File this under, “Hmmmmm…”
You remember, I’m sure, how the right-wingers had their knickers in a collective twist a few years back over the “oil for food” scandal. But for those pre-lobotomy patients who don’t spend their afternoons guffawing at Rush, let’s review:
The United Nations, see, was getting hoodwinked by Adolf Saddam Hussein Hitler, who pocketed billions from kickbacks on the oil-for-food program. That program was supposed to pay for food, medicine and humanitarian goods, but instead it helped enrich Saddam, as well as “some of America’s most forceful opponents at the United Nations,” according to Fox News (and really, who else would we cite?).
The scandal was, in fact, the real deal; Hussein did get kickbacks. Last week, we learned a little more about who provided them.
Specifically, on Tuesday the New York Times reported that Chevron, the second-largest American oil company, “is preparing to acknowledge that it should have known kickbacks were being paid to Saddam Hussein” via the program. That admission, investigators said, will be part of a settlement now being negotiated, in which Chevron will be fined $25 to $30 million, the largest fine so far for a U.S. company involved in the scandal.
But so what? You already hate the oil companies, right? There’s more.
For who should have been on Chevron’s board of directors at the time all of this was going on, but our own Condoleeza Rice.
And Condi wasn’t just on the board; she was, in fact, in charge of the company’s policy committee, “which oversaw areas of potential political concerns for the company,” according to the Times.
Political concerns. Like, say, kickbacks involving the oil-for-food program?
But let’s be fair. Let’s say Ms. Rice had no idea this was going on, at a time when she was specifically tasked with knowing if something like this was going on. Let’s say she had no clue: She was clueless. Incompetent. I mean, she is part of the Bush Administration; maybe this goes without saying.
But it does raise a larger question, doesn’t it? Rice’s former colleague, Donald Rumsfeld, was the only American to sit on the board of a company called ABB, a Zurich-based engineering giant, which in 2000 won a $200 million ontract to sell two light water nuclear reactors to North Korea. And Vice President Dick Cheney, of course, is a former CEO of Halliburton, which through its subsidiaries made quite a bit of money on Iraq reconstruction projects — and has also done plenty of business with that other charter member of the “Axis of Evil,” Iran.
The news of Condi, then, seems part of the broader whole. Which begs the question:
Don’t conservatives ever get the idea that they’re being played?
