Nigeria will file charges against former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney and officials from Halliburton Co. and four other companies in a bribery case involving $180 million. It is rather ironic that Cheney can go around bragging about torturing people, but will be charged criminally with a bribe in Nigeria. I will be discussing this and the Wikileaks case tonight on Countdown.
Godwin Obla, prosecuting counsel at the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, said the indictment will likely come in a matter of days. The arrest warrant for Cheney will issue from Interpol.
Cheney was CEO from 1995 to 2000. Nigeria has already arrested roughly two dozen people from Halliburton, Saipem, Technip and a former subsidiary of Panalpina Welttransport Holding AG in connection with alleged illegal payments to Nigerian officials.
At issue in this case is $180 million in bribes allegedly made to secure a $6 billion liquefied natural-gas contract.
Source: Bloomberg
An Interpol warrant would create a bit of a problem for the Obama Administration, which is pushing for the arrest of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Sweden released a warrant this week against Assange and Interpol added him to its most wanted list.
Source: Bloomberg
Jonathan Turley
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/17/dick-cheney-nigeria-bribe_0_n_798444.html
Plea deal, charges dropped, details not disclosed. What a surprise… Merry Christmas, Dick.
Nate, “P.S. Have tried staying away from this place but the open and welcoming atmosphere…”
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As Don Michael Corleone would say “…they pull me back in.”
If you haven’t already, go to the ABA site and vote for Turlyblawg as the best opinion oriented (IMHO category) law blawg: (she said, strumpeting for another vote) Sign up is easy but you do have to sign up.
http://www.abajournal.com/blawg100/2010/imho
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPw-3e_pzqU&fs=1&hl=en_US]
Wow, Lottakatz, just… wow.
Yeah, I don’t quite feel what you do because whether it’s just me and for me or whether it’s true for all and always, I cannot say. But I do know that for me, life is infinitely good. So much so that even the ashes of my dreams form themselves into the reality I dream of. So yeah, I get ashes on rare occasions, and I cry on rarer occasions still (for sadness, often – for happiness), but there you have it.
Now that I think about it, it obviously isn’t so for all. But life is what it is, and I both love it and believe in it.
Have been thinking hard about posting this… it’s not relevant to the thread, but it might have value somewhere, if only for a 3rd party perspective…
Life takes care itself, at least in my own little world.
P.S. Have tried staying away from this place but the open and welcoming atmosphere coupled with the overall brilliance makes it nearly impossible.
I have been listening to the Grateful Dead version of “The Twilight Zone” theme and this popped into my mind.
It’s an imperfect simile but it kind of works because once yo reach the outer limit, that place just becomes the departure point for the next leg of the journey:
(As instructed n another thread I’l try the embed code again)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lML2j_hNAI&fs=1&hl=en_US]
anon nurse: “lottakatz, …your 10:40 pm comment is my favorite one on the blog tonight. It says “Welcome to my world” like no other. The “Network” clip is the perfect capper…
Sometimes, I swear to god, I feel like I’ve entered “The Twilight Zone.”
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Why thank you, one can’t ever go wrong with that particular posting from Network though, it elevates any posting it punctuates 🙂
True story; the first time Network was shown on TV when Howard Beal did his “Got to the window…” speech I heard a couple of voices from the street holler “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” A couple of people in he neighborhood actually did it. Maybe they were inventing ‘performance art, maybe they were stoned and it just seemed like a good idea, maybe they were just royally pi$$ed off; it was a very odd moment though and I did restrain myself from joining them though I did consider doing so in the spirit of conviviality 🙂
“Welcome to my world”. It’s a dark and paranoid place on more occasions than I would like but when it’s not really paranoia but more akin to prescience it puts me in a really bad mood and that’s something I’ve been giving a bit of thought to lately and flows into the Twilight Zone reference.
(Warning, serious blather beyond this point.)
Many of us have used “Twilight Zone” as a reference for what we see happening around us but I think that we are actually talking about something else that we don’t have an apt metaphor or simile for. Some of the discussions regarding science fiction of specific genres gets close though. Dystopian Sci-fi and cyberpunk is an appropriate point of departure though.
As an example, the cyberpunk/cyberwar world of William Gibson (Neuromancer, early 80’s) is being played out as we watch the relentless attacks on Wikileaks. There have been other reports of various takedowns and attacks on computer systems but we’re watching this one play out real time and on other threads, updating each other on the elusive and temporary whereabouts of this cyber-entity as it eludes the cyber-assassins that are trying to kill it. How extraordinary is that?
A-freaking-amazing and not, NOT, an alien concept or news to most people at this blawg yet, with this exercise, I feel a line has been publicly crossed. We can point to this (and probably the recent discord in Iran where their government used the same tactics)and say that the future (at least on this front) is here. There is no going back.
So many of the things we are seeing happen right around us today we read about years ago, we’ve just been waiting for the real world to come into synch. 1984 isn’t a book, it’s the system of governance we live under right now. The gloves haven’t come off completely but they will. Since the most odious aspects of that reality are hushed up with the enforced silence of making any discussion of your abuse at the hands of the authorities a crime (read FBI National Security Letters here) the true extent will not be known for some time, if ever.
We read, we see reports, we watch the news, we ferret out little bits of information and squirrel them away in our heads and start a dot string unconsciously. At some point we read something or see something and we know where those dots are going to lead. It’s like second sight and anyone with a brain does it without even thinking. The brain categorizes as a default.
Then a week or month or year or 2 or 20 after we open that mental file and by default start putting bits of information into it, it’s here in the flesh and most of us, while horrified, aren’t surprised. My happiest new reading moments are moments when I see a headline and go ‘Fu(k me! I NEVER saw That coming! WoW!
I don’t know what to call it. It’s a bizarro Memento. It’s the reverse image of the memory loss in that movie. It is the feeling of Deja Vu, all over again 🙂 It’s disconcerting and kind of unsettling that the instances of this feeling seem to me to occur with greater frequency. That means that I’m not projecting very far or that the world is moving faster to get to the end of the dot-strings than it had previously.
It’s unsettling me. I’m not the brightest crayon in the box but I’m not the least bright either- and on a blawg like this where I respect the fact that many, if not most, participants have far more education and specialized expertise than I do, most here do not seem to evidence the trepidation I have regarding where we go from here. I feel as if I’m not handling it as well as my playmates and that gives me pause.
I have to wonder if my lessening ability to stay ahead of the pace of these changes is a personal failing, an illness of the soul or mind. It feels as if the culture is moving now, publicly, at lightning speed into a vortex of oppression and corruption so pervasive it is almost a physical, living thing. I can’t even keep abreast of it. I can’t even name it for what it feels like.
Cultural dissonance? No, not quite. Twilight Zone? No. It’s like one of those movies (Groundhog Day)about reliving the same time frame over and over but the time frame is something you projected, a future and not the past.
Perhaps being able to predict the future, even in a small and pitiful way just makes you nuts. Like those old horror stories where ‘the secrets’ are revealed to the protagonist and renders him (it’s always a ‘him’) mad because there are just some thing man (and it’s always ‘man’) are not meant to know 🙂
I need to find a good word to describe it. I also need to get to bed earlier. I tend to turn into a mental ruminant around 3:00 AM and innocent postings just set me off on long rants. 🙂