Now that Muammar el-Qaddafi is no longer on the Bush hit list, Big Oil have been crawling up his backside to line up lucrative contracts for Libya’s vast oil fields. And since Libya is on the hook for millions of dollar in reparations from years of terrorist attacks, Big Oil and the Bushies are lobbying Congress to exempt their new best friend from payments to the victims of those attacks.
The law allows victims of state-sponsored terrorism to collect court judgments by seizing foreign assets in the United States or money from those governments held by American companies doing business with them. If Libya loses a half-dozen court cases still pending, $3 billion to $6 billion could be at stake, according to lawyers’ estimates.
Among the victims pressing for Libya to pay up are 37 American soldiers wounded in the bombing of a Berlin disco in 1986. But we know who the real victims are, don’t we?: the poor, disadvantaged oil companies.
A battalion of top oil industry executives — from companies including ConocoPhillips, Hess, Occidental and Marathon Oil —have been making the rounds on Capitol Hill, focusing on members from refinery-rich Texas, according to two lobbyists who attended the gatherings. ExxonMobil, Chevron and Dow Chemical also support the effort, participants said.
Representatives of the oil companies say that victims of terrorism are entitled to appropriate compensation but that the law threatens to disrupt commerce that the United States is trying to encourage.
Poor little oil companies. Everyone is always picking on them.
One oil industry lobbyist, speaking privately, conceded that getting Congress to change the law would be a hard sell.
“As an oil company we can never win,” said the lobbyist, who asked not to be identified because the companies had agreed not to discuss the lobbying campaign publicly. “It is always going to seem that we care more about oil than the blood of victims of terrorism, even if that is not the case.”
Hard to imagine why anyone could possibly arrive at such a ludicrous notion, isn’t it?
4 Comments
April 22, 2008 at 1:41 pm
Super find gummitch… speaks the lie to the ‘War on Terror’. How many Amurkans remember that Adolf Cheney lobbied hard to be able to do business in Iran during the Clinton years and Cheney-led Halliburton shipped dual-use nuclear research materials to Iran during the 90s through a subsidiary, in violation of US sanctions? Answer, almost nobody, especially in the corporate media, the so-called-librul-media….
Government of the people, by the corporations for the corporations….. that’s fascism there, Benito.
April 22, 2008 at 3:36 pm
Read somewhere today that Parague (sp) voted in a new pres…For the first time in 61 year’s they voted out the conservative’’s…..Hummm….
Wonder if bull shit bush and pappy know about this and what do they think? Dare I hope when they move there they may be jailed for life, property confiscated, all asset’s seized maybe a little water boarding just for fun…Dare to hope for justice..Blessings and please forgive me for being off the broom…
April 22, 2008 at 4:34 pm
Two words
Exxon Valdez.
April 22, 2008 at 10:15 pm
Witch1, we can only dream of such justice.
I can’t believe that this has been going on since 1986–goddamnit, I hate the effing oil companies!
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