Interviews Available    P.M. Wednesday, July 26, 2000

                 BIG OIL GREASING POLITICS?

WENONAH HAUTER, whauter@citizen.org, www.citizen.org
Director of Public Citizen’s Critical Mass Energy Project, Hauter said
today: “High prices at the gas pump have translated into windfalls for
oil
companies, which saw first-quarter profits in 2000 rise nearly 500
percent
over the same period in 1999. Oil companies are ripping off the public
and
picking consumers' pocketbooks clean… After the Gulf War, Dick Cheney
turned around and joined the major energy service provider Halliburton
Co.,
the company that got the contract to clean up the mess in Kuwait after
the
war. No doubt the oil industry, which has already given George W. Bush
$1.5 million, has given its seal of approval to Cheney.”

RANIA MASRI, rmasri@ncsu.edu, www.iraqaction.org
Coordinator for the Iraq Action Coalition, Masri said today: “During
the
buildup to the Gulf War, Cheney convinced the Saudis to allow in half a
million U.S. troops by showing them satellite pictures that allegedly
showed Iraqi troops massing at the Saudi border. Florida’s St.
Petersburg
Times later reported that Soviet commercial satellite photos showed
there
was no such Iraqi buildup. This indicates that Cheney lied in order to
have Saudi Arabia as a base from which to attack Iraq.... Cheney also
stated that every Iraqi target was ‘perfectly legitimate,’ adding, ‘If
I
had to do it over again, I would do exactly the same thing.’ So, he
would
bomb the Ameriyah shelter in Baghdad again, the waste-water treatment
facilities, electrical power stations, and other necessities in civil
infrastructure?”

REAR ADMIRAL EUGENE CARROLL, USN (ret.), ecarroll@cdi.org, www.cdi.org

Director of the Center for Defense Information, Carroll said today: “As
Secretary of Defense, Cheney actually brought a certain amount of rigor
and oversight to the military; he wasn't just going to give them
whatever
they wanted and then some, as previous Secretaries of Defense had done.
But Cheney’s ties to the oil industry make me concerned that he’ll put
the
well-being of that industry ahead of the long-term security interests
of
this country. We ought to be investing billions being dumped into the
military systems into scientific research for alternative and renewable
energy.”

PRATAP CHATTERJEE, pchatterjee@igc.org, www.corpwatch.org

An investigative journalist who covers the oil industry, Chatterjee
said
today: “George W. Bush has made millions running shady oil businesses
into
the ground in Texas and has allowed big business to keep Texas the most
polluted state in the country… As Secretary of Defense under President
Bush, Dick Cheney privatized the U.S. military’s logistical support
facilities to companies like Brown & Root, allowing them to profit
handsomely off hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts for support
operations from Kuwait to Somalia. Today as he walks away from his job
as
chief executive of Halliburton, the parent company of Brown & Root, he
has
personally pocketed $5.1 million... He also walks away from creating
the
world’s largest oil services company that has built polluting
facilities
from Nigeria to Siberia… Ken Lay, the chief executive of Enron
Corporation, is the biggest funder of George W. Bush over his political
career… Al Gore is a major shareholder in the Occidental oil
corporation,
which is stealing land from indigenous communities in Colombia and
desecrating Native American burial sites in California.”

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020 or (202) 332-5055; David Zupan, (541)
484-9167