Pax Nortona – A Blog by Joel Sax
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Cheneygate?
Posted on January 12, 2004 in Accountability Journalists & Pundits
A letter from MoveOn (the group that the RNC fears as much as Howard Dean) pointed me to several articles that have been percolating in the foreign media about Vice President Dick Cheney’s involvement in a bribery scandal. Le Figaro reported more than three weeks ago:
It focuses notably on the French company Technip and the American Halliburton, which were associated in a Nigerian operation. Such an international inquiry is possible since the 1997 adoption of an OECD convention on the “fight against the corruption of foreign public officials in commercial negotiations” which came into effect in French law in 2000. It’s within this new judicial framework that the Judge Renaud Van Ruymbeke is conducting his investigations and the Paris court contemplates an eventual indictment of the present United States’ Vice President, Richard Cheney, in his capacity as former CEO of Halliburton. The investigations concern 180 million dollars of commissions paid on the occasion of a gas complex bid in Nigeria. The hypothesis of an eventual indictment of Dick Cheney is officially contemplated by French justice. According to projections of the case, he could be charged with “eventual complicity in supplying the means or the orders or the reception (of stolen goods)”, for the misappropriation of public property.
Last Saturday morning, the Dallas Morning News was the first American paper to cover the unfolding scandal. Once more, the American people have been left in the dark while the rest of the world gets to see the full story.
I think the Watergate legacy is leaning hard on American reporters. A scandal of this proportion outstrips what Nixon and Clinton did, combined. Timid journalists, warned by their editors and publishers not to make waves, slip off to follow nonstories such as Howard Dean’s “anger” and similar “character”-based fluff pieces. American news does not tell us how those in our government affect our lives, they make no ties to the deficit and the lousy economy, to the Patriot Act and the sense of fear dogging our people, to the war and the empty slots among us that were once filled with virile young men.
None of these men or women wants to be responsible for bringing down the Bush Administration. They see the pillage of Carthage, perhaps, or the sack of Alexandria or the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution if these criticisms reach the public eye. I think they imagine too much, that they fear you and me too much.
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