managed by Michigan governor
John Engler
and former New York representative
Bill Paxon
, at the time a high-powered K Street lobbyist. Engler and Paxon would push the Bush-Cheney agenda in Congress.

To staff his transition team, Cheney did what he had done throughout his career. He turned to people he could trust. His first appointment was David Gribben, the high school friend from Wyoming who had worked for Cheney in Congress, at the Department of Defense, and then at Halliburton. David Addington, Cheney's staffer from the House Intelligence Committee and the Iran-Contra Committee, was also brought on to the transition team, as was fellow Pentagon alum Scooter Libby.

On December 12, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Bush and Cheney by a 5–1 vote. In the weeks and months to come, Cheney would assemble Bush's cabinet. The vice president-elect understood that Bush didn't want briefing books or excessive detail. Cheney would provide Bush what he needed to know in digestible nuggets. The president-elect would learn of the progress of his administration's transition from his number two man. The filter was in place, and Cheney was finally about to arrive back in the Oval Office, if not in the top position, in the closest second place in American history.

Since George Bush and Dick Cheney replaced Bill Clinton and Al Gore, congressional oversight of the executive branch occurs only when there is a crisis so outrageous that Congress can't ignore it—such as CBS's release of harrowing images of U.S. soldiers torturing
prisoners at Abu Ghraib
or
The New York Times
report that the administration is engaged in illegal wiretapping. Even in those instances, the response of Congress has proven tepid at best, and the surprises were revealed by the media rather than by congressional investigators.

Michael Mobbs
's June 18, 2004, briefing of a House committee staff included a surprising moment of testimony that should have been repeated before a full committee hearing. Yet only House staffers in a Rayburn Building committee room would ever hear what the lawyer from the Defense Department had to say. Mobbs was on the Hill to discuss what the vice president's staff might have known of the multibillion-dollar government contracts awarded to Halliburton and its subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root. It was one of the smaller questions at the edge of a potential scandal involving Vice President Dick Cheney. The larger and more direct question—Did Dick Cheney help steer $7 billion in Iraq construction contracts to Halliburton?—was discreetly avoided. In a Congress that took its
oversight responsibility
seriously, Mobbs's visit to the Hill would have been a prelude to testimony before a full committee. In a republic with a healthy system of public ethics, a no-bid government contract awarded to a company that was mailing deferred compensation checks to the vice president would itself be a full-blown ethics scandal.

This is no longer that republic.

At the time Mobbs went up to the Hill to testify, Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) was the nation's biggest single recipient of government funding for military logistics and reconstruction. Two years into the Bush-Cheney administration, the company was the Army's number one contractor, up from the number 19 spot it had held in 2002. Not only had Dick Cheney been Halliburton's CEO for five years before he was elected vice president, the no-bid process by which Halliburton got the contracts had been put in place ten years earlier by Cheney when he was secretary of defense. Democratic members of the
House Committee on Government Reform
, led by Los Angeles congressman Henry Waxman, wanted to know if anyone on the vice president's staff had been involved in awarding the contracts. Considering what was known, Waxman believed his request was within the reasonable scope of congressional oversight, so his committee staff members were among those questioning Mobbs.

The vice president didn't find it reasonable. He had already addressed the questions being asked of Mobbs on NBC's
Meet the Press
nine months before the June 2004 hearing, when Tim Russert asked Cheney if he was in any way involved in the awarding of
Halliburton's Iraq contracts
:

Of course not, Tim. Tim, I had, when I was secretary of defense, I was not involved in awarding contracts. That's done at a far lower level. Secondly, when I ran Halliburton for five years and they were doing work for the Defense Department, which frankly they've been doing for sixty or seventy years, I never went near the Defense Department. I never lobbied the Defense Department on behalf of Halliburton. The only time I went back to the department during those eight years was to have my portrait hung, which is a traditional service rendered for former secretaries of defense. And since I left Halliburton to become George Bush's vice president, I've severed all my ties with the company, gotten rid of all my financial interests. I have no financial interest in Halliburton of any kind and haven't had now for over three years. And as vice president, I have absolutely no influence of, involvement of, knowledge of in any way, shape or form of contracts let by the Corps of Engineers or anybody else in the federal government.

Defense Department officials stayed on message for the vice president, telling Waxman that Cheney's office had nothing to do with the contracts. Then Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the information. When the DOD refused to comply with the request, the conservative public-interest law firm sued and obtained files that included an e-mail contradicting what Waxman had been told. In the e-mail, Defense Department contract officer Stephen Browning wrote that Halliburton contracts were "coordinated through the Vice President's office."

The staff meeting at which Mobbs testified was closed to the public. He wasn't sworn in, as this was not a full committee hearing with members of the House present. But as lying to Congress is a violation of federal law, staff members at the briefing expected the truth. They got more than they expected.

"We didn't know anything about Michael Mobbs at that time," says a staff member who sat in on the committee briefing. "Someone even asked if he was the same guy who wrote the Mobbs Declaration that was filed in the Hamdi case, saying Hamdi was a high-profile prisoner and had to be detained. We just knew he was a DOD employee coming up to address the issue of the Browning e-mail."

This was indeed the same Michael Mobbs who had appeared in court with a two-page memo written to strip
Yaser Esam Hamdi
of all his constitutional rights and justify his indefinite detention at Guantánamo Bay. He was more than an employee. Michael Mobbs was a high-level political appointee at the Defense Department. "We asked Mobbs who, outside the Pentagon, he had spoken to regarding the
KBR contracts
. He said he met with the deputies. . . . He began to name one deputy after another [including Cheney's deputy national security director
Stephen Hadley
, who chaired the meeting]. Then we asked him, what about Cheney's office? And he said, yeah, Scooter Libby."

"Yeah, Scooter Libby"?

That
was a surprise.

"I don't think anybody in the room expected to hear that," says the House staff member.

Until he was
indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice
, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby rode to work with Dick Cheney. As the vice president's chief of staff, he met with Cheney every day. They worked together. They were friends. Their families dined together. If Libby had been briefed on the Halliburton contracts, it was all but impossible that Dick Cheney was out of the loop. What Cheney had told Russert about the distance between his office and the Halliburton contracts was false. (It is not a crime to lie to a reporter.) In fact, much of what the vice president said on
Meet the Press
was not true. Dick Cheney received deferred compensation from Halliburton through 2003 and held more than $3 million in Halliburton stock options until some time in 2005, according to his IRS filings. But not according to what he told Russert. In the same year that Dick Cheney told the NBC news anchor "I have no financial interest in Halliburton of any kind and haven't had now for over three years," Halliburton paid the vice president $178,438 in deferred compensation.

The focus on Halliburton and KBR put the White House in a bind. If deferred compensation and stock holdings in a corporation doing business with the federal government weren't enough to trigger the public's gag reflex, stacking the deck in a $7-billion poker game was. The idea that the public would get wind of the Vice President's Office's involvement with Halliburton's war contracts was a problem. The administration could have opened its books to the public, or at least to Congress, to demonstrate that there was no impropriety. Instead, they shut down. The administration— and the
Army Corps of Engineers
—took great care to control any
paper or anecdotal trail
that might taint them. Documents were tightly guarded. Members of Congress were denied access to contracts. Responses to reporters' questions were circumspect at best. Or awkward at worst, as White House spokesperson
Scott McClellan
demonstrated when confronted at a press conference: "It's not something that, as a contracting matter, the White House decides; it's something the Pentagon decides."

Pentagon e-mails and Michael Mobbs's statement to the House committee staff contradicted McClellan's clumsy denial and the vice president's artful, self-assured dismissal of the same question. As information was pieced together by the minority staff on the House Government Reform Committee, it became evident that Vice President Cheney was misinformed, or he was lying.

Halliburton has a history of outrageous costs, huge unexpected billings, and unexplained charges that extend back to the Clinton administration and into Bosnia. But the company's incestuous relationship with the Bush-Cheney administration is a case study in political cronyism, out-of-control outsourcing, and absence of oversight—much of it related to Halliburton's vast logistical undertaking in Iraq. Some of the issues have been covered by the press, some exposed by
Halliburton Watch
and other advocacy groups, some ignored.

Responding to requests from Congress, the Army Corps of Engineers reported that Halliburton billed $2.64 per gallon on seventy-five million gallons of gasoline it transported from Kuwait into Iraq for civilian use. At the same time, the Iraqi national fuel company was paying only 97 cents a gallon to purchase fuel in Kuwait and other nations bordering Iraq. Also at the same time, the U.S. Defense Energy Support Center, which supplied fuel for the military, was importing gas from Kuwait at $1.32 per gallon. No one in the region was charging Halliburton's rates. Halliburton subcontracted with
Altanmia Commercial Marketing Company
, which had no experience in transporting fuel, much less doing it in a war zone. Altanmia was the preferred provider of the U.S. ambassador in Kuwait, so Halliburton wasn't exclusively at fault. At least that's what is suggested in an e-mail that Ambassador
Richard Jones
wrote to his staff: "Tell KBR to get off their butts and conclude deals with Kuwait now! Tell them we want a deal done with al-Tanmia within 24 hours and don't take any excuses." In the end, the $61 million that KBR paid above market price was passed on to taxpayers. The gasoline contracts were bid, according to Waxman, by telephone in one day. Evidently, not much effort was put into finding the best price.

In another gasoline deal, a Halliburton procurement officer took a $1 million kickback for transportation subcontractors, according to the company's own admission and an indictment handed down in Illinois. Halliburton cooperated with a government investigation and repaid the $6.3 million that the
kickback scheme
had cost taxpayers.

On another occasion, Halliburton billed the government for forty-two thousand meals per day when it was serving only fourteen thousand. Halliburton did not reimburse the government, because the language in their contract for meals didn't specify how many meals per day they had committed to serve.

There were other accounts found in embassy e-mails of subcontractors delivering bribes or kickback money to Halliburton executives staying at the
Kuwait Hilton
. In most cases, Halliburton has denied any impropriety.

The Kuwait Hilton was also the scene of a quintessential "ugly American" story involving KBR's Middle East Division chief
Tom Crum
and his wife's wristwatch. According to an embassy e-mail, Crum's wife lost a diamond-encrusted watch on the hotel grounds and insisted that the Hilton management find it or replace it. When the hotel manager couldn't turn up the watch, valued at $2,600, Mr. Crum called and ordered him "get off your fucking ass, put my wife in a car, and go get her a watch." With Halliburton (more precisely, U.S. taxpayers) spending about $1.5 million a month at the Hilton, Mrs. Crum's watch looked like a bargain. The hotel manager accommodated the Crums, opening up a hotel jewelry store in the middle of the night to make nice. The e-mail, one of four hundred documents obtained by the House Committee on Government Reform, suggests that KBR will make demands of local contractors if the stakes are high enough. While a small incident, it says a great deal about how the Army's private ministry of public works conducts itself in Iraq.

Some of these transgressions can be attributed to the hasty, nasty, and hugely expensive nature of a war in which logistical services are contracted out to companies whose managers are required to increase earnings. Call it the fiscal fog of war. And the fiscal fog of war is more dense when the war and occupation are as badly planned as the
Bush-Cheney
-Rumsfeld invasion of Iraq. Some transgressions can be attributed to cost-plus contracts that encourage big spending because company profits are based on a percentage of total costs. "A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money," Illinois senator
Everett Dirksen
said more than forty years ago. Today, real money is more than $10 billion in Halliburton
Iraq War contracts
that don't pass the standard ethical smell test. The vice president created the process that started money flowing from the federal treasury into the accounts of Halliburton and its subsidiaries. The vice president's staff, if not the vice president himself, was involved in directing the flow of some of that money. And despite his public statements, or his odd parsing of the term "financial interests," the vice president had a financial interest in Halliburton when the deals were being done.

Halliburton's Iraq War revenue stream can be followed back to the military outsourcing that began in 1992, while Dick Cheney was secretary of defense. At Cheney's bidding, the Defense Department paid Halliburton $3.9 million to prepare a classified report on privatizing the logistics of war: housing, feeding, refueling, and clothing troops. Halliburton went through the $3.9 million, secured an additional $5 million for a follow-up, then landed a five-year Corps of Engineers contract to provide logistical support for the Army. That process became the template for
Halliburton-KBR Iraq War contracts
ten years later. It was an extraordinary deal for Halliburton. On the DOD's dime—or millions—the company wrote a classified marketing plan for its own product. Then—because it owned the proprietary information, which was classified—it effortlessly moved into the market. As Halliburton followed the Army into Somalia and Bosnia, it became the Wal-Mart of the defense service economy. Halliburton even used Wal-Mart's big-box pricing plan: Accept low margins, squeeze competitors, and make it up on volume. The cost-plus pricing model the company devised guaranteed one percent profit on contracts—with the possibility of bonuses that would push the profit margin up to almost eight percent. It wasn't a win-win proposition, it was win-and-win-bigger, with an incentive to increase expenditures in order to increase the company's return. It was particularly lucrative when buying and shipping commodities, which entailed little work but was subject to the same one-percent-plus billing.