The 'Hunt' Oil Deal Nobody Wants to Talk About

[Purveyor]

Ever since the President's Global War on Terror revved up and Iraq was invaded, Hunt Refining has quietly reaped major rewards. In addition to its Pentagon connections, Hunt Refining, too, has tight ties to President Bush.

by Nick Turse
(Tom Dispatch)

For years, "oil" and "Iraq" couldn't make it into the same sentence in mainstream coverage of the invasion and occupation of that country. Recently, that's begun to change, but "oil" and "the Pentagon" still seldom make the news together.

Last year, for instance, according to Department of Defense (DoD) documents, the Pentagon paid more than $70 million to Hunt Refining, an oil company whose corporate affiliate, Hunt Oil, undermined U.S. policy in Iraq. Not that anyone would know it. While the hunt for oil in Iraq is now being increasingly well covered in the mainstream, the Pentagon's hunt for oil remains a subject missing in action. Despite the staggering levels at which the Pentagon guzzles fuel, it's a chronic blind spot in media energy coverage.

Let's consider the Hunt Oil story in a little more detail, since it offers a striking example of the larger problem. On July 3, 2008, according to the New York Times, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform found that Hunt Oil had pursued "an oil deal with the regional Kurdistan government that ran counter to American policy and undercut Iraq's central government." Despite its officially stated policy of warning companies like Hunt Oil "that they incur risks in signing contracts until Iraq passes an oil law," the State Department in some cases actually encouraged a deal between the "Texas oil company with close ties to President Bush" and Kurdistan that "undercut" Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government in Baghdad.

Asked if the White House was aware of Hunt Oil's negotiations with Kurdistan's largely autonomous regional government, President Bush's press secretary Dana Perino replied, "I don't know of anybody who was aware of it."

It turns out that wasn't exactly the truth of the matter. The Times noted that the company's chief executive, "Ray L. Hunt, a close political ally of President Bush, briefed on his contacts with Kurdish officials before the deal was signed." In fact, in a July 2nd letter, Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman told Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: "Documents obtained by the Committee indicate that contrary to the denials of Administration officials, advisors to the President and officials in the State and Commerce Departments knew about Hunt Oil's interest in the Kurdish region months before the contract was executed."

For the Times, however, the hunt for the story ended with Hunt Oil. No attention was paid to its corporate twin, Hunt Refining, with its own major financial ties to the Pentagon, the President, and the U.S. occupation forces in Iraq. This despite the fact that the company proudly promotes itself as "a significant supplier of jet fuel to the U.S. Department of Defense" in the Southeastern United States.

And why not be proud? Ever since the President's Global War on Terror revved up and Iraq was invaded, Hunt Refining has quietly reaped major rewards. While the company was a defense contractor back in the 1990s, according to DoD documents, Hunt did not receive any funds from the Pentagon in 2000 or 2001. From 2002-2004, however, the company began garnering contracts and collected an average of just over $15.5 million a year. And only then did the good times begin to roll. In the last three years, records show that Hunt has taken in increasingly larger sums of taxpayer dollars from the Pentagon -- $39.6 million in 2005, $52.2 million in 2006, and, in 2007, a whopping $70 million. (Hunt Refining did not return telephone or email messages seeking comment for this article.)

Hunt's largest 2007 Pentagon contract was for the delivery of both aviation turbine fuel and JP-8 jet fuel -- the latter a product used by the Army and Air Force that is very similar to commercial jet fuel. That deal was awarded just months before Hunt Refining and its affiliate Hunt Southland Refining agreed, according to Department of Justice documents, "to pay a $400,000 civil penalty and spend more than $48.5 million for new and upgraded pollution controls at three refineries" as part of a settlement to resolve "alleged violations of the Clean Air Act."

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