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This must not slip down the memory hole.

WASHINGTON A Pentagon e-mail said that Vice President Dick Cheney coordinated a huge Halliburton government contract for Iraq, Time reported Monday, despite Cheney's denial of interest in the company, which he ran until 2000.

The March 5, 2003, e-mail, from an official of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, said that a top Pentagon official, Douglas Feith, got the job of shepherding the contract, according to the latest edition of the weekly magazine.

Feith approved the multibillion-dollar deal "contingent on informing WH tomorrow," the e-mail said, referring to the White House. "We anticipate no issues since action has been coordinated" with the "VP's office," it added, referring to Cheney's office. The e-mail was obtained by Time.

The newsweekly said that Halliburton won the contract three days later, and that no other bids were submitted.

"As vice president, I have absolutely no influence of, involvement of, knowledge of in any way, shape or form of contracts led by the Corps of Engineers or anybody else in the federal government," Cheney told NBC's "Meet the Press" in September, Time reported.

Cheney had been Halliburton's chief executive until 2000, when he accepted the vice presidential spot.

Cheney's spokesman, Kevin Kellems, told the magazine that since 2000, the vice president had "played no role whatsoever in government-contract decisions involving Halliburton."

The e-mail was sent "in anticipation of controversy over the award of a sole-source contract to Halliburton," a Pentagon spokesman said, adding, "We wanted to give the vice president's staff a heads-up."

Douglas Feith, under secretary of defense for policy, was handed the job of coordinating the contract by his boss, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Time said.

Feith, Wolfowitz and Cheney, along with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, are the key Bush administration "hawks" who pushed for war in Iraq.

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