With Sunday's announcement of its headquarters relocation to Dubai, Halliburton completed its transformation from mere war-profiteer to corporate traitor. The motivations for the move are simple: death and taxes. Shifting its corporate headquarters not only allows Halliburton to shaft American taxpayers. It enables Dick Cheney's old firm to comfortably expand its large and growing business with Iran and other declared terrorist enemies of the United States.
The company, which raked in $2.3 billion in profits on revenue of $22.6 billion in 2006, offered up the standard boilerplate in explaining its exodus to Dubai:

"The opening of a headquarters in Dubai is the next step in a strategic plan announced in 2006 to focus on expanding its customer relations with national oil companies while concentrating more of the company's investments and resources in growing its business in the Eastern Hemisphere."

Halliburton CEO David Lesar portrayed the historic abandonment of the company's Houston HQ and its Delaware incorporation as business as usual. "I will continue," Lesar noted, "to spend quite a bit of time in an airplane as I remain attentive to our customers." Sadly for the United States, those customers will increasingly be found in places like Tehran, Damascus and Khartoum.
In November 2004, Forbes ("Trading with the Enemy") provided a glimpse into the dark world of dirty deals and re-exports in Dubai and the UAE by unaccountable foreign subsidiaries of American firms such as Halliburton:

No matter how hard the U.S. tries to keep dual-use commodities like gas monitors, software and nuclear triggers out of transshipment hubs like Dubai, stuff gets through. The lure is quick profits. Traders easily pocket 40% markups just by flipping goods, illicit and otherwise.
The open secret is that Dubai buys far more than it keeps. More than a quarter of its $23 billion in annual nonoil imports are reexported, and Iran gets the biggest share. Interviews with private businesspeople and U.S. officials, along with court documents, reveal a simple scheme. Companies located around the world sell goods--from cigarettes to medical devices and PCs--to buyers in the U.A.E. Dubai traders repackage the items and send them along by air or ship to agents in, say, Tehran, Pyongyang, Damascus or Islamabad.

And as I documented just two week ago, Halliburton has been very successful indeed in using its foreign subsidiaries to skirt U.S. laws banning trade and investment with Iran.
In 2004, the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes detailed the Iranian business dealings of Cheney's former company, Halliburton. Despite the prohibitions signed into law by President Clinton with his 1995 executive order and the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act of 1996, Halliburton continued to reap the profits of business with Iran through its non-U.S. subsidiaries. While U.S. law bans virtually all commerce with the rogue nations, Halliburton was able to jump through its major loophole: the rules do not apply to any foreign or offshore subsidiary so long as it is run by non-Americans. As CBS documented:

That subsidiary, Halliburton Products and Services, Ltd., is wholly owned by the U.S.-based Halliburton and is registered in a building in the capital of the Cayman Islands -- a building owned by the local Calidonian Bank. Halliburton and other companies set up in this Caribbean Island, because of tax and secrecy laws that are corporate friendly.
Halliburton is the company that Vice President Dick Cheney used to run. He was CEO from 1995 to 2000, during which time Halliburton Products and Services set up shop in Iran. Today, it sells about $40 million a year worth of oil field services to the Iranian government.

Halliburton has earned over $20 billion in contracts for the Iraq war. But even as the company is being investigated over $2.7 billion in waste and fraudulent charges to American taxpayers, Cheney's old firm looks to expand its business with another member of President Bush's "axis of evil," Iran. It's no wonder that Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy fumed that, "This is an insult to the U.S. soldiers and taxpayers who paid the tab for their no-bid contracts and endured their overcharges for all these years."
For Dick Cheney and his colleagues at Halliburton, it's just good business. In 2002, Vice President Cheney described Iran as "the world's leading exporter of terror." But as Halliburton CEO, Cheney was a fervent foe of President Clinton's sanctions against the regime in Tehran. In 1998, he complained that his company was being "cut out of the action." And back in 1996, Cheney railed against the Clinton prohibitions on Iranian trade and financial activity for American firms:

"We seem to be sanction-happy as a government. The problem is that the good Lord didn't see fit to always put oil and gas resources where there are democratic governments."

Vice President Cheney will be untroubled Pat Leahy's complaints about the Benedict Arnolds at Halliburton. After all, in 2004 Cheney told Leahy to "go f**k yourself" on the Senate floor.
Now, Halliburton is sending Cheney's message to all of the American people.