Who Let the Dogs In? (42 page)

When Cheney left Halliburton, he received a $34 million severance package despite the fact that the single biggest deal of his five-year career there, the acquisition of Dresser Industries, turned out to be a huge blunder since the company came saddled with asbestos liability.

Halliburton, America’s No. 1 oil-services company, is the nation’s fifth-largest military contractor and the biggest nonunion employer in the United States. It employs more than 100,000 workers worldwide and does over $15 billion a year. Halliburton under Cheney dealt with several brutal dictatorships, including the despicable government of Burma (Myanmar). The company also played questionable roles in Algeria, Angola, Bosnia, Croatia, Haiti, Somalia, and Indonesia.

Halliburton also had dealings with Iran and Libya, both on the State Department’s list of terrorist states. Halliburton’s subsidiary Brown & Root, the old Texas construction firm that does much business with the U.S. military, was fined $3.8 million for reexporting goods to Libya in violation of U.S. sanctions.

If you want to know why the Democrats didn’t jump all over this story and make a big deal out of it, it’s because—as usual—Democrats are involved in similar dealings. Former CIA director John Deutsch is on the board of Schlumberger, the second-largest oil services firm after Halliburton, which is also doing business with Iraq through subsidiaries.

Americans have long been aware that corporate money has consistently corrupted domestic policy in favor of corporate interests, and that both parties are in thrall to huge corporate campaign donors. We are less accustomed to connecting the dots when it comes to foreign policy. But there is no more evidence that corporations pay attention to anything other than profits in their foreign dealings than they do in their domestic deals.

Enron, as usual, provides some textbook examples of just how indifferent to human rights American companies can be. Halliburton’s dealings in Nigeria, in partnership with Shell and Chevron, provide another such example, including gross violations of human rights and environmental abuses.

No one is ever going to argue that Saddam Hussein is a good guy, but Dick Cheney is not the right man to make the case against him. I have never understood why the Washington press corps cannot remember anything for longer than ten minutes, but hearing Cheney denounce Saddam is truly “Give us a break” time.

September 2002

The Clinton Wars Continue

W
ATCHING
SOME DIPSTICK
the other day on Fox News carry on with great certainty about Hillary Clinton and her evil motives—and I don’t think this guy actually spends a lot of time tête-à-tête with Mrs. Clinton while she reveals her deepest thoughts to him—I wondered, “Lord, when are these people going to get over it?”

I think the answer is never, because most people have a very hard time forgiving those whom they have deeply wronged. I know that’s sort of counterintuitive, but think about some of the bad divorces you have known. When we have done something terrible to someone, we often need to twist it around so it’s their fault, not ours.

So we continue to suffer this deformity in our public life because of what Sid Blumenthal calls “this perverse episode,” the scoundrel time.

Just last week,
The Wall Street Journal,
reminded of the Vince Foster suicide by Mrs. Clinton’s new memoir,
Living History,
wrote a nasty, callous, defensive editorial. It’s a classic of the genre of exculpating yourself by blaming others. Since Foster named
The Wall Street Journal
in his suicide note, you might think the paper would, if not acknowledge responsibility, at least have the common decency to express some regret.

I had to force myself to start Blumenthal’s book,
The Clinton Wars,
because I’m still exhausted from the whole megillah, but then I couldn’t stop reading it. It’s perversely fascinating. The year this country wasted on the impeachment was the most tawdry, the nastiest, the ugliest, the sorriest chapter I’ve ever seen in politics.

I watched it from my vantage point in Texas and naturally concluded—as did everyone else in the country with a lick of common sense—that everyone in Washington, D.C., had completely lost their minds.

I’m still ambivalent about it. The late, great Billie Carr of Houston—a woman who had taught the baby Bill Clinton how to do politics when he came over to Texas in 1972—was invited to the White House in the middle of the Monica Lewinsky mess. Billie got all gussied up, sashayed up to Clinton in the receiving line, and said to him, “You dumb son of a bitch.” Thank heavens, I always thought, somebody said to him exactly what every American wanted to say. (Clinton started laughing as Billie proceeded to tear him a new one, and said, “I knew you were gonna do this, Billie.”)

On the other hand, Clinton is one of the most brilliant natural politicians I have ever observed—I put him in a category with Lyndon Johnson and the late Texas Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock. That his presidency could have been so seriously damaged by what was, in fact, a vast right-wing conspiracy is a horrible indictment of politics in our time.

The most depressing thing about Blumenthal’s book is that it keeps reminding you that these nasty little ideological zealots set out from Day One to commit the Politics of Personal Destruction. They had no honor, and they had no shame. They were just out to get him any way they could, and when sex proved a convenient route, they used it—hypocrisy, be damned.

Blumenthal, who was in the center of that cyclone, has accomplished something remarkable—he has actually written a rather detached account of it all. If I had been that close to it—and received that much personal abuse—I doubt I could write without anger, even now.

A couple of times Blumenthal cites some advice Hillary Clinton gave him: “Remember, it’s never about you. Whatever you think, it’s not about you.”

This is not to say there is not some score-settling in this book: The number of reporters who allowed themselves to be used by Kenneth Starr and his ideological wrecking crew is a depressing tally in itself. Blumenthal shames the press corps simply by being meticulous himself. “Here is what he would have found if he had bothered to check . . .” is his general method. I found only one error in the book—it was George W. Bush who repeatedly failed in the oil business, not his father, who made $6 million back when that was real money.

The Clinton Wars
has been criticized for not being more balanced about the flawed presidency—the Clintons themselves are almost entirely blameless in this account. But if that’s what Blumenthal had set out to do, he would have written some other book.

I’ve heard many people say, “But they made it so easy for people to attack them.” That may be true, but it’s still blaming the victim, isn’t it?

The Clinton wars reflect no credit on anyone, but I still think it was journalism, or what passes for journalism these days, that most disgraced itself. We should all be required to read this book.

June 2003

The Failures of 9/11

T
HE
CONGRESSIONAL REPORT
by the committees on intelligence about 9/11 partially made public last week reminds me of the recent investigation into the crash of the
Columbia
shuttle—months of effort to reconfirm the obvious.

In the case of the
Columbia,
we knew from the beginning a piece of insulation had come loose and struck the underside of one wing. So, after much study, it was determined the crash was caused by the piece of insulation that came loose and struck the underside of the wing.

Likewise in the case of 9/11, all the stuff that has been blindingly obvious for months is now blamed for the fiasco.

The joint inquiry focused on the intelligence services, concluding that the FBI especially had been asleep at the wheel. And that, in turn, can be blamed at least partly on the fact that the FBI, before 9/11, had only old green-screen computers with no Internet access. Agents wrote out their reports in longhand, in triplicate. Although the process is not complete, the agency is now upgrading its system: many agents finally got e-mail this year.

My particular bête noire in all this is the INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service), which distinguished itself by granting visas to fifteen of the nineteen hijackers, who never should have been given visas in the first place. Their applications were incomplete and incorrect. They were all young, single, unemployed males, with no apparent means of support—the kind considered classic overstay candidates. Had the INS followed its own procedures, fifteen of the nineteen never would have been admitted.

The incompetence of the INS was underlined when it issued a visa to Mohamed Atta, the lead hijacker, six months after 9/11. In the wake of the attacks, the Bush administration promised to increase funding for the INS, to get the agency fully computerized with modern computers and generally up to speed. All that has happened since is that INS funding has been cut.

Much attention is being paid to the selective editing of the report, apparently to protect the Saudis. I think an equally important piece of the report is on the bureaucratic tangle that prevents anyone from being accountable for much of anything.

The CIA controls only 15 percent to 20 percent of the annual intelligence budget. The rest is handled by the Pentagon, despite widespread agreement that it needs to be centralized. The Bush administration has ignored these calls, mostly because Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld doesn’t want to give up any power.

Time
magazine reports, “It was striking that the Pentagon came under such heavy fire in last week’s bipartisan report for resisting requests made by CIA director Tenet before 9/11, when the agency wanted to use satellites and other military hardware to spot and target terrorists in Afghanistan.”

But the most striking thing about this report is that none of its conclusions and none of its recommendations have anything to do with the contents of the PATRIOT Act, which was supposedly our government’s response to 9/11. All the could-haves, would-haves, and should-haves in the report are so far afield from the PATRIOT Act it might as well be on another subject entirely.

Once again, as has often happened in our history, under the pressure of threat and fear, we have harmed our own liberties without any benefit for our safety. Insufficient powers of law enforcement or surveillance are nowhere mentioned in the joint inquiry report as a problem before 9/11. Yet Attorney General John Ashcroft now proposes to expand surveillance powers even further with the PATRIOT II Act. All over the country, local governments have passed resolutions opposing the PATRIOT Act and three states have done so, including the very Republican Alaska.

The House of Representatives last week voted to prohibit the use of “sneak and peek” warrants authorized by the PATRIOT Act. The conservative House also voted against a measure to withhold federal funds from state and local law-enforcement agencies that refuse to comply with federal inquirers on citizenship or immigration status. All kinds of Americans are now waking up to the fact that the PATRIOT Act gives the government the right to put American citizens in prison indefinitely, without knowing the charges against them, without access to an attorney, without the right to confront their accusers, without trial. Indefinitely.