while the pugs LIE about dems' cutting defense/intel spending, THIS doesn't get much traction outside the dark dungeons of liberal websites:
Yet even while he was making war on Iraq, Cheney was carrying out
the largest peacetime military-force reduction in history. By the time he left office in 1993, he had cut America's armed forces by half a million men and women. !!!!!!
Key to this massive downsizing was hiring out traditional military jobs to companies like Brown and Root. Under Cheney, the Pentagon paid Brown and Root $8.9 million in 1992 for two studies on how this might be done. Shortly after that, the company won an exclusive worldwide contract for military logistical support, everything from runways to toilets, hamburgers, and laundry service—the first such contract ever given to a civilian group. In Blackhawk Down-era Somalia in 1993, Brown and Root had such a large U.S. Army support contract that it briefly became the largest employer in Africa. In 1996 fully 13 percent of the $1.9 billion budgeted by the Pentagon for Bosnia went to Brown and Root.
But by then Cheney was no longer working for the government: He was running Brown and Root, having taken a job in October 1995 as chairman of the board and CEO of Halliburton, whose Brown and Root subsidiary accounted for about a third of its revenue. (He had tested the waters for a run at the 1996 Republican presidential nomination but managed to raise only $1 million of the $20 million he thought he would need to win.) On paper, Halliburton and Cheney were a perfect match. The company's hard-boiled, ultraconservative Texas-based culture had spread itself throughout a world in which Dick Cheney was well known, if not always revered: More than 40 percent of Halliburton's revenues came from overseas, much of it from Arab nations and nations of the old Soviet bloc. "He would be able to open doors around the world and to have access practically anywhere," says Thomas H. Cruikshank, the former chairman of Halliburton who hired Cheney. "There was a lot that he could bring in the way of customer relationships." Cheney had never run a business before. But that's not what Halliburton's overseers wanted. They wanted a rainmaker.
http://legalpr.com/fredbaronoct02texasmonthly.htmlfunny how none of this gets brought up in the liberal media
WHY don't the dems answer back with THIS......EVERY time they mention Kerry's supposed weakness on defense????
this is a SCATHING fricking article about Cheney, BTW, actually concentrating on his UNETHICAL/ILLEGAL activities while head of