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A Self Important
Senior Contributor
Join Date: 08-03-03
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Total ownage not only do they have energy but the left can link them to Halliburton.
Cheney says Haliburton did not support Myanmar regime - October 28, 2000
Quote:
KING:All right, let's get into some issues. As you know, when we get into the last week things always break, and I want to give Dick a chance to respond to that story today in The Wall Street Journal about your former company, Haliburton's, relationship with a brutal junta government in Myanmar, which is formerly Burma, and Haliburton's involvement supporting the regime that treated its people terribly.
D. CHENEY: Well, Larry, we didn't support the regime. We were there because we had competed on a contract to lay some undersea pipeline offshore in Myanmar. It was done through a joint-venture partner. It was fully in compliance with U.S. policy, and our conduct around the world, the Haliburton operation is in more that 120 countries, and you have to operate in some very difficult places and oftentimes in countries that are governed in a manner that's not consistent with our principals here in the United States.
But the world's not made up only of democracies, and everything we did there was totally in compliance with U.S. policy, as the article made clear.
KING: Did you expect this kind of thing to come out, though?
D. CHENEY: Oh, I think so. It wouldn't be a story except for the fact that I'm running for vice president...
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Corporate Watch : Halliburton : Corporate Crimes
Quote:
Adventures in Burma...
'We don’t do business in Burma,' claims Halliburton spokesperson Wendy Hall. But while the company may have no current direct investments in Burma, it has participated in a number of energy development projects there, including the notorious Yadana and Yetagun pipelines. Prior to the gas pipeline’s construction, the Burmese military forcibly relocated towns along the onshore route. According to the US Department of Labor, 'credible evidence exists that several villages along the route were forcibly relocated or depopulated in the months before the production-sharing agreement was signed.'76 According to an Earth Rights report: 'From 1992, until the present (2000), thousands of villagers in Burma were forced to work in support of these pipelines and related infrastructure. They lost their homes due to forced relocation and were raped, tortured and killed by soldiers hired by companies as security guards for the pipelines.'77 In addition, as the largest foreign investment project in Burma, the pipelines will provide revenue to prop up the regime, perhaps for decades to come.
Shortly before the US presidential election, Dick Cheney admitted on the Larry King Live! show that Halliburton had done contract work in Burma. Cheney defended the project by saying that Halliburton had not broken the US law imposing sanctions on Burma, which forbids new investments in the country. 'You have to operate in some very difficult places and oftentimes in countries that are governed in a manner that’s not consistent with our principles here in the United States,' Cheney told Larry King. 'But the world’s not made up only of democracies.' Halliburton’s engagement in Burma predates Dick Cheney’s tenure as CEO. Halliburton had an office in Rangoon as early as 1990, two years after the military regime took power by voiding the election of the National League for Democracy, the party of Aung San Suu Kyi. In the early 1990’s, Halliburton Energy Services joined with Alfred McAlpine (UK) to provide pre-commissioning services to the Yadana pipeline. In 1997, after Dick Cheney joined Halliburton, the Yadana field developers hired European Marine Services (EMC) to lay the 365-kilometer offshore portion of the Yadana gas pipeline. EMC is a 50-50 joint venture between Halliburton and Saipem of Italy. From July to October 1997, EMC installed the 360-inch diameter line using its pipelaying barges. The route followed by Halliburton and Saipem was chosen by the Burmese government to minimize costs, even though the onshore pipeline path would cut through politically sensitive areas inhabited by ethnic minorities in the Tenasserim region of Burma. Given the Burmese military’s well-documented history of human rights violations and brutality, human rights groups say the western companies knew or should have known that human rights crimes would accompany Burmese troops into the onshore pipeline region. They say there was ample evidence in the public domain that such violations were already occurring when Halliburton chose to lay pipe for the project. As Katie Redford, a lawyer with EarthRights International puts it, 'To be involved in the Yadana pipeline is to knowingly accept brutal violations of human rights as part of doing business.'
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To sit down with these men and deal with them as the representatives of an enlightened and civilized people is to deride ones own dignity and to invite the disaster of their treachery - General Matthew Ridgway
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