Dick Cheney: Wanted for Bribery

/23 Comments/in /by

Nigeria has made it official. Today, it charged Dick Cheney with 16 bribery-related charges.

While that’s not unexpected, I’m amused by Dick Cheney’s Defense-Attorney-on-Call Terry O’Donnell’s response to the charges:

Mr Cheney’s lawyer, Terence O’Donnell, said US investigators had “found no suggestion of any impropriety by Dick Cheney in his role of CEO of Halliburton”.

“Any suggestion of misconduct on his part, made now, years later, is entirely baseless,” Mr O’Donnell said.

O’Donnell suggests that because the US conducted its own investigation–mostly during a period when Cheney remained the most powerful man in government and when DOJ was clearly politicized–then Nigeria should be unable to do so, too.

Particularly given Mary’s very intriguing post about competing jurisdictions and missing millions in Switzerland, I find that response particularly notable.

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23 replies
  2. lakeeffectsnow says:

    i volunteer to rendition vietnam war draft evader and gout ridden dick to Nigeria, no charge.

    hell, i’ll even toss in 183 waterboardings for free if they would like that also.

    • bmaz says:

      If you can assist me with the large inheritance I have received from my sister, by sending me your personal banking data so that I may partner with you in settling the estate, for which I will share with you more that $1,000,000 US dollar units, I will gladly also inform you of our Nigerian extradition compact provisions!

  5. rosalind says:

    as things are slow, needing a laugh i found one over at boing boing: “Pundit calls for development of magical anti-Wikileaks computer virus”

    It’s hard to even begin to summarize coverage on Wikileaks-related stuff today. But if you read one thing, read Marc Thiessen’s fresh item at the Washington Post…It all gives me this vision of Thiessen dreaming about single-handedly stopping Wikileaks by typing “OVERRIDE PASSWORD” into Julian Assange’s laptop, then hitting the delete button after a stern British female voice declares “ACCESS GRANTED.” Then there is a tense moment as a glowing neon blue progress bar slowly deletes Wikileaks, but will it finish before Julian returns from the virtual reality cyber conference with George Soros where they are laughing about having just gotten an oblivious Julian Sands thrown in jail?

    favorite comment, #23: “I type the magical password “PATRIOT ACT” and I have control of the banks ….Oh wait, it’s true.”

  6. R.H. Green says:

    “Suggestion of misconduct”

    You gotta love the nostalga for that quaint notion of innocent until proven guilty, which renders indictments as mere suggestion in the mind of prosecutors. While there is little of note in this alone, comming on behalf of Mr 1%, it’s really a laugh.

    PS. For Interpol watchers, this case involes an actual indictment.

    • liberaldem says:

      While it will never happen, isn’t there something delicious about the thought of Darth Cheney sweating in a Nigerian jail?

  7. Petrocelli says:

    Who knew that Cheney might be done in by irony overload ?

    Nigeria thumbs its Nose at every “Civilized” country and presses charges against PapaDick. Nigeria should get the Nobel Peace Prize, if they manage to prosecute him.

  9. fatster says:

    O/T.

    Judge gives Assange’s lawyers a window to test sex assault case

    “This scenario, senior legal sources in London told the Herald, is the ”big fear … that if he is extradited they will send him to America and he will disappear”.’ [emphasis added]

    LINK.

    • NCDem says:

      After watching the rage with which our State Department has pursued Assange and created problems by strong arming corporations like PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, and even Swiss Banks, you have to wonder why the Obama administration would ever bother with compromising with Republicans on tax cuts.

      Back to the $130 million supposedly in a Swiss Bank. I’ll venture to guess that it was used by Cheney to buy the “best government available” in Afghanistan for a small 10% finders fee on all the skimmed money from US contracts in the longest war in US history.

  10. JohnLopresti says:

    The interesting parts of M*s elaboration about the affair involved the sidelining of $MM*s.

    Reading ew*s news of progress in the matter, and keeping in mind the lax environmental regulations in some of these areas which have longterm unrest because indigenous peoples object to extractive industries* imperious practices, plus the diminutiveness of those countries* voices in global efforts like Kyoto, Toronto, Rio, Copenhagen, Cancun; I thought to look at the archive at EDF. Much of their material often is dated, products issued by IMF, World Bank, stultifyingly obscure studies which barely paper over the sorts of business practices that would have a quite different appearance if licensed on US territory. However, from this search resulted a few such reports, all of these barely mention Nigeria, although it appears at the margins; consider:

    forests 1.7MB filesize; 130pp.; date 2005; in English; authorship Amazon Institute for Environmental Research;

    oil business practices in Africa; several studies mention places like Togo, but nothing much about Nigeria there; 7 pp, 70KB;

    WorldBank 2003;53pp, 2.2MB; look at displaced populations;

    oilcos, bribes, Africa 20pp, 1.8MB; publication date not clearly stated, likely sometime after Y2K.

  11. BoxTurtle says:

    I firmly believe Dick Cheney is innocent of the charges. Dick would NEVER resort to bribery if he could use extortion.

    Boxturtle (I gotta believe that even at the time, Darth could exert pressure in Nigeria)

  13. YYSyd says:

    How is it that Royal Dutch Shell, who apparently run Nigeria, or at the very least have a finger in every pie, decided to charge Cheney? This is too wierd.

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