According to Newsweek, the owner of the ranch where VP Dick Cheney sprayed Harry Whittington with birdshot is Anne Armstrong, GOP big hitter and onetime ambassador to the Court of St. James. She is also a former member of the Halliburton board that picked Cheney to be CEO. (She was also mentioned as a possible vice president for Gerald Ford.)
Armstrong's daughter Katharine was in the hunting party and according to her resume at one time she worked for Senator John Tower and in the Nixon White House. She was appointed by Gov. George W. Bush in 1999 to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission and was named its Chairman in 2001. She now has her own consulting firm specializing in corporate affairs and government relations at state and national levels.
Another member of the hunting party, U. S. Ambassador to Switzerland Pamela Willeford also has interesting connections. Her brother-in-law, Lewis Lucke, is the recently appointed U. S. Ambassador to the Kingdom of Swaziland. From November 2002 to February of 2004 Lucke was Deputy Assistant Administrator of USAID in Iraq.
USAID, under the Bush administration's faith-based funding initiative, has been giving significant financial support to several high-powered U.S.-based Christian evangelical organizations that are focusing on Africa. And here we thought the faith-based program was to benefit the needy in our country, not to convert Africans. Silly us.
During his stint with USAID in Iraq, Lucke headquartered in the Iraqi Republican Guard Palace in Baghdad while coordinating reconstruction efforts. Of course one company who received huge multi-billion reconstruction contracts was Halliburton. Surprise, surprise.
Could the real reason for the secrecy surrounding this hunting party incident be that Cheney and the Bush administration didn't want anyone snooping into these relationships?
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