Dick Cheney's brilliant career

WITH SPIRO ("TED") Agnew, it was so simple. He was charged with pocketing more than $100,000 in graft from Maryland engineering firms, one of which took the trouble to have someone personally deliver an envelope with $10,000 in small bills to the newly elected U.S. vice-president at his suite in the Executive Office Building in Washington. Bribery is plainly illegal, so Ted pleaded "no contest" to the charges against him and quit public life in 1973.

But you look at Dick Cheney's brief stint in business from 1995 to 2000, prior to joining the Bush ticket, and you don't see anything illegal. Not yet, anyway.

There's nothing illegal about a former U.S. defence secretary and Gulf War hero accepting a plum post as CEO of a tainted firm, Halliburton Co., that was harshly criticized in the early 1990s for selling oil-drilling equipment to, of all places, Saddam Hussein's Iraq. In 1995, the same year Cheney decided to try his hand at business with Halliburton after a lifelong career in politics, the company pleaded guilty to violating the U.S. ban on exports to Libya, having peddled to strongman Moammar Gadhafi six pulse nuclear generators that could be used to detonate nuclear weapons.

Nor was there anything illegal about Cheney's inability, as CEO, to stop the stain of questionable conduct at the Texas-based oil-services and construction company from spreading. Under Cheney, Halliburton continued to do business with countries the U.S. has described as "rogue nations," including Libya, Iran and Iraq.

And it overbilled the Pentagon on contracts over a four-year period ending in 1998 — charging $750,000 (U.S.) for electrical repairs at Fort Ord in California that actually cost about $125,000, for example — and ultimately reached a settlement with the Army in which it paid a $2 million fine.

Also in 1998, Halliburton, with the assistance of its auditor, Arthur Andersen, altered the company's accounting methods in a way that postponed losses from deadbeat clients, a device that artificially inflated Halliburton's profits by about $100 million and is now the subject of an investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.