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Getbig Main Boards => Politics and Political Issues Board => Topic started by: Danny on June 06, 2010, 04:56:01 PM
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Liz Cheney’s Lie on ABC’s Sunday Show about Halliburton’s Fraud Charges Is Easily Disproved
"The apple doesn"t fall far from the tree"
http://www.pensitoreview.com/2010/06/06/liz-cheney-caught-lying-on-abc-sunday/ (http://www.pensitoreview.com/2010/06/06/liz-cheney-caught-lying-on-abc-sunday/)
Liz Cheney seems to need to prove that she is every bit as amoral and shameless about lying as her father. On ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, she flat-out lied about Halliburton, the company her father ran before he appointed himself vice president. In a back and forth with Arianna Huffington about Halliburton’s role in the Gulf Disaster — it appears likely that Halliburton’s bungling caused the explosion — Cheney flatly contradicted Huffington’s assertion that Halliburton had ever been charged with fraud by the U.S. government:
“The truth is,” Huffington said, “that right now we have precisely the regulatory system that the Bush-Cheney administration wanted: full of loopholes, full of cronies and lobbyists filling the very agencies they are supposed to be overseeing the industry.”
“So,” George Will asked, “it’s Bush’s fault? Just clear this up.”
“It is absolutely, a thousand percent Bush-Cheney’s fault,” Huffington said.
“Ahh,” Will sighed.
“I actually heard that George Bush was responsible for the breakup of Tipper and Al Gore’s marriage too,” Liz Cheney said sarcastically. “I mean it’s incredible the extent to which people are now trying to shift blame.”
“You gotta look at the facts,” Cheney said. “For years you have been demonizing Bush and Cheney and I’m sure you will continue to demonize them for years going forward, but we have got now a catastrophe on the Gulf Coast…that happened on this administration’s watch, which this administration is failing to clean up,” she said, adding that President Obama was failing to show leadership on the oil spill.
“Right here, we have the posterchild of Bush-Cheney crony capitalism, Halliburton, and we haven’t said about that,” Huffington hit back. “They, after all, were responsible for cementing the well. Here is Halliburton, after it defrauded the American taxpayer of hundreds of millions of dollars…”
“Arianna,” Cheney interrupted. “I don’t what planet you live on, but that’s not planet earth.”
“I’m living on this planet,” Huffington said.
“What you’re saying, has no relationship to the truth,” Cheney insisted. “Your assertion that Halliburton defrauded the U.S. government… Arianna, it’s absolutely not true.”
“I’m so glad PolitiFact is going to be checking this,” Huffington said, smiling. “I’m so glad.”
Who needs PolitiFact when the story was reported in Huffington Post, on May 11, 2010:
It seems increasingly likely that when investigators determine the precise cause of the oil-rig explosion that threatens to poison huge swaths of the Gulf of Mexico, what they’ll conclude is that something went catastrophically wrong with the work done by Halliburton.
BP owns the well, and Transocean Ltd. owns the drilling rig, but Halliburton was the subcontractor in charge of sealing the bottom of the well…
For Halliburton, it’s just the latest in a seemingly endless series of brushes with notoriety…
In 2009, Halliburton and its former subsidiary, KBR, paid $569 million in fines to settle bribery charges. It turns out that from 1995 to 2004, Halliburton had bribed a long succession of Nigerian officials to obtain lucrative construction contracts…
Here’s a contemporaneous report on Halliburton’s guilty plea — Bloomberg News, February 12, 2009:
HOUSTON – KBR Inc. and its former parent, Halliburton Co., agreed to pay $579 million to resolve US criminal and regulatory charges that the engineering company paid bribes totaling more than $180 million to Nigerian officials to win more than $6 billion in contracts to build a liquefied natural gas project in that country.
Andrew Farley, KBR’s general counsel, entered a guilty plea yesterday in federal court in Houston on behalf of the Houston-based company to conspiracy and to violating the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and agreed to a $402 million fine.
Separately, the Securities and Exchange Commission said Halliburton and KBR would pay $177 million in forfeited profits to settle civil bribery allegations without admitting wrongdoing.
KBR also pledged at a federal court hearing to hire an independent monitor to review its internal controls and record keeping for three years.
Earlier this year, the federal government also sued Halliburton over more than $100 million in alleged invoice padding:
A 2004 GAO investigation into Halliburton’s contract to provide essential services to the troops in Iraq “found significant problems in almost every area, including ineffective planning, inadequate cost control, insufficient training of contract management officials, and a pattern of recurring problems with controlling costs, meeting schedules, documenting purchases, and overseeing subcontractors.”
Just last month, the Justice Department brought a civil fraud suit against KBR, alleging that it charged the government for unauthorized security services in Iraq. “In 2007 and 2008, the Defense Department disapproved $103.4 million paid to KBR under LOGCAP III for unauthorized security services,” Reuters reported.
Sadly, it simply doesn’t matter when lies like this one from Cheney are uncovered. In fact, the more controversial she is, the more demand she has among segment producers for shows like ABC’s “This Week.” And since there’s no real-time fact checking on these shows, she’ll always be glad to appear.
The relationship between the political shows and their need for ratings and Republican propagandists like Cheney who need platforms where their disinformation is never seriously challenged is symbiotic, and it is doing serious damage to the American political system.
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Yes,everything is Bushs' fault and Cheneys fault.Obama has been in there for 1.5 years and has DONE NOTHING to change a dam thing that was in place.All this talk of change,still in Iraq,still in Afghanastan,Gitmo still open,UE still sky high[higher].This little piece of crap community organiser hasnt done a fucking thing but throw money away and make speeches and then his left wing jerkoffs like Arinna Huffington,a women who turned her husband gay,has the balls to blame Bush.
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Yes,everything is Bushs' fault and Cheneys fault.Obama has been in there for 1.5 years and has DONE NOTHING to change a dam thing that was in place.All this talk of change,still in Iraq,still in Afghanastan,Gitmo still open,UE still sky high[higher].This little piece of crap community organiser hasnt done a fucking thing but throw money away and make speeches and then his left wing jerkoffs like Arinna Huffington,a women who turned her husband gay,has the balls to blame Bush.
He has spent TRILLIONS and passed a disastrous health care bill and is now exploting the BP spill to try to ram through crap and tax.
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