Time for your Two Minutes Hate (or, in this case, your Eight Years Hate).

If Cheney's sweating probes of the Bush-Cheney Era, this is a good time to dredge up the Kazakhstan bribery intrigue.

Amid all the bonus talk and other financial news, some people are still wondering why Dick Cheney chose this month to throw acid in Barack Obama's face on CNN.

As always, follow the money.

Yes, Time's Bobby Ghosh has a valid reason for ruminating:

Yes, yes, yes, torture, torture, torture. But maybe we can also look at the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), under which several probes of alleged U.S. corporate bribery overseas are proceeding with little publicity. Some of the cases began during the Bush regime; others predate it. It's for sure that the Bush-Cheney people weren't exactly eager to pursue many, if any, of them.

FCPA Blog has a nice little roundup — "Unfinished Business" — of some of the probes (including one in which the government is calling out Avon's business practices in China).

But the one I'm thinking of is the long-delayed U.S. v. Giffen, a bribery case swirling around oil-rich Kazakhstan that I wrote about several years ago because of its possible connection to Cheney and/or other U.S. government officials.

There's a murky Cheney angle regarding Kazakhstan (so murky that we don't know if he has a direct connection to Giffen's alleged wrongdoing).

FCPA Blog explains the Giffen case succinctly at the tail end of its roundup:

Remember that before Cheney was "chosen" by George W. Bush to run the panel to select Dubya's running mate in 2000 (Cheney, as we know, selected himself), he was Halliburton's CEO.

And during his Halliburton tenure, Cheney was a member of a board of Western oilmen appointed as "advisers" to Kazakhstan strongman Nursultan Nazarbayev. They were all jockeying to drill in Kazakhstan. Exactly what else Cheney and these other advisers were doing to make deals with the corrupt Nazarbayev is unknown.

But Jim Giffen, meanwhile, was a key middleman between Nazarbayev and the oil companies, and we know what he's accused of: shuttling bribes between Nazarbayev and one or more Western oil companies.

The case has been long delayed, in part because Giffen's claim that he was actually a sort of a double agent on behalf of the U.S. government. Subsequent attempts by his lawyers to get at CIA records failed, and the case has stayed buried on court calendars. So now FCPA Blog is saying there's movement at last on the case. Hmmm.

Now, it's not as simple as saying that there's a direct tie between Cheney and Giffen from those days or that Cheney is accused of any wrongdoing. We don't know because the case has been buried on court calendars.

But as veep, Cheney continued to have friendly relations with dictator Nazarbayev. See Alec Appelbaum's Eurasianet backgrounder in 2003 for details. That piece, "WILL GIFFEN NAME NAMES IN KAZAKHSTAN CORRUPTION CASE?" was referring to names of U.S. business people who might be involved in the schemes.

No one paid attention to Appelbaum's story at the time — it was published on April 2, 2003, just as we were conquering Iraq.

Veteran oil-politics prober Ken Silverstein has done admirable work on the Giffen case, too, including this L.A. Times piece from 2004, "Oil Adds Sheen to Kazakh Regime."

Still following the case is Steve LeVine, who, when he was with the Wall Street Journal, got a book out of the Kazakh intrigue and other Central Asia tomfoolery, The Oil and the Glory. More to the point, see LeVine's September 2008 Business Week story on the Giffen case, "The CIA, Secretiveness and Jim Giffen's Gamble."

It's not that these stories focus one bit or even mention Cheney's role as a former adviser to the more-than-shady Nazarbayev — though it's incontrovertible that Cheney served on the dictator's "advisory panel" before he became vice-president. But it's worth wondering whether Cheney was in any way involved in this particular case of international intrigue that bubbled under the surface all through the Bush-Cheney regime's rule. Or whether the case, which bridged the Clinton and Bush eras, would have been pursued with more alacrity if Bush-Cheney hadn't been directing John Ashcroft's Justice Department and Big Oil hadn't had the run of the White House.

Cheney, after all, was always thinking about bidness and going "where the oil is," no matter the consequences or, in particular, the volatility of Central Asia, as he told his fellow oilmen in 1998. Now, he could/might/may be also worried about other probes of matters other than his flouting of the Constitution.