Halliburton Sweeps Project Censored’s Top 25 Stories
Folks,
I’m taking a brief respite from energy coverage today, to bring you this item by popular demand.
For 30 years, Sonoma State University has compiled an annual list of important stories that were ignored (or censored) by the mainstream media. Their “Top 25 Censored Stories of 2007” list has been published, and it has a few real doozies in it. (Why they’re calling it the list for 2007, I don’t know.)
The ones that caught my eye, and that of an alert reader, were the three Halliburton stories. Let me excerpt some key points:
- as recently as January of 2005, Halliburton sold key components for a nuclear reactor to an Iranian oil development company
- throughout 2004 and 2005, Halliburton worked closely with Cyrus Nasseri, the vice chairman of the board of directors of Iran-based Oriental Oil Kish, to develop oil projects in Iran. Nasseri is also a key member of Iran’s nuclear development team. Nasseri was interrogated by Iranian authorities in late July 2005 for allegedly providing Halliburton with Iran’s nuclear secrets. Iranian government officials charged Nasseri with accepting as much as $1 million in bribes from Halliburton for this information.
- It was [Dick] Cheney who directed Halliburton toward aggressive business dealings with Iran—in violation of U.S. law—in the mid-1990s, which continued through 2005 and is the reason Iran has the capability to enrich weapons-grade uranium.
- When I asked Wendy Hall, a spokeswoman for Halliburton, a couple of years ago if Halliburton would stop doing business with Iran because of concerns that the company helped fund terrorism she said, “No.”
- Halliburton’s subsidiary KBR (formerly Kellogg, Brown and Root) announced on January 24, 2006 that it had been awarded a $385 million contingency contract by the Department of Homeland Security to build detention camps in the United States.
- Vice President Dick Cheney’s stock options in Halliburton rose from $241,498 in 2004 to over $8 million in 2005, an increase of more than 3,000 percent, as Halliburton continues to rake in billions of dollars from no-bid/no-audit government contracts.
Man, it’s gotta be great to be Dick Cheney. You get to flaunt US law and make millions selling weapons to your enemy, and you get to keep your job as CEO. Then, as Vice President of the country, you get to gin up support for wars against your clients, shovel no-bid contracts to your former company, and build secret detention centers to sequester your opponents when things get out of hand. And you never have to answer to anybody, and make millions on all of it. What a gig!
Feel sick yet?
Well, don’t. If none of this is worthy of coverage by the mainstream media, then clearly, it’s not important.
Here are the top 25 headlines. Read the Project Censored report for the full stories.
Happy Thanksgiving everybody!
–C#1 Future of Internet Debate Ignored by Media
#2 Halliburton Charged with Selling Nuclear Technologies to Iran
#3 Oceans of the World in Extreme Danger
#4 Hunger and Homelessness Increasing in the US
#5 High-Tech Genocide in Congo
#6 Federal Whistleblower Protection in Jeopardy
#7 US Operatives Torture Detainees to Death in Afghanistan and Iraq
#8 Pentagon Exempt from Freedom of Information Act
#9 The World Bank Funds Israel-Palestine Wall
#10 Expanded Air War in Iraq Kills More Civilians
#11 Dangers of Genetically Modified Food Confirmed
#12 Pentagon Plans to Build New Landmines
#13 New Evidence Establishes Dangers of Roundup
#14 Homeland Security Contracts KBR to Build Detention Centers in the US
#15 Chemical Industry is EPA’s Primary Research Partner
#16 Ecuador and Mexico Defy US on International Criminal Court
#17 Iraq Invasion Promotes OPEC Agenda
#18 Physicist Challenges Official 9-11 Story
#19 Destruction of Rainforests Worst Ever
#20 Bottled Water: A Global Environmental Problem
#21 Gold Mining Threatens Ancient Andean Glaciers
#22 $Billions in Homeland Security Spending Undisclosed
#23 US Oil Targets Kyoto in Europe
#24 Cheney’s Halliburton Stock Rose Over 3000 Percent Last Year
#25 US Military in Paraguay Threatens Region