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August 2, 2002
Ralph Nader
The Labor
Party
Chris Floyd
Moral Maze:
Bankruptcy Made Easy
Jeremy Scahill
Saddam,
Chemical Weapons and Donald Rumsfeld
Jeffrey St. Clair
Dark Deeds in the Black Hills:
Daschle Dooms the
Sacred Land of the Sioux
August 1, 2002
Steven Higgs
Activists
Under Siege
Anthony Gancarski
Draft
Picks:
Staffing the Latest War
Zeynep Toufe
Invisible
Children: AIDS,
Africa and Selective Vision
Alexander Cockburn
Drivel and Squawk:
Angelina Jolie, the NYT
and the Attack on McKinney
July 31, 2002
Amelia Peltz
Inside
Ramallah:
How Can the World Witness Such Suffering and Do Nothing?
M. Shahid Alam
The Academic
Boycott of Israel
Bernard Weiner
20 Things
We've Learned Since 9/11
Philip Cryan
Discourse
and War in Colombia
Neve Gordon
A Feast
of Bombs:
Sharon's Endgame for Palestine
July 30, 2002
Pierre Tristam
Branding September 11
PS Burton
Financial
Journalism:
A Very Small Cog
Tom Stephens
Hypocrites in the House:
Fast Track After Midnight
Dave Marsh
Censorship
Goes Global
July 29, 2002
Linda Belanger
Why Do They Do It?
Alfredo Castro
Colombia's
Disappeared
Anne Brodsky
Inside Pakistan and
Afghanistan with RAWA
Andrew George
The Fires
of Summer:
Don't Blame the Greens
David Vest
A Blind Mule and
a Box of Medals
July 28, 2002
Bob Geary
Our Dinner
with Fidel Castro
July 27, 2002
Ian Daoust
The New
Mahler, Seattle Style
Gavin Keeney
Zizek
and Lenin
Ralph Nader
Citigroup
Heal Thyself
M. Shahid Alam
American
Presidents (Poem)
Mokhiber / Weissman
Push Back: Women Take
on the Corporate Beasts
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
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Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
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by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
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August
2, 2002
CounterPunch News Flash
A
Drivel & Squawk Exclusive
Jeff Gerth Saves Cheney,
Again!
by Alexander Cockburn
Republican strategists are jubilant over a New
York Times (Thursday, Aug 1) front-page story by Jeff Gerth and
Richard Stevenson that effectively damps the bonfire of public
suspicion over Cheney's business ethics, dousing it with a thick
blanket of cautious qualifiers, clogged syntax and now-you-see-it,
no-you-don't insinuation.
Connoisseurs of Gerth's prose noted familiar
features: excessive length (1604 words); rambling divagation;
no clear point. I say "Gerth's prose" because it is
clearly unfair to blame Stevenson as the chief perp, because
Gerth's stories read the same, whoever his co-author may be.
The Gerth report was eagerly anticipated
as likely to add to the White House's woes. The Drudge Site heralded
it breathlessly.
The story finally tottered into view,
with a lead paragraph aglow with tedium: "With Washington
focused on corporate
responsibility, Vice President Dick Cheney's tenure as chief
executive of Halliburton is under scrutiny from government
investigators and his political opponents."
Already weary, the reader trudges on
to the third paragraph, where a signpost informs him that the
story is headed in the general direction of the circumstances
of Halliburton's takeover of Dresser Industries, a Dallas-based
oil services company which (not mentioned by Gerth & Co)
has historic ties to the Bush clan.
The Dresser takeover by Halliburton is
no secret. It happened on Cheney's watch as CEO of the latter
company, and did not display any acumen, (at least in the interests
of Halliburton's present stockholders) on the part of the man
often considered to be the White House's keenest brain. Dresser
has huge liabilities from asbestos-related lawsuits, which have
threatened to drag down the merged companies. Halliburton's shares
have dropped from around $50 when Cheney cashed in 2000 for around
$36 million, to $13.50 today.
To put the suspicion in compact form:
did Cheney maybe in concert with his hunting buddy Bill Bradford,
Dresser's CEO, shaft the shareholders by suppressing the explosive
news that a former Dresser subsidiary had formally alerted Dresser
it might be facing hugely expanded asbestos liabilities?
It walks like a duck. Halliburton's board
was due to vote on the Dresser merger/takeover in June, 1998.
In May, 1998, Bradford was alerted by a letter from the CEO of
Global
Industrial Technologies that his company was looking to share
with Dresser the burden of asbestos related liabilities.
It walks like a duck. Though asbestos
suits had bankrupted such corporate titans as Johns Manville,
Halliburton looked the other way on the asbestos issue and, officially
at least, the deadly May letter from the CEO of Global Industrial
Technologies lay quietly in Dresser's filing cabinet.
By God, it is a duck! Halliburton mumbles
in a footnote in 1999 report that there is a pesky little problem
to do with asbestos and Global Industrial Technologies, but "these
new assertions by Global are without merit" and its "pending
asbestos claims will be resolved without material effect on Halliburton's
financial position or results of operations."
It's a huge duck! Unstained by any public
airing of asbestos liabilities Halliburton's stock stays high,
thus making Cheney's options of enormous value. In the summer
of 2000 George Bush, (who has himself made millions by cashing
in options while in possession of knowledge unknown to Harken's
outside shareholders,) taps Cheney as his choice for veep and
Cheney cashes in, clearing nearly $40 million. One year later
Halliburton announces publicly that, guess what, there's been
"an unexpected development" and yes, there is
an asbestos problem. Halliburton's shares begin to tank.
Sorry fellas, it's not a duck at all.
We thought it might have been a duck but licensed poultry
experts in the form of Gerth and Stevenson cite competent authority,
in the form of Steven N. Kaplan, identified as a finance prof
at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business, to
the general effect that CEOs often don't really bother themselves
with tedious minutiae like asbestos risk. And anyway, Halliburton
did look at the risks in the merger really, really hard. And
besides, it all came out long after Cheney had gone. And in conclusion,
we'll stop the story now because everyone's gone to sleep.
So now the White House can say, "Look,
the deal was scrutinized by that fearsome newshound, the Pulitzer
prize-winning Gerth, the hound sniffed and the hound came up
with nothing."
For more
on Gerth's deadly record click here.
Today's
Features
Ralph Nader
The Labor
Party
Chris Floyd
Moral Maze:
Bankruptcy Made Easy
Jeremy Scahill
Saddam,
Chemical Weapons and Donald Rumsfeld
Jeffrey St. Clair
Dark Deeds in the Black Hills:
Daschle Dooms the
Sacred Land of the Sioux
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