Shhhh.... Halliburton is Doing a No-No

Dan Gillmor succinctly and efficiently puts the focus on Halli-Cheney:

August 05, 2004 The Halliburton Stench Vice President Dick Cheney's tenure at Halliburton, the company he ran before returning to partisan politics in 2000, gets more and more questionable as facts come out. Consider what's happened in the past two days. While CEO, Cheney was grossly negligent -- at best -- in the company's handling of an accounting change that helped the company show better profits without changing the underlying business at all. The accounting move was legal, but it wasn't disclosed to shareholders, who had an absolute right to know. The Securities and Exchange Commission, in a legal wrist slap given the money involved, fined Halliburton $7.5 million (NYT). But it didn't hold the company's chief executive accountable in any way. So either Cheney was willfully ignorant of an accounting shift that added tens of millions to the bottom line, or he was one of the people culpable for the move. We don't know, because the SEC's statement on the matter was muddled. But the most favorable way to view Cheney's actions here is to assume that he utterly failed to do his job. Meanwhile, investigations are growing more intense into alleged bribery (Bloomberg) in Nigeria by Halliburton, also under Cheney's tenure as CEO. There are also ongoing investigations into the company's dealings with Iran. And, of course, there's the continuing Halliburton saga in its Iraq operations today, a scandal of fairly major proportions. A full-service company indeed. Ask yourself what the hard-right partisans would be doing if we'd been talking about a Democratic vice president whose former company was up to its eyeballs in such shenanigans. They'd be screaming their outrage from the rooftops. But on this, they are silent.