CHENEY

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NO MERRI

mahdi

cheney secdef 1990 got b41 to go after saddam in kuwait b/c of oil; aei kazakstan caspian pipeline operated by chevron, hallib built refineries Tengiz; azerbajan --> hallib ceo oct 1995 (he had good rel w/ saudis as secdef] 1994-2001 rev up 127%

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zeteo

the ‘Prince of Darkness’ is gone.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney died at the age of 84 on Monday, his family said, surrounded by his wife and daughters.

Like fellow war criminal Slobodan Milošević, Cheney should have died alone in a prison cell at The Hague. But, like the rest of the gang behind the invasion of Iraq (George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Donald Rumsfeld, et al.), Cheney never faced any legal or even political accountability for his war crimes over the past two decades. In recent years, he even became a hero in some liberal and Democratic Party circles after denouncing Donald Trump and endorsing Kamala Harris for president.

Yet the Bush-Cheney administration, between 2000 and 2008, was one of the worst in American history, overseeing skyrocketing deficits and tax cuts for the rich, the abuse of executive power and politicization of the Justice Department, the Hurricane Katrina debacle, and, of course, the global financial crisis.

Upgrade to paid

But it was the so-called “War on Terror” and the illegal invasion of Iraq, based on lies about “weapons of mass destruction,” that Cheney must be remembered for. It was Dick, more than Dubya, who was the driving force behind one of the bloodiest wars of the 21st century. Cheney was a hawkish ideologue – one of the most belligerent politicians of our lifetimes, despite dodging the Vietnam draft on multiple occasions (“I later saidhad other priorities in the sixties than military service,” he ). It was Dick, more than Dubya, who was also the unapologetic architect of America’s post-9/11 torture regime.

It is difficult to quantify just how many people are dead because of Cheney. Thousands? Hundreds of thousands? Millions? The legacy media won’t tell us. They will likely engage in hagiography when it comes to covering his death because that is what the legacy media does when the powerful pass away. Reputations are laundered; careers are whitewashed; crimes are ignored.

Let us remember who Richard Bruce Cheney really was.

Below are 10 quotes from the former vice president that should define his horrific, blood-stained legacy: a litany of shameless lies and false predictions, as well as a total lack of regret or contrition......

joe msnbc prez hist patriot, not party killed iran-contra

11 25

Dick Cheney, whom CNN calls "America's most powerful modern vice president and chief architect of the 'war on terrror,'" has died at the age of 84 due to complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease — and MAGA faithful aren't shedding any tears.

Cheney was a polarizing figure who served alongside Republican President George W. Bush for two terms between 2001 and 2009, but it wasn't until he cast his final vote in the presidential election for Democrat Kamala Harris that he really divided people in his own party.

Cheney's vote for Harris was, CNN says, "a reflection of how the populist GOP had turned against his traditional conservatism that he really divided people in his own party."

His daughter Liz Cheney, former member of the House of Representatives, is one of Trump's most vocal and prominent Republican critics. Cheney's strong condemnation of Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his role in the January 6th Capitol attack drew ire from MAGA Republicans.

That division was seen as soon as the news broke of Cheney's death, with MAGA Republicans wasting no time in celebrating his passing.

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"He went out on the bottom," posted one on X, along with a picture titled, "Kamala Harris voter Dick Cheney dead at 84."

Another wrote, "Let's remember him for the evil vile neocon war monger Harris supporter that he was."

"It's a shame he won't get to see his daughter go to prison," wrote another, referring to Trump's repeated calls for Liz Cheney to be jailed for her role in the House Jan. 6 committee investigation.

Another dug into Cheney's reputation as a "war monger," writing on X, "Former Vice President, warmonger, and Kamala Harris supporter Dick Cheney is dead at age 84. His lasting legacy will be $8 trillion squandered in Middle East wars, while proving Trump is the president of peace by endorsing Kamala."

"So Dick Cheney, the man who built his career on wars and deception, ended it by voting for Kamala Harris? No wonder the modern GOP wanted nothing to do with him. The ultimate neocon relic dying politically long before he died physically fitting end to a disastrous legacy," wrote another commenter on X.

"I'm not going to pretend that Dick Cheney was a good guy. The world, in hindsight, would've been better off if he were never born. He shamed his administration, his party, his country, and — at the end — he tried to screw over his onetime voters by handing power to Kamala Harris," posted MAGA author Joseph Ford Cotto.

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90 pp

Juhasz, A. (2006). The Bush agenda: Invading the world, one economy at a time. New York: HarperCollins. Chapter 2 Ambitions of Empire

iraq.war.juhasz

...INTRODUCING THE AUTHORS: CHENEY, WOLFOWITZ, KHALILZAD, LIBBY, EDELMAN, AND POWELL

The clearest early rendering of the ideas that would become the Bush Agenda took shape in the 1992 "Defense Planning Guidance" (DPG), which was one of the final products of the George H. W. Bush administration (1989-1993): It provides much of the Bush Agenda's military framework. The DPG is a classified, internal planning guide for the Pentagon prepared approximately every two years. It is not intended for public consumption. It describes America's overall military strategy and represents "guidance" from the president and the secretary of defense to the four military services on how to prepare their budgets and forces for the future.

The 1992 DPG was written by six men who served in the administrations of both Bush presidents: Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Zalmay Khalilzad, Scooter Libby, Eric Edelman, and Colin Powell. These men, together with later authors of key Bush Agenda documents, have known and worked with each other, shared and sculpted ideas, and refined their positions for well over a quarter of a century.

. Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (a later author), and World Bank President and former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz have worked together in the administrations of Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush. Over the years, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz have increasingly demonstrated a commitment to the combined forces of absolute U.S. military dominance and corporate -expansion that have found their fulfillment in the Bush Agenda. At age twenty-eight, Cheney began his government career as Rumsfeld's assistant in the Nixon and then the Ford White Houses, , eventually replacing his mentor as Ford's chief of staff when Rumsfeld became defense secretary.

Under Ford, Cheney established his cold-warrior credentials as a steadfast opponent to detente with the Soviet Union. In fact, the only administration official credited with being more opposed to detente at the time was Rumsfeld. When the Republicans lost the White House in 1977 to Jimmy Carter, Cheney moved to the House of Representatives, while Rumsfeld went to work for multinational pharmaceutical company, G.D. Searle, eventually becoming its CEO. Cheney maintained a consistent conservative voting record for eleven years as Wyoming's sole member of Congress. Wolfowitz, who also began his government service in the Nixon administration at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, was increasingly focusing his attention on two highly interrelated issues: U.S. dominance over oil in general, and U.S. dominance over the Middle East in particular.

In fact, Wolfowitz has shown a greater commitment to these twin modes of building the Pax Americana than to any particular party affiliation. Thus, unlike most of his fellow authors, Wolfowitz continued his government career working in President Carter's Pentagon. In 1977, two years before Saddam Hussein even became Iraq's leader, Wolfowitz conducted the first extensive study of the need for the United States to defend the Persi

...

Texan. After all, Bush was born in Connecticut, and he returned to the East Coast at age fifteen to attend the prestigious Phillips Andover Academy in Massachusetts, followed by college and business school at Yale and Harvard, respectively.

As a result of his loss, Bush vowed that he "would never be out-Texaned again" in his political career.21 In 1984, Spectrum 7 Energy Corporation bought out Bush's oil companies. Although both of Bush's companies had failed, they were purchased and Bush was retained as Spectrum 7's chairman and CEO likely due to the fact that his father had recently become vice president of the United States. Spectrum 7, which owed more than $3 million in debts by 1986, was saved through a merger with Harken Energy, which retained Bush as a board member and consultant.22

:{:{Tapping into his many friendly and profitable connections to the Saudi royals, Bush raised $25 million for Harken by bringing Saudi real estate tycoon Sheikh Abdullah Taha Bakhsh onto the board. Harken subsequently received a gas and oil exploration contract with Bahrain in 1989. 23 After working on his father's presidential campaign as liaison to the religious right, Bush began his second career as an owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team in 1989.}:

When he sold his shares in 1998, he earned more than $14.5 million in profit. In the interim, he was elected governor of Texas in 1994 and again in 1998. Bush's policies as governor deeply favored corporations and the wealthy. For example, in 1999 Houston overtook Los Angeles as the smoggiest U.S. city. This was due in part to Bush's decision to allow Texas's more than 800 oil refineries and chemical plants (which were contributing 900,000 tons of pollution annually) to choose whether or not they would comply with the state's clean air regulations, rather than requiring them to do so.

Bush cut taxes on corporations and individuals and increased policies directing financial benefits to both. As a result, by 2000, Texas ranked forty-ninth among states in overall taxes collected and fiftieth in per capita state spending. Economic inequality overall in Texas rose dramatically during Bush's tenure as the incomes of those at the top soared and those in the middle and bottom either stagnated or dropped. Texas then joined Louisiana and New York as the three states with the worst income inequality in the nation.24

:{:{Bush was very good to the oil and energy sectors, and they, in turn, were very good to him. Kenneth Lay and the Houston-based energy services company, the Enron Corporation, were Bush's all-time career patrons, contributing more money than any individual and company to his political campaigns.}: That is, before Enron was found guilty of defrauding its investors, including the State of California, of billions of dollars, which led to the company's 2001 bankruptcy and Lay's 2004 indictment on eleven counts of securities fraud (for which he is currently standing trial).

In fact, Bush had an unprecedented ability to raise money for his campaigns. Charles Lewis of the Center on Public Integrity put it this way: "George W. Bush has altogether redefined the parameters of political fundraising," shattering all previous fundraising records in 1999 to 2000 and again in 2003 to 2004. 25

George W. Bush certainly had the right connections and the right politics, but, if there were any doubts that he belonged in the Pax Americana brotherhood, he put them all to rest with his 2002 National Security Strategy,}:}:

....

Before the DPG -drafters reunited in 1997 to establish a virtual Bush government in waiting with the Project for the New American Century, each man pursued the ideas enshrined in the DPG in his own way. Cheney considered a run for president against Bill Clinton. In 1993 and 1994, he formed a Political Action Committee, which included Thomas Cruikshank, CEO of the Halliburton Corporation, the Texas-based energy services giant, and Stephen Bechtel, president of California's Bechtel Corporation, the largest engineering company in the world. The "Cheney for President" buttons he distributed are still highly sought after; the same, however, was not true of his candidacy. Cheney did not despair; in 1995, he accepted his first job in the private sector in more than twenty years as president and CEO of Halliburton. Paul Wolfowitz left the government as well. Apparently, President Cl...

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rev door mil logistic bd, hallib charged govt for meals never provided; did intial study bush 41 [gig?] that said pvt cheaper but real # 2x more $

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/study-says-nearly-half-of-defense-spending-for-9-11-wars-went-to-private-contractors

Sep 13, 2021 5:58 PM EDT

Up to half of the $14 trillion spent by the Pentagon since 9/11 went to for-profit defense contractors,a study released Monday found. While much of this money went to weapons suppliers, the research is the latest to point to the dependence on contractors for war-zone duties as contributing to mission failures in Afghanistan in particular.

In the post-9/11 wars, U.S. corporations contracted by the Defense Department not only handled war-zone logistics like running fuel convoys and staffing chow lines but performed mission-crucial work like [dyncorp]training and equipping Afghan security forces — security forces that collapsed last month as the Taliban swept the country.

Within weeks, and before the U.S. military had even completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Taliban easily routed an Afghan government and military that Americans had spent 20 years and billions of dollars to stand up. President Joe Biden placed blame squarely on the Afghans themselves. “We gave them every chance,” he said last month. “What we could not provide them was the will to fight.”

But William Hartung, the author of Monday’s study by Brown University’s Costs of War project and the Center for International Policy,and others say it’s essential that Americans examine what role the reliance on private contractors played in the post-9/11 wars. In Afghanistan, that included contractors allegedly paying protection money to warlords and the Taliban themselves, and the Defense Department insisting on equipping the Afghan air force with complex Blackhawk helicopters and other aircraft that few but U.S. contractors knew how to maintain.

“If it were only the money, that would be outrageous enough,” Hartung, the director of the arms and security program at the Center for International Policy, said of instances where the Pentagon’s reliance on contractors backfired. “But the fact it undermined the mission and put troops at risk is even more outrageous.”

At the start of this year, before Biden began the final American withdrawal from Afghanistan, there were far more contractors in Afghanistan and also in Iraq than U.S. troops.

The U.S. saw about 7,000 military members die in all post-9/11 conflicts, and nearly 8,000 contractors, another Costs of War study estimates.[total pvt out# mil 150k?]

The Professional Services Council, an organization representing businesses contracting with the government, cited a lower figure from the U.S. Department of Labor saying nearly 4,000 federal contractors have been killed since 2001.

A spokeswoman pointed to a statement last month from the organization’s president, David J. Berteau: “For almost two decades, government contractors have provided broad and essential support for U.S. and allied forces, for the Afghan military and other elements of the Afghan government, and for humanitarian and economic development assistance.”

U.S. officials after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks embraced private contractors as an essential part of the U.S. military response.

It started with then-Vice President Dick Cheney, [nope bush 41 hallib study to pvtize]the former CEO of Halliburton. Halliburton received more than $30 billion to help set up and run bases, feed troops and carry out other work in Iraq and Afghanistan by 2008, the study says. Cheney and defense contractors argued that relying on private contractors for work that service members did in previous wars would allow for a trimmer U.S. military, and be more efficient and cost effective.

By 2010, Pentagon spending had surged by more than one-third, as the U.S. fought dual wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In a post-9/11 American, politicians vied to show support for the military in a country grown far more security conscious.

“Any member of Congress who doesn’t vote for the funds we need to defend this country will be looking for a new job after next November,” the study notes Harry Stonecipher, then the vice president of Boeing, telling The Wall Street Journal the month after the attacks.[up 3-5% /yr soon to hill trillion; reconciliation 3.5 trill over 10 years so this is 2x?!]

And up to a third of the Pentagon contracts went to just five weapons suppliers. Last fiscal year, for example, the money Lockheed Martin alone got from Pentagon contracts was one and a half times the entire budgets of the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, according to the study.

The Pentagon pumped out more contracts than it could oversee, lawmakers and government special investigators said.

For example, a Florida Republican Party official made millions on what lawmakers charged were excess profits when the U.S. granted a one-of-a-kind contract for fuel convoys from Jordan to Iraq, the study notes. The electrocution of at least 18 service members by bad wiring in bases in Iraq, some of it blamed on major contractor Kellogg, Brown and Root, was another of many instances where government investigations pointed to shoddy logistics and reconstruction work.

The stunning Taliban victory last month in Afghanistan is drawing attention now to even graver consequences: the extent to which the U.S. reliance on contractors may have heightened the difficulties of the Afghan security forces.

Jodi Vittori, a former Air Force lieutenant colonel and scholar of corruption and fragile states at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who was not involved in the study, points to the U.S. insistence that the Afghan air force use U.S.-made helicopters. Afghans preferred Russian helicopters, which were easier to fly, could be maintained by Afghans, and were suited to rugged Afghanistan.

When U.S. contractors pulled out with U.S. troops this spring and summer, taking their knowledge of how to maintain U.S.-provided aircraft with them, top Afghan leaders bitterly complained to the U.S. that it had deprived them of one essential advantage over the Taliban.

Hartung, like others, also points to the corruption engendered by the billions of loosely monitored dollars that the U.S. poured into Afghanistan as one central reason that Afghanistan’s U.S.-backed government lost popular support, and Afghan fighters lost morale.

Hillary Clinton, while secretary of state under President Barack Obama, accused defense contractors at risk in war zones of resorting to payoffs to armed groups, making protection money one of the biggest sources of funding for the Taliban.

The United States also relied, in part, on defense contractors to carry out one of the tasks most central to its hopes of success in Afghanistan — helping to set up and train an Afghan military and other security forces that could stand up to extremist groups and to insurgents, including the Taliban.

Tellingly, Vittori said, it was Afghan commandos who had consistent training by U.S. special operations forces and others who did most of the fighting against the Taliban last month.

Relying less on private contractors, and more on the U.S. military as in past wars, might have given the U.S. better chances of victory in Afghanistan, Vittori noted. She said that would have meant U.S. presidents accepting the political risks of sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, and getting more body bags of U.S. troops back.

“Using contractors allowed America to fight a war that a lot of Americans forgot we were fighting,” Vittori said.

no lnx

https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-september-14-2021/

==

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/art-levine/dick-cheneys-dangerous-so_b_40695.html

While Vice-President Cheney has been pursuing a war in Iraq that has led to an increase in terrorism worldwide, his son-in-law, Philip Perry, until very recently the general counsel of DHS, has been working behind the scenes to make it easy for those terrorists to hit chemical facilities at home. The upshot, to put it bluntly: more Americans have died in war and are at risk of terrorism because of this family’s efforts.

The Washington Monthly reports today in its online edition — and in the magazine early next week — on the critical role Phil Perry has played in recent years in derailing meaningful and tough chemical security oversight on behalf of the chemical industry. My article, backed with research assistance by the Nation Institute, is called, “Dick Cheney’s Dangerous Son-In-Law.”As reported in hearings yesterday, he’s also played a key role in thwarting oversight investigationsinto alleged abuses at DHS....

angler

ppl: http://blog.washingtonpost.com/cheney/about/cast_of_characters/

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/cheney/ 2013 series

iraq war plan oil hali feith

http://projectcensored.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=e8526bc09be7b03c98231efd7&id=ad18cfdfc8&e=087818defe

Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency

 By Lou Dubose, Jake Bernstein

http://books.google.com/books?id=GPt2a0-BSvEC&dq=inauthor:%22Lou+Dubose%22&source=gbs_navlinks_s

cites suskin that DC wrote ltr to CTW

VICE lou dubose and jake bernstein random 2006

dc has the congress port, iraq [energy]  i don't know  what's left" p 

apr 17 2001 dc meet ken lay, middle of CA crisis; enron taking pwer offline, booking movement of electr that never happened, shuttling elect across state lines to end0run price controls. p4 one power co decl bakrupt the orther asked and got gov't bailout; davis beg for cap rate; keny boy give 3 pp doc recs fr energy policy in works; most made it into Nat En Dev Gp report; dc say price caps good sht term for pol but do not help fund problem [more dereg needed]; sen and even gop hse CA beg; dc refused to say if ken told him enron in trouble, and ken died july 2006 while wait sentencing bank and secr fraud;

p 5 dc did know 1mw in one year went 30 to 300, 1500 spikes; enron et al profit up 4-600% p 5  FERC did grant caps, stopped Fat boy, death star and get shorty; not all b2 ferc guys in yet 5 enron dead 6 mos later; dc called LAT day after ken visit to put out ken's msg?

NEPD est 10 days after oath;secret task force had couple congr but they did not brief collegaues 8 barbour and other lobby met at curb and hustled in; reporters watch cabs and limos like kremlin; waxman asked info, ~, so David walker GAO helped; center gop, RR, 10 yrs at Arthur Anderson parner; BC picked 1998; gao is watchdog, nonpart rept gold std ~ david Addington 

addington Duke Law, CIA, staffer house intel com; dc sec defense b1 add went w/ 1989; unitary; pres can ignore congr law or reinterpet, esp in times of war p 10; 

task force; 15 lobby plus 1 gov't official ~ FACA Fed Advisory Comms Act this is not a pipe 10

paul o'n liked public/pvt mts, but transparent; smelled trouble; Suskin price of Loyalty dc says info gets used by enemy p 11

HW and dingell sent ltr; m matalin said "politics of destruction" asked for names and notes 11; walker rolled back to only names of non-gov.11 but dc and mm k to say the req was for more,a lie  12; int by Tony Snow on Fox -->WH spokes; 

exec privil only to protect nat'l sec or funct of prez; bruce fein const law RR ~; 1st x 80 yrs gao sued; Ted O argued tho way below his pay grade at distr ct level; judge john bates 1 yr appt b2 worked for starr on bimbo gate 14 ~ b/c no comm req, but all chair are gop so won't; lead house oversight comm req 5 subopenas wrt WH and GOPm but same comm in clinton admin 8 yrs asked for 1052. 14 walker did not applal b/c of $ waste, but said no big deal as ruling only applies to this case, but DC knew he cd use as precedent p 14 gop makesa fight whenever poss to give pres leverage over congress "rule is "like a loaded gun forever. 9" to congr head p 14-5 say fein.

Ashcroft backs dc, nrdc and jud watch sued [jud wat just did something evil yesterday?trayvon]p 15 got oilfield maps [recall wolfie plan for decades0 ; vulan dc, rumy, wolf, powell, rice , armitage, perel); oil min from neighbor countries caled in; 

task force head Joe Kelliher ask lobby Dana Contratto wish list il duce 17 API fill in the bl exec order becomes 13211 verbatim fed rel dir James Ford, dereg , no jud review p 17 !! [ = Halib Loophole?]  3/1 IF Engelhardt and fred palmer eo and VP peabody met lundquist, sec of eng S Abrqaham, b2 eco advisor Larry Linfdsy; stock offer IPO coming; 3/16 task rept hype coal 3/21 321 IPO got 420$mil, 60 over predicted

epa rep on task blocked frack; pulled from draft, but stuck back in final p 18

only "lobbyists names/pix were green; 4 yrs after task force over, sen comm got lies from ceo's etc but Sec serv log leaked, so lautenberg say give to DOJ to improve memory 18

B2 co2 pledge austin press conf rove by side; P O'N: "no 2nd chance"; b2 no change even as tx delay and barton ~; 3/1 HB emo; ctw in triest; "Regarding Cheney Energy Policy & Co." 19 b2 had rejected kyoto but still ok w/ "multipollutant" bill incl co2 cap; 3/3 ctw met o'n w/ ltr 4 sen; P ON thot dc wrote it; suskind says hagel work w/ dc; 3/13 pvt mtg w/ b2, told he he had a ltr to hagel; dc walked the ltr over as she exited mtg p 20 PON says ame tactic he'd sen dc do under rmn and ford; quietly pick topi, talk to players, exge /mfg docs, then guide to goal" "clean kill" no fingerprints 20 fed judge ordered release of Barbour memo 20 163 pp task force rep had nice pix of nature; rec over 100, incl 1300-1900 new pwr plants and nat gas pipelines; 4 mos mtds early 2001 Fitton says dc ~ all FOIA (co-counsel Shannen sic Coffin w/ olsen) 21 end ch 1  

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ch2 ed : 9/29/74 dc rummy took over WH new dep CoC in 2 yrs take rumy CoC, youngest in hist at 35 yo; all B2 2nd term? scandals rooted in 74; 68 schol to DC WI gop congr b ill steiger HSE; ex figher jock rumy got dual appt but dc on 2nd flr of OEO; rummy bruissels ab, dc to Bradley Woods & co kept him in DC; RMN crashed; ford called rumy, met w/ ltr; trans team, rmn ppl never really left; ford was ~ b2, liked to hear real exge ; rumy would listen? to all then take to pres??actually just made himself chf advisor to prez rumy never  wrote anything //dc

when dc left WH 77 hetook all papersvs give to ford libr st;d SOP 27;  [3 man-sized safes in DC office)] 

rmn pardon before tiral led to 1974 trounce, veto proof Congr; monday after rumy takeover ford agreed to test before congr (said no precendent except lincoln, but actually GW and WW did, tho WW made them come to WH) 28

Congr tried to rein in prez after rmn and LBJ war

dc fort GF to ~ rmn eco law eg Rusell sic E train ~ enforce CAir Act 2003 book Pollitics, Pollution and pandas 

FOIA passed 1966/ but not working early 70's, 1974 bipart reform expand what covered and speed action; almost done when GF took over, his staff, dc and CIA ~ esp jud review of what is ojk to keep secret; he had veotes 13 lost al but one; aslo overridden on fopia veto;  2003 JAsh isued rule to ~ foia; addidnton argues const says OVP not in exec br (Congr is exempt form foia?!) 30 dc will not tell size of staff, budget, activities eg corp jets 30

Rumy leaked what made him look good, but got others to leaks to hit other ppl 31 "Cheney was the abominabe No-man" ? 31

sim sop hit plame;p3l

1974 nyt say 10k us ppl cia intel files, incl brit Hume who worked for JA 33; NSA feeding info to fbi and Sec serv from electronic surveill; colby takes over cia fro schelesinger promoted; colby killed VN collab Phoenix; Levi intel reforms, dc wanted to go after NYT hersch, look for papers in his apt etc//b2 warrantlss wiretaps and bank transactions 35. 1975 ATT and WUnion; scalia 38 yo asst atty gen ~ foia congress oversight 36 Carter signed FISA 37

rumy dc took out VP rockefeller, alt fuels fund; dc made sure that conserve and limit import not construed as limit consumption 38-9 "two little throat-slitters" 39  11/75 haloween massacre, vp out, colby, scjhles, demoted Kissinger, wnners rumy, dc and b1, dc also ran reelection; kiss sec of state went to africa put down apatheid, dc thot lost TX 41  dc did concession sp

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oct 77 announce run Wyo (in DC for 10 yrs?) //dtr] out of state $ //b2 TX

JPB lib wing of GOP; dc preservation and dereg 44 1st heart attack; astro Cardiacs for C, lynne campaigned for mo; outspent 1 guy 7:1; PACm weyerhauser; frosh but Rwep Conf gave him access to big guys

94 newt cut $ and staff to caucus to concentrate power in leadership 48

lott scared of newt so went to sen? dc in mod Weds caucus, but kept ties to newt hardcore; rowdy parties somtimes went to boatys barged together on ches bay

jpb ~ MX issles, guy said dc ost dang guy ever, dc thinks world dangerous 52 dc oppose misle cuts tho ussr wanted. ground zro red square 53 pro SDI, mx jobs in wyo

dc gets 10k ltrs ~ Washakie, 800k acres set aside, but 2001 calls to open, congr block, dc helped BLM endrun, so oil/gas drill in wilderness since lbj 64

fdr somoza our sob 56 june 79 somoza told by us to bail, so sandinista take over, dc led contra funding ; newt cspan sca empty room; scam worked, so dc upped msg into Policy Committee; house polarize (bob michel dc pal also gold with tip o, PO newt) Boland cut $; tip got on ground intel from maryknoll nun 80 yo aunt; tip retired then Jim Wright  59 amazing got all 13 bills passed ; Wright expert on Lat A, worked with costa rica osar arias later Nobel; evil: JW open door policy used 

: w told contra visitors no more cia help; state dept sent contras to Wa Times office, told that cia agitating in managua, they said he leakeded classified info, but it was a closed mtg andthey already knew; dc in intel comm screamed; Newsday reporter Roy Gutman confiormed a setup 62 dc and bob m fled ethics complaint (no warning, tho jw in golf game days before, later apolpgize, but his status key; newt piled on: acused W of defending tx s&l, supporters 9of hit?] bulk bught his book construed as undiscl camp contrib, also 2 dallas apts; resigned may 89 96 wks befoere told fbi dca good guy, same night thx by dc 63. 

ch 4 cia contractor cargo kicker broke rule parachute captured 1986 SAM; asst sec of state e abrams ex socialist, married podh, lied to congress? dems did not believe but dc on comm; ollie n gave iranians bible and choccake (hezbollah had hostages; RR lied to congree comm, then to ppl; AG found memo that said 12m from arms sales wd go to contras 66 1st house/sen joint invest comm, wright deferredto exec, wanted it over quick, lost lev when took impeach off table 69; casey resign brain tumor then died, big brk for gop; hearing TV favored bad guys says spielberg 72 dc et al said taking away $ was congr negligence; dc absurd q of felix rodriguez, cia killed che 73 question/praised abrams (pardoned b1 1992, tho he covered up 1k ppl massacre by el salv army at El Mozote) 74, later dc got him dep nat sec advisor 75 b2  ollie stack of WU telgrams, but co gave 1/2 off; mine nic harbor world ct ~; jw wanted unanious, so dropped some tougher stuff, so gop spun as witch hunt, no big deal 81

addington join dc staff, asst gen councel cia

ch 6 halib got 10 mil there, 20mil severance, actually 45M$ 2006 net worth 95M, most from hali, said give charity by 50K stock option worth 4mil$ 2006; Fortune mag said co suffered from dc leadership 105 co did not get much gov $ (5 yras prior 100m loan inmport-ex bank, dc time 5 yrs 1.5Bi w b 106

brown and root subsid, lbj pork, lots of work in VN so caled Burn and Loot, bith TX based urged 1963; oil bust 80's tough but mil $ dc dod in 90's; stocjk up 80% 3 yrs before dc ceo, hired not to run co but make relations 108 (oops)

scalia and dc went duck hunting just before scotus ruled in sierra club req in secret task 109

in 96 hali spun of Highland Ins Gp thartwould take B&R'sasbestos liabilituy (did not tell hig stockholdrs0 busted del scotus 2002 80M$ 12/01 stock fell 40% one day, shell co bankrupt so H 9/share prepkg ch 11; co paid 5bil Insur 1.4b) 1998 dc got 1.5m$ bonus for Dresser merge 9inherited other probs too) 111

hali did biz with iraq, iran, burma, libya, indonesia, azer. 111 bribes nigeria

dc lobbied phil gramm pal to get exemption to ILSA to work in iran 116 cayman subsid opened office in Tehran 2000; 73m$ contracts w/ iraq dc tenure (lied)

hali AAnd acct #3 behind enron; AA changed loses into assets for hali 118

in 2000 stock up 150% dc time, but brazil hidden crash 2 yrs later; dc got 18.5 stock options cashed out 2000 119

B&R designed mil outserc pgm, so got lots of them 119 problems afwer dc/bc of, sold B&R 2005. end ch

lady c: orig C's c; he dropped out of yale after year 9mentor got him in)power pole lineman, draft and lyne got him u of wyo; Mary took coors mkting job to help w/ gay and niche 126 NEH 2x mkt$; quit 16 mos left; went to AEI foer newt revo; 3 wks before election hyped hit on school hist curric (that neh funded/ok'd? Gary nash UCLA defense, but tough to do sound bite; LC picked ppl who duid st'd and cherry pick lack of famous names, while concepts actually there; praised work in prog; later aid curt $ but 177M vs fed defic 180Bill, got matiching % generated 36Bill/yr, 1.3 mill jobs 132; when she left 12/92 she said big compl was expansion 132

2 mos after 9/11 ACTA report blamed univ faculty

dept of ed homeschool study guide mentioned evil history st'd so shred 300K copies end

2000 gop conv dc found groove; attack dog; ht attack

trans team law est after jfk/rmn, no foia or oversight, so can raise unltd B-C fdn 3 ill$ corp and energy, severl pioners on transteam PICKED LOBBYISTS for gov jobs/regulatory; persisted way after election, gave $ to Mi Gov john engler pol gps and bill paxton k str, to push b2 agenda in congr 150

--

Michael Mobbs in comm invest did dc steer iraq constr $ to hali/KBR, biggest recip of mil logistics and reconstruct, in 2 yrs up from 19th to #1 army contractor; no bid sys put into place 10 yrs bwefore when dc as Sec of Def 152; waxman asked dc, denied, but email showed contracts coord thru VP 153 9mobbs mtg closed, not sworn)

dc denied degerre4d compenbut got thru 03 and held 3mil$ stock option till 05178K deferred. 154

hali billed for 42K meals only served 14k said contract unclear? 156

1992 hal did study outsrce for 3/9m$ but then needed 5 mil to f/u 157 classified mkt plan for themselves 

in 80;s mobbs at Feith and Zell; wolfie (iraq plan 1992 "limited contingency study to carter WH) restr contr to coal of willing (libby, feith neo con poker night metaphot) 161 bechtel shut out....hali 16bill and counting for iraq; leahy asked "gfy" 164

b2 iron triangle "mayberry machiavellians) 176 out gunned/smarter (staffed) by dc staff; dc had own shadow NSC 178

plan was 90 days in bagdadthem on to tehran 182

liz univ of chic law White & Case) broke protocol by going to see heads of state w/o ambass; abrams and cabal crap negot 185

torture: yoo OLegal Counsel (miniscotus?) rehnquist, alito alums; in ford admin dc saw how olc cd defend pres priv under scalia 188 post nuke attack no congr too much trouble 198

bruce fein (iran contra) signing statrment that pres can ok torture goes ~ a statue he signed? 200  lasting damage to cty 224

midterm elect dc did 80 fundraisers, raised 24mil$ w/ 3 mos to go 204.

around june 12 2003 dc told scooter about val plame

team B: pipes, wolf, albert Wohl... (tweller) 209

dc fired 2 cia briefers, went to langely

fitzgerald plame leak ? ... at end

see angler txt  ?

:{

}: 

sw:

Cheney studied at Yale University dropped out], Casper College, and the University of Wyoming, where he earned B.A. (1965) and M.A. (1966) degrees. After studying political science at the University of Wisconsin he was a congressional fellow in Washington in 1968-69. In 1969 he was special assistant to the director of the Office of Economic Opportunity. In 1971 he was a White House staff assistant, then, until 1973, assistant director of the Cost of Living Council. After a year in business Cheney was deputy assistant to President Gerald Ford(1974-75) and then White House chief of staff (1975-77). [1]

Cheney was elected as a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives for Wyoming in November 1978 and was re-elected to a further five times. In March 1989, a week after being nominated as whip for the 101st Congress, he was confirmed Secretary of Defense in the administration of George H.W. Bush. He held the position until January 20, 1993. [2]

Following the election of Bill Clinton as President, Cheney took up a position as senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. In October 1995 Cheney was appointed as president and chief executive officer of the Dallas-based company, Halliburton Company. (Halliburton has won lucrative contracts with the U.S. government, especially in the war with Iraq. As of 2003, Cheney was being paid between $100,000 and $1,000,000 per year in "deferred compensation." [3] [4].

Cheney on Global Warming

U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney's office was behind a push to censor congressional testimony that global warming poses a danger to the public, according to Jason Burnett, a former associate deputy administrator at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The vice president and the White House Office of Management and Budget heavily edited testimony last year by the director of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). "I read the testimony, checked with EPA scientists, and came to the conclusion that the draft testimony was fundamentally accurate as written," Burnett stated in a letter to Barbara Boxer, who chairs the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. ^[1]

Cheney and the tobacco industry

In an October 18, 1983 letter, Dick Cheney (as House Representative) invited Chuck Merlin, the Vice President for Legislative Affairs for the Tobacco Institute, to a fundraising dinner where the cost of attending was $250.^[2] In November, 1983, the Tobacco Institute Political Action Committee donated $500 to Dick Cheney.^[3] Stanely S. Scott, Vice President of Philip Morris in 1987, and Dick Cheney were colleagues at the White House when Cheney served as Chief of Staff under President Jerry Ford.^[4] In August, 1982, then-Representative Dick Cheney (R-WY) added his name as a cosponsor of a bill calling for rotational warning labels on cigarettes, which was sponsored by Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA).^[5]

U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler, who presided over the The U.S. Government's racketeering case against Big Tobacco, is the judge who ordered the U.S. Department of Energy to release documents from the energy task force of Vice President Dick Cheney.^[6]

Cheney's first term as VP

During his 2001-2004 term with George W. Bush, he has [5]

• championed Donald Rumsfeld for Defense Secretary
• "insisted, over fierce objections by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, on placing Paul Wolfowitz in the number two position at the Pentagon"
• "insisted, again over Powell's misgivings, on making ultra-unilateralist John Bolton, then vice-president of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), undersecretary of state for arms control and international security.
• "reportedly played a key role in the appointment of another controversial neo-conservative, Elliott Abrams, to head the Middle East office on the National Security Council."
• "reportedly visited the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) several times in the run-up to the war in Iraq, in what was seen as pressure on CIA analysts to take a darker view of Saddam Hussein's alleged ties to al Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction."
• backed the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans. [6]

Cheney & 'Scooter' Libby

Cheney's chief of staff, until October 2005, was I. Lewis Scooter Libby, who sought to influence the content of Colin Powell's February 2003 speech to the United Nations. [7] (Libby resigned in October 2005 after being indicted on charges of to a grand jury investigating the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame). In December 2006, Libby's lawyers announced that Cheney would be called to testify in the hearing on the charges, scheduled for January 2007.^[7]

Family business

Cheney's wife, Lynne Cheney, is a senior fellow with the American Enterprise Institute. Cheney's daughter, Elizabeth Cheney, is the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs and Coordinator for Broader Middle East and North Africa Initiatives and heads the Iran-Syria Operations Group.

Cheney: on violence in Iraq

• "I don't think anybody anticipated the level of violence we encountered" in Iraq.—Cheney, National Press Club in Washington, D.C., June 19, 2006. [8]

• "And I think we've had a lot of good news out of Iraq over the course of the last year. It's hard sometimes to see through that, given the continued level of violence, obviously."—Cheney, on Fox News' Hannity & Colmes, January 11, 2006. [9]

• In June 2005, in the "draft of a new book" on the Iraqi insurgency, Center for Strategic and International Studies "expert" Anthony Cordesman said that the "insurgency already has long been a low-level civil war, and is being driven towards a broader Sunni vs. Shiite conflict by Islamist extremists.... the main body of Iraq insurgents has learned to create a continued level of violence as a means to try and destabilize the Iraqi situation. They have improved methods of attack through such means as digging holes in roads, inserting bombs, and then paving them over so as to make them undetectable by the eyes of US troops on patrol. ... Vice President Dick Cheney, for his part, insisted in a broadcast interview that the insurgents would be defeated by the end of President Bush's second term.

"'I think they're in the last throes, if you will,' Mr. Cheney told CNN." [10]

• "The level of violence will be high during this period of time because they're desperate. They know the window's closing. They know they've either got to derail the process now or ultimately we'll succeed in our objectives."—Cheney, on eve of first Kerry-Bush debate, September 29, 2004. [11]

Contact details

Currently no contact details exist, the official whitehouse.gov page for Dick Cheney has been removed.

Articles and resources

Related SourceWatch articles

• Related SourceWatch articles

References

1. ↑ "Cheney Sought to Alter Climate Discussion" Stephen Power, The Wall Street Journal, July 8, 2008.  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121554228130836473.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
3. ↑ Dick Cheney Dick Cheney Invites the Tobacco Institute to His Fund-raising Dinner Letter. 2 pp. October 18, 1983. Tobacco Institute Bates No. TI46371254/1255
4. ↑ P. McGovern, Tobacco Institute Political Action Committee Letter November 3, 1983. 1 pp. Bates No. TNWL0014888
5. ↑ Stanely S. Scott, Philip Morris Letter August 6, 1987. Philip Morris Bates No. 2024272633
6. ↑ Tobacco Institute TI Infolog Information Services Vol. 82/NO. 99 Newsletter. 2 pp. August 27, 1982. Bates No. TIMN0240971/0972
7. ↑ David Sylvia, Philip Morris DOJ Stories 3 Email. August 15, 2005. Bates No. 5000918367/8372
8. ↑ James Vicini, "Cheney to be called to testify in CIA leak case", Reuters, December 19, 2006.

External Articles

Profiles

• The Buying of the Presidency: "Dick Cheney", Center for Public Integrity.
• "Who's Who in the White House," updated February 16, 2004.
• The Unauthorized Biography, produced by CBC Newshour in October 2004.

General articles

• 2000 through 2006
• 2007: January through June 2007 and July through December 2007
• 2008: Dick Cheney: Articles & Commentary: 2008

This article may include information from Tobacco Documents Online.

Halliburton doing biz in iran, BC outlaws, 1995 so hires DC and  co creates cayman island subsid to keep doing (previously fined for violating export ban).  to be legal subsid has to be indep, but houston still ran co; iran was helping kill us troops [in iraq?] p 85

DC brought in fmr generals into co, then they worked as lobbyists to get biz 86  also acted as booster for afgan war, as revealed by 2008 pulitzer prize davis barstow nyt "msg machine"

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/5/8/pentagons_pundits_ny_times_reporter_david

DC called himself a "pretty good environmentalist" strat ignor  DC once sorta ok on green, but only 1 of 16 ~ ESA; 1 of 26 support RR ~ Clean water act; ~ superfund, safe drink act; ~ cit suit ~ chem 50

Bowen, in Censoring Science says DC ran meetings on climate in parallel w/ secret energy mtgs, invited Hansen ) principals only, means big deal p 98

By Georges Magazine he [b2?] was ranked nr 45 in a list of the 50 most influential politicians. Greenspan was one, Cheney was two. 

 ---

wikipedia:  In July 2008, a former Environmental Protection Agency official stated publicly that Cheney's office had pushed significantly for large-scale deletions from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report on the health effects of global warming "fearing the presentation by a leading health official might make it harder to avoid regulating greenhouse gases."^[118] In October, when the report appeared with six pages cut from the testimony, The White House stated that the changes were made due to concerns regarding the accuracy of the science. However, according to the former senior adviser on climate change to Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Stephen Johnson, Cheney's office was directly responsible for nearly half of the original testimony being deleted.^[118]

...

Cheney was a prominent member of the National Energy Policy Development Group (NEPDG),^[83] commonly known as the Energy task force, which comprised energy industry representatives, including several Enron executives. After the Enron scandal, the Bush administration was accused of improper political and business ties. In July 2003, the Supreme Court ruled that the US Department of Commerce must disclose NEPDG documents, containing references to companies that had made agreements with the previous Iraqi government to extract Iraq's petroleum.^[84]

Beginning in 2003, Cheney's staff opted not to file required reports with the National Archives and Records Administration office charged with assuring that the executive branch protects classified information, nor did it allow inspection of its record keeping.^[85] Cheney refused to release the documents, citing his executive privilege to deny congressional information requests.^[86][87] Media outlets such as Time magazine and CBS News questioned whether Cheney had created a "fourth branch of government" that was not subject to any laws.^[88] A group of historians and open-government advocates filed a lawsuit in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, asking the court to declare that Cheney's vice-presidential records are covered by the Presidential Records Act of 1978 and cannot be destroyed, taken or withheld from the public without proper review.^{[89][90][91][92]}

rfk2

b2 pick DC ensured Wise Use backing. go to guy for wise use  and oil in 80's;

arranged /led 1st  veto of wilderness bill in hist under RR, big win psychol. 1992

to 2000 "dist advisor" to Ctr for Def of Free Ent (WU) arnold exec VP. DC also on

bd of Nat'l Legal Ctr for Public Intrerst, WU CTT 31

...

halburton free pass on benzene fracking

Ch 6  blueprint for plunder

energy co 48.3m to b2 and gop 2000, 58m since inaug 96  31 of 48 trans team energy ties; cab and staff 4 cab sec, 6 powerful WH and 20 high level apptees

rove owned 250K enron stock early 2001 while energy pol made; also BP, amoco, royal dutch shell  97 but involved in all decisons (scoter sold a bunch early

2001 dept comm ceo of cabot chem; undersec chief econ for exxon

secret taks force; Nat Energy Pol Dev gp right after inaug 97  but Fed Advisory Comm Act says any mtgs of pvt and public be disclosed, so official members

all gov as end-run 98  DC #2 spenser abrams (2000 failed relect sen after one term MI 700K from car industry) killed fuel effic; Joe Allbaugh dir F Energy

Reg Comiss (tx "iron triangle) wife lobby for reliant, entergy and txu); also Don evans tx, norton (1/3 sen camp energy co's), amd Paul O'Neill SIC vowed to

sell alcoa stock but stalled till after rep out, stock went up 30%  99 thot he cd have good impact, but relaized not goal 101

may 17 01 rep released --> energy bill ; exxon record profits, 2x prev yr 99

for 1st x, GAO sued for info, redently appt judge denied, no appeal , but Sierra C and Jud watch won. scotus delayed till after election; scalia had gone to

oil co duck hunt junket refused to recuse, tho msny demands 100 docs heavy redeacted, and nothing from CD mtgs 100

task force got input from API, Am Gas assoc, nat mining assoc and edison 101 400 co's combined in Alliance for Energy and ec growth to lobby.

B2 campaigh workers became lobbyists; mtgs w/ task force; am gas at least 8 480 K cantrib 1999-02 etc, api, exelon, westinghouse, enron 10x, 6 w DC (who

refused to cap CA energy prices) 103  RELIANT engineered CA scam 103  Westar exec email said $ to delay PAC was proce for "seat at table" of the task force

103. DC says just b/c somoen gave $ to camp does not mean shd not have "express views " to gov 103

suskind bk says DC orchestrated idea of energy crisis, permitted no discuss and said pres wd not read anyone's reports 104 day before rep released, foto op

w/ green energy

chevron big input, api lang on exec order verbatim 104-5

19 mtgs/contacts w/ nuke ind over 1/2 mil contrib

So Co 1.6 m 99-02 met 7x, hired haley barbour and current rnc Marc Racicot SIC to lobby esp on co2, NSR rule key, req gpa plants to intall control when

upgrade or expand 106  prosecuted by BC (8 of 51); dpet Just forced to drop suits EPA cheif enforcement officer quit 106 "if yo have a good lobbyist, you can

just buy your way out of trouble" 106  joined by edison's Tom Kuhn, b pioneer college roomate edison 600k to gop 99-02 and its mmbers almost 20 mil since 98  

106

rep rec'd exempt old power plants from CAA; barbour raisedf 250K at may 21 gala, 150k from So co.107

Haliburton gave 1 mil gop 97-02, and all soft money 1/2 mil to gop ; incentive to polute added to rep.bill, tho O'N says does not cost more to do right.

conservation a private virtue, noy basis of pub;lic poliocy DC TO speech mo before rep released 107  but 1 mpg increase = ANWR  2.6 = iraq and kuwait import,

8 all of ME 108  JC cafge up 7.5, shorage --> glut 108, 86 rolled by RR; lovens says if not, we need no persian gulf oil after 86; no need for wars; since

1990 80 mil car $ , cancelled tax decd for gren cars, less effic st'ds 100K tax break hummers etc. result worst effic in 20 yrs 109  tax cuts to offset

energy prices [basically another subsidy !?]  bill ~ Daschle but end-run, by june 02 3/4 of 105 recs in place

oct 01 weakend regs on mining and air pollut

power plants kill a Trillion fish/yr 111

took pwer from states to limit offshore drill, b2 refused to suppoert Superfund (hid as reform) but 1:4 Us ppl live near one 112  10c bbl cheap b/c excluded

from liability under cost recovery 112 normally epa can clean site then charge 3x to poluter, so big leverage ; w/o tax, no cleanup; oct 03 fund went

bankrupt, so cost shifted to public.

In October 2003, the Pentagon published a report titled An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security by Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall. The authors conclude by stating that "this report suggests that, because of the potentially dire consequences, the risk of abrupt climate change, although uncertain and quite possibly small, should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a U.S. national security concern."^[3]

M oD: ~ gw as late as 2007 p 213

salon:

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/03/31/dean/index.html

http://www.muckety.com/Richard-B-Cheney/1323.muckety

Energy task force  2001

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Cheney_Energy_Task_Force

pjt censored:

The energy turmoil of 2000-01 prompted Bush to establish a task force charged with developing a long-range plan to meet U.S. energy requirements. With the advice of his close friend and largest campaign contributor, Enron CEO, Ken Lay, Bush picked Vice President Dick Cheney, former Halliburton CEO, to head this group. In 2001 the Task Force formulated the National Energy Policy (NEP), or Cheney Report, bypassing possibilities for energy independence and reduced oil consumption with a declaration of ambitions to establish new sources of oil.

The Bush Administration’s struggle to keep secret the workings of Cheney’s Energy Task Force has been ongoing since early in the President’s tenure. The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, requested information in spring of 2001 about which industry executives and lobbyists the Task Force was meeting with in developing the Bush Administration’s energy plan. When Cheney refused disclosure, Congress was pressed to sue for the right to examine Task Force records, but lost. Later, amid political pressure building over improprieties regarding Enron’s colossal collapse, Cheney’s office released limited information revealing six Task Force meetings with Enron executives.

With multiple lawsuits currently pending, the Bush Administration asserts that its right to secrecy is a matter of executive privilege in regard to White House records.

cheney blamed greens for elect shortage, but refinery surplus (cheaper to expand grandfather's ) what saved CA was conservation, sneered at option by cheney 324

Bush global warming plan 4.6 bil 1 cent per person/day, not enough to make any change  337

2000 82% forest lobby $? to gop

Vice-president Dick Cheney - Cheney denied that he had any ties with Halliburton Company after he left his position as CEO of the company in 2000. An investigation by the Congressional Research Service revealed that while VP Cheney received deferred compensation from Halliburton to the tune of $500,000 to $1,000,000. While Cheney was Secretary of Defense for George Herbert Walker Bush, the Pentagon contracted infamous Halliburton subsidiary Brown & Root "to study the cost effectiveness of outsourcing some military operations to private contractors. Based on the results of the study, the Pentagon hired Brown & Root to implement an outsourcing plan." Cheney became the CEO of Halliburton in 1995. Questions about "sweetheart deals" with Halliburton arose as the company was awarded no-bid contracts for reconstruction in Iraq. The contracts were estimated to be worth about $1.5 billion. Probes into Halliburton led to allegations of overcharging the military for importing oil from Kuwait into Iraq, $6 million in kickbacks for the awarding of contracts to a Kuwaiti company and $180 million in bribes to land a natural gas project contract in Nigeria while Cheney was CEO. Reported by MSNBC/AP on 9 April 2004 to be "making a pitch for Westinghouse's U.S. nuclear power technology" while in China on the taxpayer tab.

see cooney and connaughton

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/18/opinion/18mon1.html?_r=1&hp

...

Some candidates are emphatic in their denial, like the Nevada Republican Sharron Angle, who flatly rejects “the man-caused climate change mantra of the left.” Others are merely wiggly, like California’s Carly Fiorina, who says, “I’m not sure.” Yet, over all (the exception being Mark Kirk in Illinois), the Republicans are huddled around an amazingly dismissive view of climate change.

A few may genuinely believe global warming is a left-wing plot. Others may be singing the tune of corporate benefactors. And many Republicans have seized on the cap-and-trade climate bill as another way to paint Democrats as out-of-control taxers.

In one way or another, though, all are custodians of a strategy whose guiding principle has been to avoid debate about solutions to climate change by denying its existence — or at least by diminishing its importance. The strategy worked, destroying hopes for Congressional action while further confusing ordinary citizens for whom global warming was already a remote and complex matter. It was also remarkably heavy-handed.

According to Congressional inquiries, White House officials, encouraged by Mr. Cheney’s office, forced the Environmental Protection Agency to remove sections on climate change from separate reports in 2002 and 2003. (Christine Todd Whitman, then the E.P.A. administrator, has since described the process as “brutal.”)

The administration also sought to control or censor Congressional testimony by federal employees and tampered with other reportsin order to inject uncertainty into the climate debate and minimize threats to the environment.

Nothing, it seemed, could crack the administration’s denial — not Tony Blair of Britain and other leaders who took climate change seriously; not Mrs. Whitman (who eventually quit after being undercut by Mr. Cheney, who worked for the energy company Halliburton before he became vice president and received annual checks while in office); and certainly not the scientists.

In 2007, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its most definitive statement on the human contribution to climate change, Mr. Cheney insisted that there was not enough evidence to just “sort of run out and try to slap together some policy that’s going to try to solve the problem.” To which Mrs. Whitman, by then in private life, said: “I don’t see how he can say that with a straight face anymore.”

Nowadays, it is almost impossible to recall that in 2000, George W. Bush promised to cap carbon dioxide, encouraging some to believe that he would break through the partisan divide on global warming. Until the end of the 1990s, Republicans could be counted on to join bipartisan solutions to environmental problems. Now they’ve disappeared in a fog of disinformation, an entire political party parroting the Cheney line.

A version of this editorial appeared in print on October 18, 2010, on page A34 of the New York edition.

RS 28 june 07

The Secret Campaign of Bush's Administration To Deny Global Warming This article is from the latest issue of Rolling Stone, on news stands until June 29th "That's a big no. The president believes . . . that it should be the goal of policymakers to protect the American way of life. The American way of life is a blessed one." - Ari Fleischer, White House Press Secretary responding in May 2001 to whether Bush would ask Americans to curb their first-in-the- world energy consumption

 Earlier this year, the world's top climate scientists released a definitive report on global warming. It is now "unequivocal, " they concluded, that the planet is heating up. Humans are directly responsible for the planetary heat wave, and only by taking immediate action can the world avert a climate catastrophe. Megadroughts, raging wildfires, decimated forests, dengue fever, legions of Katrinas - unless humans act now to curb our climate-warming pollution, warned the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, "we are in deep trouble."

 You would think, in the wake of such stark and conclusive findings, that the White House would at least offer some small gesture to signal its concern about the impending crisis. It's not every day, after all, that the leading scientists from 120 nations come together and agree that the entire planet is about to go to hell. But the Bush administration has never felt bound by the reality-based nature of science - especially when it comes from international experts. So after the report became public in February, Vice President Dick Cheney took to the airwaves to offer his own, competing assessment of global warming.

 "We're going to see a big debate on it going forward," Cheney told ABC News, about "the extent to which it is part of a normal cycle versus the extent to which it's caused by man." What we know today, he added, is "not enough to just sort of run out and try to slap together some policy that's going to 'solve' the problem." Even former White House insiders were shocked by the vice president's see-no-evil performance. "I don't see how he can say that with a straight face anymore," Christine Todd Whitman, who clashed privately with Cheney over climate policy during her tenure as the administration' s first chief of the Environmental Protection Agency, tells Rolling Stone. "The consequences of climate change are very real and very negative, but Cheney is not convinced of that. He believes - not quite as much as Senator James Inhofe, that this is a 'hoax' - but that the Earth has been changing since it was formed and to say that climate change is caused by humans is incorrect." Cheney's statements were the latest move in the Bush administration's ongoing strategy to block federal action on global warming. It is no secret that industry-connected appointees within the White House have worked actively to distort the findings of federal climate scientists, playing down the threat of climate change. But a new investigation by Rolling Stone reveals that those distortions were sanctioned at the highest levels of our government, in a policy formulated by the vice president, implemented by the White House Council on Environmental Quality and enforced by none other than Karl Rove. An examination of thousands of pages of internal documents that the White House has been forced to relinquish under the Freedom of Information Act - as well as interviews with more than a dozen current and former administration scientists and climate-policy officials - confirms that the White House has implemented an industry- formulated disinformation campaign designed to actively mislead the American public on global warming and to forestall limits on climate polluters.

"They've got a political clientele that does not want to be
regulated," says Rick Piltz, a former Bush climate official who blew
the whistle on White House censorship of global-warming documents in
2005. "Any honest discussion of the science would stimulate public
pressure for a stronger policy. They're not stupid."
Bush's do-nothing policy on global warming began almost as soon as he
took office. By pursuing a carefully orchestrated policy of delay,
the White House has blocked even the most modest reforms and replaced
them with token investments in futuristic solutions like hydrogen
cars. "It's a charade," says Jeremy Symons, who represented the EPA
on Cheney's energy task force, the industry-studded group that met in
secret to craft the administration' s energy policy. "They have a
single-minded determination to do nothing - while making it look like
they are doing something."
It's now almost impossible to fathom that back in 2000, after then\-
candidate Bush vowed to place caps on carbon pollution, top climate
scientists believed he was just the man to take action on global
warming. "It looked like we could finally get beyond the fray that
had consumed the Clinton administration, " recalls James McCarthy, a
Harvard climate scientist who co-chaired the previous report issued
by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which gaveled down
the very day Bush was inaugurated in 2001.
Even at that point, the science was in. The U.N. panel linked "most
of the warming observed over the last fifty years" to "human
activities." That judgment aligned with the National Assessment on
climate change, a landmark federal report commissioned by Bush's
father in 1990 and completed just before Bush was elected in 2000.
The assessment projected dire impacts from global warming - from the
extinction of maple trees in New England to a catastrophic loss of
snowpack in California. "If we do nothing," McCarthy says, "the lack
of water in California will force a mass exodus."
But those who were expecting a Nixon-to-China moment from Bush on
climate weren't counting on the influence of the vice president and
his industrial patrons. In March 2001, Whitman traveled to Italy for
climate talks with European allies. She affirmed Bush's commitment to
regulating greenhouse gases - a position she had vetted with
Condoleezza Rice and Chief of Staff Andy Card. But what Whitman
didn't grasp was that when it came to climate, the president was
largely irrelevant.
Whitman should have had her doubts. Prior to joining the Cabinet, she
sought personal assurance from Bush that the EPA would be able to
call its own shots without deferring to the CEQ - the Council on
Environmental Quality, a policy arm of the White House. As Whitman
recalls it, Bush made no effort to mask his bureaucratic
ignorance. "What's CEQ?" he asked blankly.
Cheney took full advantage of the president's cluelessness, bringing
the CEQ into his own portfolio. "The environment and energy issues
were really turned over to him from the beginning," Whitman says. The
CEQ became Cheney's shadow EPA, with industry calling the shots. To
head up the council, Cheney installed James Connaughton, a former
lobbyist for industrial polluters, who once worked to help General
Electric and ARCO skirt responsibility for their Superfund waste
sites.
Industry swiftly took advantage of its new friend in the White House.
In a fax sent to the CEQ on February 6th, 2001 - two weeks after Bush
took office - ExxonMobil's top lobbyist, Randy Randol, demanded a
housecleaning of the scientists in charge of studying global warming.
Exxon urged CEQ to dump Robert Watson, who chaired the IPCC, along
with Rosina Bierbaum and Mike MacCracken, who had coordinated the
National Assessment.
Page 3
Exxon's wish was the CEQ's command. According to an internal e-mail
obtained by Rolling Stone, Connaughton' s first order of business -
even before his nomination was made public - was to write his White
House colleagues-to-be from his law firm of Sidley & Austin. He
echoed Exxon's call that Bierbaum, the acting director of the Office
of Science and Technology Policy, be "dealt." In the end, each of the
scientists on Exxon's hit list was replaced. "It was clear there was
a strong lobby and activity against me by some in the energy
industry - especially ExxonMobil," says Watson.
A month after Exxon's fax, Whitman got her first sign that the EPA
was no longer in charge of climate policy. "When I made the statement
in Italy that something might happen on CO2," she says, "the utility
industry got really engaged, and all of that caused a rethink." In a
move Cheney is suspected of engineering, conservative senators Jesse
Helms, Chuck Hagel and Larry Craig wrote the White House on March 6th
seeking a "clarification" of the president's policy.
Two days later, the climate "rethink" was laid out in a memo by a
team of advisers loyal to Cheney - two of whom, Andrew Lundquist and
Karen Knutson, would go on to lead the vice president's energy task
force. The memo - provided to Rolling Stone by a former
administration official - concluded that Bush's campaign promise to
regulate CO2 "did not fully reflect the president's position" and
that "it would be premature at this time to propose any specific
policy or approach aimed at addressing global warming." The authors
dismissed both the IPCC and the National Assessment, writing
that "the current state of scientific knowledge about causes of and
solutions to global warming is inconclusive and . . . must await
further scientific inquiry."
When Whitman heard that Bush was wavering on warming, she "broke
through the palace guard," as the president had urged her to do, and
marched into the Oval Office. "I wanted to tell him that there were
ways to call for a cap on carbon that wouldn't hamstring the
economy," she says, "and that it was vitally important we not be seen
as ignoring the issue of climate change." But before Whitman could
even present her case, the president cut her off. "It was clear the
decision had already been made," she says.
As a dumbstruck Whitman walked out of the Oval Office, she bumped
into the true Decider. There was Cheney, collecting the envelope from
a secretary that contained Bush's "clarification" on climate-warming
pollution - which he was on his way to deliver, in person, to his
allies in the Senate.
Although the letter was signed by the president, it bore Cheney's
unmistakable stamp. Quoting the language of the vice president's
energy staffers almost verbatim, it not only reversed Bush's promise
to regulate CO2, it also made a sweeping new declaration: that carbon
dioxide "is not a 'pollutant' under the Clean Air Act." (The
administration would cling to this untenable position for six years,
until the Supreme Court ruled in April that federal law compels the
EPA to take regulatory action on climate pollution.)
The letter concluded with a hint of things to come: "I look forward
to working with you and others to address global climate change
issues in the context of a national energy policy." Bush's about-face
on planet-warming pollution thus enabled Cheney to take control of
the White House's energy policy and to work with industry behind
closed doors to craft a polluter-friendly approach to global
warming. "By having control of the energy plan, the vice president
also had the reins on the climate policy," says Symons, who sat in on
Cheney's energy task force. "The ideology is simple: You don't put
limits on greenhouse-gas pollution, because that might put limits on
coal and oil - and that would hurt industry's performance. Everything
else flowed from that."
Page 3
Exxon's wish was the CEQ's command. According to an internal e-mail
obtained by Rolling Stone, Connaughton' s first order of business -
even before his nomination was made public - was to write his White
House colleagues-to\- be from his law firm of Sidley & Austin. He
echoed Exxon's call that Bierbaum, the acting director of the Office
of Science and Technology Policy, be "dealt." In the end, each of the
scientists on Exxon's hit list was replaced. "It was clear there was
a strong lobby and activity against me by some in the energy
industry - especially ExxonMobil," says Watson.
A month after Exxon's fax, Whitman got her first sign that the EPA
was no longer in charge of climate policy. "When I made the statement
in Italy that something might happen on CO2," she says, "the utility
industry got really engaged, and all of that caused a rethink." In a
move Cheney is suspected of engineering, conservative senators Jesse
Helms, Chuck Hagel and Larry Craig wrote the White House on March 6th
seeking a "clarification" of the president's policy.
Two days later, the climate "rethink" was laid out in a memo by a
team of advisers loyal to Cheney - two of whom, Andrew Lundquist and
Karen Knutson, would go on to lead the vice president's energy task
force. The memo - provided to Rolling Stone by a former
administration official - concluded that Bush's campaign promise to
regulate CO2 "did not fully reflect the president's position" and
that "it would be premature at this time to propose any specific
policy or approach aimed at addressing global warming." The authors
dismissed both the IPCC and the National Assessment, writing
that "the current state of scientific knowledge about causes of and
solutions to global warming is inconclusive and . . . must await
further scientific inquiry."
When Whitman heard that Bush was wavering on warming, she "broke
through the palace guard," as the president had urged her to do, and
marched into the Oval Office. "I wanted to tell him that there were
ways to call for a cap on carbon that wouldn't hamstring the
economy," she says, "and that it was vitally important we not be seen
as ignoring the issue of climate change." But before Whitman could
even present her case, the president cut her off. "It was clear the
decision had already been made," she says.
As a dumbstruck Whitman walked out of the Oval Office, she bumped
into the true Decider. There was Cheney, collecting the envelope from
a secretary that contained Bush's "clarification" on climate-warming
pollution - which he was on his way to deliver, in person, to his
allies in the Senate.
Although the letter was signed by the president, it bore Cheney's
unmistakable stamp. Quoting the language of the vice president's
energy staffers almost verbatim, it not only reversed Bush's promise
to regulate CO2, it also made a sweeping new declaration: that carbon
dioxide "is not a 'pollutant' under the Clean Air Act." (The
administration would cling to this untenable position for six years,
until the Supreme Court ruled in April that federal law compels the
EPA to take regulatory action on climate pollution.)
The letter concluded with a hint of things to come: "I look forward
to working with you and others to address global climate change
issues in the context of a national energy policy." Bush's about-face
on planet-warming pollution thus enabled Cheney to take control of
the White House's energy policy and to work with industry behind
closed doors to craft a polluter-friendly approach to global
warming. "By having control of the energy plan, the vice president
also had the reins on the climate policy," says Symons, who sat in on
Cheney's energy task force. "The ideology is simple: You don't put
limits on greenhouse-gas pollution, because that might put limits on
coal and oil - and that would hurt industry's performance. Everything
else flowed from that."

 As he shaped climate policy, Cheney took his cues from the Global
Climate Coalition, an alliance of anti-Kyoto polluters that included
the top lobbying arms of the oil and coal industries. In June 2001,
the administration dispatched Paula Dobriansky, the undersecretary of
state for global affairs, to address the GCC at the headquarters of
the American Petroleum Institute. In her speech, Dobriansky was glad
to give the industry crowd credit for the president's decision to
withdraw from the international treaty designed to slow climate
change. Her talking points from that day read, "POTUS rejected Kyoto,
in part, based on input from you."

 Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act also reveal
that Dobriansky had received a copy of the GCC's "21st Century
Climate Action Agenda," a game plan crafted by polluting industries
that calls for "a new approach to climate policy" focusing
on "voluntary actions" rather than mandatory limits on greenhouse
gases. On February 14th, 2002, Bush gave a speech at the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that laid out his policy on
global warming for the first time. The speech was a Valentine's Day
gift to polluters, officially enshrining the GCC's agenda, almost
point for point, as the White House's climate policy. Under the plan,
planet-warming pollution would actually increase by thirty-four
percent by 2030. Bush vaguely promised to cut the "intensity" of
carbon emissions by eighteen percent over the next ten years -
neglecting to mention that the nation was already on track for a
fourteen percent reduction. He touted $700 million in new funding for
technologies that might someday reduce emissions - money that
government auditors were later unable to find any trace of. And he
promised that the entire plan would be thoroughly reviewed and re\-
evaluated - in 2012, four years after he left office.
The National Academy of Sciences blasted the policy, saying it lacked
a "guiding vision, executable goals, clear timetables and criteria
for measuring progress." Even the technology promoted in the
president's plan was bogus. "It's as if these people were not
cognizant of the existing science," one member of the academy
remarked. "Stuff that would have been cutting-edge in 1980 is listed
as a priority for the future."

 In his Valentine's Day speech, Bush gave credit to the man who Cheney
had placed in charge of crafting the nation's climate policy to suit
the needs of big polluters. "I want to thank Jim Connaughton, who is
the chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality," Bush
declared. "He's done a fabulous job of putting this policy together."
Connaughton' s mission at the CEQ was to make sure climate
regulations never got in the way of energy development. A Yale-educated lawyer,
Connaughton comes across like a slightly caffeinated Ron Howard, with
a manic energy and a balding pate of wispy red hair. As head of the
CEQ, he put a green spin on polluter-friendly measures: Lowering air
quality became the "Clear Skies Initiative," while allowing timber
companies to step up their clear-cutting was dubbed the "Healthy
Forests Initiative."

 To direct the White House's spin on global warming, Connaughton
appointed Philip Cooney as his top deputy. Cooney had the right
experience for the job: He worked as "climate team leader" for the
American Petroleum Institute. In 1998, the API took part in an
industry coalition that created the "Global Climate Science
Communications Action Plan." The plan, recently entered into evidence
by the House Oversight Committee, maps out an elaborate
disinformation campaign to prevent "precipitous action on climate
change." The strategy was to sow doubt about global warming,
disseminating industry-funded research to challenge "the science
underpinning the global climate change theory."
Now, with Cooney in the White House, the industry had its own anti\-
climate man running the disinformation campaign. As the "action plan"
directed, Cooney set out to censor the EPA's science on global
warming and inject the industry's denialist positions into government
documents. "They decided they didn't need to win the debate on
climate," says Piltz, the former official who exposed Cooney's
tactics. "They just had to leave an atmosphere of uncertainty about
it and dissipate the will for political action."
Page 5
But for all his credentials as a master of spin, Cooney got off to a
rough start. In May 2002, the administration released its Climate
Action Report, a dispatch to the U.N. that documents progress on
climate-treaty obligations. The report was developed by the EPA, but
internal documents reveal that Cooney edited it to reflect positions
advocated by the API and Ford. On the opening page of the chapter on
climate impacts, Cooney inserted a litany of language in bold
intended to cast doubt on the science: "the weakest links in our
knowledge . . . a lack of understanding . . . uncertainties . . .
considerable uncertainty . . . perhaps even greater uncertainty . . .
regarded as tentative."

 But the clumsy caveats weren't enough to obscure the report's real
science. With the help of an EPA source, The New York Times filtered
out Cooney's waffling and filed a front-page story that called the
report "a stark shift for the Bush administration. " The report, the
Times observed, detailed "far-reaching effects that global warming
will inflict" and "for the first time mostly blames human actions for
recent global warming."

 Cooney was horrified: An obscure government report he had tried to
whitewash now threatened to undermine his former employers in the
energy industry. Panicked, he called on an old friend for help. Myron
Ebell had been a key member of the coalition that crafted the
disinformation "action plan." In fact, casting doubt on global
warming is Ebell's full-time job: He heads the climate-denial
campaign at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think tank that
was underwritten in part by ExxonMobil.
Ebell recalls that Cooney was frantic over the story in the
Times. "We tried to put some qualifiers on that chapter in the
report," Cooney told him. "We'd take the text from EPA, and then we'd
add a sentence like, 'We don't really know if this is really
happening.' So we tried to do it, but I can see now that we made a
total mess of it."

 Ebell's advice to Cooney is contained in a e-mail dated June 3rd,
2002. "Thanks for asking for our help," he wrote. "I know you're in
crisis mode. . . . I want to help you cool things down, but after
consulting with the team, I think that what we can do is limited
until there is an official statement from the administration
repudiating the report."

 That repudiation came the very next day. President Bush himself
dismissed the report, saying it had been "put out by the
bureaucracy. " Forget the headlines, he said - there was no shift in
the administration' s policy.
What happened next, according to internal e-mails obtained by Rolling
Stone, reveals just how seriously the White House took its
intelligence fixing on global warming. Cooney was put in charge of
damage control and was apparently instructed to craft a letter to the
Times denying that the president had changed course on climate
change. But this time, Cooney's editor was not just Connaughton, but
Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove. The collaboration with
Rove raises questions about Cooney's congressional testimony last
March, in which he insisted, under oath, that he had not discussed
with Rove his work at the CEQ.

 The letter drafted by Cooney - and vetted by Rove - insists that the
Climate Action Report "reinforces" the "significant scientific
uncertainties" emphasized in the president's climate policy. Edits to
the rough drafts of the letter were blacked out by White House
censors, but Rove's pithy endorsement of the final draft
survived. "Great," he wrote in praise of Cooney's spin. "Defends the
report rather than staying focused on the policy." In other words,
Cooney had succeeded in emphasizing the report's overhyped
uncertainties, thus shifting attention away from the White House's do\-
nothing approach to global warming.
Page 6
At the same time, Cooney got a pat on the back from Bill O'Keefe, his
old boss at API. In a letter to Bush's chief of staff, O'Keefe - by
that point a registered lobbyist for ExxonMobil - urged the president
to tighten up the White House spin machine and make sure all
communications were "on the same page, with the same message."
O'Keefe also faxed a copy to Cooney with a handwritten note
reading, "P.S. You are doing a great job."

 >From then on, Cooney wielded a heavier pen when editing official
reports on global warming. Not content to obscure science with
uncertainty, he began to rewrite the science itself. Draft documents
made public by the House Oversight Committee reveal that Cooney now
had veto power over federal scientists, including Richard Moss,
coordinator of the Climate Change Science Program Office, and even
James Mahoney, the assistant commerce secretary nominally in charge
of America's climate science.

 In one document, Moss and Mahoney attempted to push back on several
of Cooney's more than 100 edits to an EPA document called "Our
Changing Planet" - each of which served to amplify uncertainty and
downplay the threat posed by global warming. Cooney repeatedly
overruled Moss and Mahoney with an aggressive "no" scrawled in the
margins. On another document Cooney marked up, he commanded EPA
officials that "these changes must be made." Beside one strike\-
through marked with a star, Cooney wrote, "Red Flag: Do not cite
National Assessment" - dismissing the landmark report commissioned by
Bush's father.

 Although some of Cooney's edits were revealed in a New York Times
story in June 2005 that led to his departure, the full extent of his
interference has never been reported. His commissarial coup came in
April 2003, with his revisions to the EPA's Draft Report on the
Environment. He began by deleting the sentence "climate change has
global consequences for human health and the environment. " He then
deleted the top-line assessment by the National Research Council,
which establishes an unequivocal cause-and-effect link - "Greenhouse
gases are accumulating in the atmosphere as the result of human
activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean
temperatures to rise." In its place, Cooney wrote the following
mishmash of his own creation: "Some activities emit greenhouse gases
and other substances that directly or indirectly may affect the
balance of incoming and outgoing radiation, thereby potentially
affecting climate on regional and global scales."
The changes sparked a rebellion by the EPA's senior scientists. In an
internal memo uncovered by Congressional investigators, they wrote
that Cooney's edited text "no longer accurately represents scientific
consensus on climate change" and "may leave an impression that
cooling is as much an issue as warming." Whitman was also
furious. "The language that CEQ found acceptable was such pablum,"
she says now. "It was so much below the level of sophistication of
the report that I felt it would have denigrated it all." But her
solution to this problem was to simply delete the section on climate
change - handing Cooney a carte-blanche victory.

 Whitman says she killed the section hoping that scientific documents
included with the report would speak for themselves. But the
capitulation helped drive her to the breaking point. Four days after
bowing to Cooney, she resigned as head of the EPA.
Internal documents uncovered by Rolling Stone reveal that Cooney did
far more than edit scientific reports to suit the administration' s
point of view. Just as neoconservative hawk Douglas Feith funneled
false intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs to the vice president,
Cooney steered industry-sponsored junk science on global warming to
Cheney. "What disturbed me most," Whitman says, "was the
administration' s record of taking the most extreme of the science -
what I call the 'political science' - and giving it the same weight
as the real science."

 The most egregious example of cooked intelligence was a study
underwritten in part by the API, Cooney's former employer. The study,
which purported to show that the twentieth century was not unusually
warm, was authored by two astrophysicists, both of whom were on the
payroll of the George C. Marshall Institute, a climate-denial group
funded by ExxonMobil and now headed by Bill O'Keefe, Cooney's former
boss. The paper's publication in a minor German journal in January
2003 quickly created a scandal, with the editor in chief and three
other editors resigning in shame after acknowledging that the paper
was fundamentally flawed and should never have been published.
"It was sham science," says McCarthy, the Harvard scientist. "It's
almost laughable, except that this study was held up by the
administration as a definitive refutation of the temperature record."
But even as the paper was being discredited, it was causing great
excitement in the White House. When Kathie Olsen of the Office of
Science and Technology Policy [worked for sen c burns, 
abramoff; nasa scandal?; goldwater teaching award]forwarded the study to Cooney, he
responded with an enthusiastic, "Thanks, Kathie!" Six minutes later,
according to internal e-mails, the study was in the hands of Kevin
O'Donovan, who served as Cheney's point man on climate. The study
also grabbed President Bush's attention, as revealed in an e-mail
sent two days later to a high-ranking White House official: "Bob - if
you din't [sic] already have, this is the study the President was
talking about."

 The study gave Cheney's office the quasi-plausible refutation of
climate science it was waiting for. According to a memo reviewed by
congressional investigators, but which the CEQ refused to make
public, Cooney was eager to promote the sham science. The study, he e\-
mailed O'Donovan, "represents an opening to potentially reinvigorate
debate on the actual climate history of the past 1,000 years." The
paper, he added, "contradicts the dogmatic view held by many in the
climate science community that the past century was the warmest in
the past millennium. . . . We plan to begin to refer to this study in
administration communications on the science of global climate
change."

 One e-mail exchange about the study underscores just how many
industry foxes were guarding the climate henhouse. When Matthew Koch
(a White House energy adviser who today lobbies for API) saw the
study, he wrote to Cooney (the former API lobbyist who is
now "corporate issues manager" for ExxonMobil) and CC'd O'Donovan
(who now works for Shell Oil).

 "What??!!" Koch wrote in mock disbelief at the study's claim that the
planet isn't really heating up. "I want to grow oranges in the
Arctic!"

 Such joking aside, the administration continues to hold up the
discredited study as a counterweight to the IPCC's scientific, peer\-
reviewed findings on global warming. Testifying before the House
Oversight Committee in March, Connaughton lauded the study as a "new
and major piece of science." His only regret, he said, is that "I'm
not a scientist, so I can't find it conclusive."

 Although Cooney resigned in 2005, the campaign of disinformation he
implemented had the desired effect. Two months after Cooney returned
to work for ExxonMobil, the Cheney energy plan was passed into law. A
massive giveaway for the fossil-fuel industry, the Energy Policy Act
authorized $6 billion in subsidies for oil and gas production and
another $9 billion for coal producers. Worst of all, the bill fast\-
tracked the construction of coal-fired power plants that would hasten
global warming.

 Nor did Cooney's return to the oil industry spell an end to the
administration' s meddling in climate science. Less than a month
later, before the G8 summit on climate change, the administration
killed the opening line of the eight-country report - "Our world is
warming" - and quashed a section that cited "increasingly compelling
evidence of climate change." Last month, in negotiations leading up
to the newest round of G8 talks, the administration blocked another
motion that "resolute action is urgently needed in order to reduce
global greenhouse gas emissions."

 "It's the ideological bent of the current administration, " says
McCarthy. "They seem absolutely resistant to any call to action, no
matter what the science says."

 Indeed, the campaign to sow doubts about climate change has grown
more aggressive in recent years. No longer is the administration
simply censoring scientific reports - it has moved to silence the
scientists themselves. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the
administration refused to allow a top federal scientist whose
research links increased hurricane intensity to global warming to
speak to the press. It sent out a gag order to top government polar
scientists, demanding that anyone attending international scientific
conventions agree not to speak to reporters about "climate change,
polar bears and sea ice." And it ordered a former intern from the
Bush-Cheney campaign in the NASA press office to prevent Dr. James
Hansen, the godfather of global-warming science, from talking to the
media.

 "Interference with communication of science to the public has been
greater during the current administration than at any time in my
career," Hansen testified before Congress in March, suggesting that
NASA's press office had become an "office of propaganda." This month,
when news leaked that the Pentagon plans to kill a satellite program
critical to monitoring the Earth's climate, NASA's scientists issued
a confidential memo warning that the move "places the overall climate
program in serious jeopardy."
In many ways, the administration' s refusal to budge on global
warming
mirrors its intransigence on Iraq. No matter how bad the reports from
the field get, Bush appears determined to stay the course. "Never
once - not a single time - have they revisited the decision to not do
anything serious about global warming," says Symons, who sat in on
Cheney's task force. "They say it's more 'serious' now than they did
earlier on. But the president has never said, 'Let's start over and
come up with a real plan.' "
Even when Bush proposes what looks like a plan, it's designed to
stall real progress on global warming. In May, America's allies in
the G8 unveiled an ambitious proposal: Member nations would cut
planet-warming pollution in half by 2050, accepting mandatory caps on
carbon emissions. But the administration flatly rejected the plan,
which it called "fundamentally incompatible with the president's
approach to climate change."

 Instead, at the G8 summit on June 6th, Bush pushed what he touted as
his "new initiative" for combating climate change. For the first
time, the president acknowledged that "long-term goals for reducing
greenhouse gases" are needed. But his solution, in essence, is to
take his do-nothing strategy global, turning our allies into a
Coalition of the Warming. Under his proposal, mandatory caps on
emissions would be replaced with "aspirational goals" to be met
through voluntary cuts and futuristic technology. Countries would
work independently for the next "ten to twenty years" to develop
strategies to "improve energy security, reduce air pollution and also
reduce greenhouse gases" - apparently in that order.
And when will the United States and other polluting nations be
expected to meet the nonbinding targets they set for themselves under
Bush's plan? Not until as late as 2075 - well past the point that
global warming will have superheated the planet.

sum:

The Energy Policy Act of 2005, signed by President George W. Bush on August 8, 2005, achieved many of the goals set out by Cheney’s secret task force in 2001 and ushered in a new era of deregulation, self-regulation, and utter disregard for environmental and safety laws. It also coincided with a culture of deep and widespread corruption at the Interior Department, including the Minerals Management Service. This era unquestionably set the stage for the BP oil catastrophe—Cheney’s Katrina.

*Joshua Dorner*is Communications Director for Progressive Media. To read more about the causes and consequences of the BP oil catastrophe, go the Energy and Environment page of the Center for American Progress web site.

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2010/06/prelude_cheney_katrina.html

DC approced cooney pick conn

conn and dc undercut ctw till she quit

cooney headed api fight on ghg p 108

cooney left for sr pos at exxon

chevron big infl on energy task force (as were funders of bush cheney polit funds? p111

dc tried to turn emissions from epa to doe 115

The co-presidency of Bush and Cheney

By Shirley Anne Warshaw

http://books.google.com/books?sitesec=reviews&id=i2-PWgKCKDAC

Editorial Review - Publishers Weekly vol. 256 iss. 14 p. 37 (c) 04/06/2009

In this critical investigation of former vice president Cheney’s role in George W. Bush’s administration, Warshaw (The Keys to Power ) reveals how Bush and Cheney split the presidency, each using the office’s power to advance agendas that rarely overlapped. This suited Bush’s limited agenda and experience well; while he focused on education reform and faith-based initiatives, he was content to leave Cheney in charge of economic and foreign policy. As head of Bush’s transition team, Cheney staffed virtually the entire administration with longtime associates who shared his vision of a strong—some have called it “imperial”—executive. He and his staff controlled political appointments and drafted most of the 800-plus signing statements affixed to bills that declared the president’s refusal to enforce selected parts of laws passed by Congress. Warshaw rejects analyses that portray either Cheney or Karl Rove as puppet masters in favor of portraying Bush as capable in the spheres that mattered to him, where Cheney was careful not to interfere. Thoroughly researched and insightful into the complexities of both personalities, the book offers an engaging look at the most controversial presidency since Nixon’s. (June)

co-prez bk

dc's dc at OMB was mitch daniels, VP eli lilley

http://books.google.com/books?id=i2-PWgKCKDAC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

nyt

Editorial

Mr. Cheney's Imperial Presidency

Published: December 23, 2005

George W. Bush has quipped several times during his political career that it would be so much easier to govern in a dictatorship. Apparently he never told his vice president that this was a joke.

Virtually from the time he chose himself to be Mr. Bush's running mate in 2000, Dick Cheney has spearheaded an extraordinary expansion of the powers of the presidency - from writing energy policy behind closed doors with oil executives to abrogating longstanding treaties and using the 9/11 attacks as a pretext to invade Iraq, scrap the Geneva Conventions and spy on American citizens.

It was a chance Mr. Cheney seems to have been dreaming about for decades. Most Americans looked at wrenching events like the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal and the Iran-contra debacle and worried that the presidency had become too powerful, secretive and dismissive. Mr. Cheney looked at the same events and fretted that the presidency was not powerful enough, and too vulnerable to inspection and calls for accountability.

The president "needs to have his constitutional powers unimpaired, if you will, in terms of the conduct of national security policy," Mr. Cheney said this week as he tried to stifle the outcry over a domestic spying program that Mr. Bush authorized after the 9/11 attacks.

Before 9/11, Mr. Cheney was trying to undermine the institutional and legal structure of multilateral foreign policy: he championed the abrogation of the Antiballistic Missile Treaty with Moscow in order to build an antimissile shield that doesn't work but makes military contractors rich. Early in his tenure, Mr. Cheney, who quit as chief executive of Halliburton to run with Mr. Bush in 2000, gathered his energy industry cronies at secret meetings in Washington to rewrite energy policy to their specifications. Mr. Cheney offered the usual excuses about the need to get candid advice on important matters, and the courts, sadly, bought it. But the task force was not an exercise in diverse views. Mr. Cheney gathered people who agreed with him, and allowed them to write national policy for an industry in which he had recently amassed a fortune.

The effort to expand presidential power accelerated after 9/11, taking advantage of a national consensus that the president should have additional powers to use judiciously against terrorists.

Mr. Cheney started agitating for an attack on Iraq immediately, pushing the intelligence community to come up with evidence about a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda that never existed. His team was central to writing the legal briefs justifying the abuse and torture of prisoners, the idea that the president can designate people to be "unlawful enemy combatants" and detain them indefinitely, and a secret program allowing the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on American citizens without warrants. And when Senator John McCain introduced a measure to reinstate the rule of law at American military prisons, Mr. Cheney not only led the effort to stop the amendment, but also tried to revise it to actually legalize torture at C.I.A. prisons.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Barton Gellman’s newsbreaking investigative journalism documents how Vice President Dick Cheney redefined the role of the American vice presidency, assuming unprecedented responsibilities and making it a post of historic power.

Dick Cheney changed history, defining his times and shaping a White House as no vice president has before— yet concealing most of his work from public view. Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman parts the curtains of secrecy to show how Cheney operated, why, and what he wrought.

Angler, Gellman’s embargoed and highly explosive book, is a work of careful, concrete, and original reporting backed by hundreds of interviews with close Cheney allies as well as rivals, many speaking candidly on the record for the first time. On the signature issues of war and peace, Angler takes readers behind the scenes as Cheney maneuvers for dominance on what he calls the iron issues from Iraq, Iran, and North Korea to executive supremacy, interrogation of Al Qaeda suspects, and domestic espionage. Gellman explores the behind-the- scenes story of Cheney’s tremendous influence on foreign policy, exposing how he misled the four ranking members of Congress with faulty intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, how he derailed Bush from venturing into Israeli- Palestinian peace talks for nearly five years, and how his policy left North Korea and Iran free to make major advances in their nuclear programs.

Domestically, Gellman details Cheney’s role as “super Chief of Staff ”, enforcer of conservative orthodoxy; gatekeeper of Supreme Court nominees; referee of Cabinet turf; editor of tax and budget laws; and regulator in chief of the administration’s environment policy. We watch as Cheney, the ultimate Washington insider, leverages his influence within the Bush administration in order to implement his policy goals. Gellman’s discoveries will surprise even the most astute students of political science.

Above all, Angler is a study of the inner workings of the Bush administration and the vice president’s central role as the administration’s canniest power player. Gellman exposes the mechanics of Cheney’s largely successful post-September 11 campaign to win unchecked power for the commander in chief, and reflects upon, and perhaps changes, the legacy that Cheney—and the Bush administration as a whole—will leave as they exit office.

Fri Jun 18, 2010 at 01:52 AM PDT

Dick Cheney rears his head over the Gulf disaster

by 1BQFollow

You probably know that Halliburton, the contractor BP hired to cement the well, is under investigation for its role in this disaster.

You may also know that Dick Cheney has ended his seclusion in a secure, though disclosed, location.

But do you know just how much of this disaster could be attributed, both directly and indirectly, to Dick Cheney? Viewed as a whole, his actions while in office make him look at least as culpable in the Gulf oil disaster as Tony Hayward. Please bear with me - this will take a while to explain...

The failure of the MMS to regulate the oil and gas industries is now legendary (to the extent that it was regulated at all). It could be argued that the American Petroleum Institute regulated the MMS, apparently, and despite its inquiries, with Congress' permission. How this came about was a long-term strategy.

It seems that Wyoming, Cheney's home state, has been a breeding ground for fossil fuel enthusiasts. And those enthusiasts found employment working for and with the Bush Administration:

The Wyoming connection was especially evident from 2000 to 2008, during the two administrations of President George W. Bush and his vice president, Wyoming native Dick Cheney. A former chief executive of Halliburton, Cheney took an early and very active interest in energy policy and placed several Wyoming political friends in key positions in the Department of Interior.

Among those friends and the key positions they occupied:

-- David J. Gribbin III, a high school and college friend from Wyoming, was Cheney's transitional liaison with Congress. Gribbin previously worked for Cheney as Halliburton’s chief lobbyist in the capital.

-- Thomas Sansonetti, a prominent Cheyenne lawyer, GOP activist, and member of the conservative Federalist Society, who headed the team choosing top personnel for the Department of Interior, which oversees Minerals Management Service.

-- Gayle Norton, who, though not from Wyoming, was picked by Sansonetti to head Interior. Native Coloradan Norton was a longtime protégée of James Watt in the Mountain States Legal Foundation, of which Watt was the founding director. Norton was also a member of the Federalist Society.

-- Rebecca W. Watson, a former Sheridan, Wyoming, lawyer, who Norton named as assistant Interior Secretary for Land and Minerals Management. Watson was responsible for the Bureau of Land Management, the Office of Surface Mining and the Minerals Management Service.

-- Rejane "Johnnie" Burton of Casper had managed the Wyoming Department of Revenue under former Gov. Jim Geringer. In 2007, Burton resigned under fire from her $168,000-a-year Minerals Management director’s job after the Department of Interior Inspector General found widespread corruption in the agency’s Colorado-based royalty collection office. In addition, questions were raised in Congress about Burton’s handling of offshore leases. Burton now works as a $49,000-a-year aide for longtime friend and former legislative colleague Wyoming U.S. Rep. Cynthia Lummis.

-- Randall Luthi, of  Freedom, is a former speaker of the Wyoming House and a former aide to U.S. Sen. Alan K. Simpson. He succeeded Burton as MMS director.  Luthi left his Minerals Management position when President Obama took office in January 2009. A little over a year later, Luthi was named president of the National Ocean Industries Association, the main industry trade group for the offshore oil and gas industry. (Luthi testified May 27 before the House Natural Resources committee investigating the Gulf of Mexico disaster. (Complete hearing transcript - PDF.)  Several of the companies involved in the Deepwater Horizon disaster are members of Luthi’s association. One of the National Ocean Industries’ stated missions: reduce federal regulatory controls. More about Luthi here (be sure to click through the links; the Daily Beast article is a doozy!)

-- Former Wyoming U.S. Rep. Barbara Cubin, as chairman of the House Resources Energy and Minerals subcommittee, was Congress’ most strident champion of the now-abandoned "Royalty-in-Kind" program that had allowed energy producers to pay Mineral Management Services royalties with gas or oil instead of cash. Where was the protest by the deficit hawks?

-- Current U.S. Rep. Cynthia Lummis pushed a proposal through the state Board of Land Commissioners to commit Wyoming’s 50 percent share of federal natural gas royalties to the Minerals Management Royalty-in-Kind program While serving as state treasurer in 2005. In 2008, Royalty in Kind accounted for more than half of the $543 million in federal gas royalties dispersed to the state. Deficit hawks, are you reading this?

Got the picture? The Department of Interior in general, and the MMS in particular, were oozing with Cheney devotees. This ensured that the primary regulatory body for the fossil fuel industry would be "industry friendly." But that's just part of the story.

Another part of the story is the "National Energy Policy Development Group," aka the Cheney Energy Task Force. Offered without comment from Sourcewatch:

The National Energy Policy Development Group was a group, created by Executive Order on January 29, 2001, that was chaired by Vice President Richard Cheney. The group, commonly referred to as the "Cheney Energy Task Force," produced a National Energy Policy report in May 2001. In a cover note to George W. Bush, Cheney wrote that "we have developed a national energy policy designed to help bring together business, government, local communities and citizens to promote dependable, affordable and environmentally sound energy for the future." The composition of the task force, according to the report, was confined to government officials.

However, according to media reports at the time, energy industry executives participated in the Task Force. In particular, those identified as having been involved included then-Enron President and Chairman Kenneth Lay and lobbyists Haley Barbour and Marc Racicot.

The National Resources Defense Council filed a FOIA request for the records of the meetings. As they state:

In early 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney presided over a task force charged with setting a new national energy policy. For months high-ranking Bush administration officials met in secret with lobbyists and executives from utility companies and the oil, gas, coal and nuclear energy industries. In May 2001 the task force released its recommendations: more subsidies to polluting industries, more reliance on oil, more nuclear power. Despite NRDC's repeated requests for information, the Bush administration refused to disclose the names of industry participants in the task force or what they discussed with Bush policymakers.

In April 2001 NRDC filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act for access to the task force's records; the Bush administration refused to comply. NRDC filed suit, and a federal judge ordered the administration to turn over the documents. On March 25, 2002, nearly a year after first requesting them, NRDC received roughly 10,000 pages relating to the task force from the Department of Energy. Subsequently the department provided another 3,500 pages, but withheld more than 16,000 others.

You can peruse the documents here. As they clarify further:

Even though the government heavily censored the documents before supplying them to NRDC, they reveal that Bush administration officials sought extensive advice from utility companies and the oil, gas, coal and nuclear energy industries, and incorporated their recommendations, often word for word, into the energy plan.

The Guardian reported on a piece by the WSJ:

The oil well spewing crude into the Gulf of Mexico didn't have a remote-control shut-off switch used in two other major oil-producing nations as last-resort protection against underwater spills.

The lack of the device, called an acoustic switch, could amplify concerns over the environmental impact of offshore drilling after the explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon rig last week...

... regulators in two major oil-producing countries, Norway and Brazil, in effect require them. Norway has had acoustic triggers on almost every offshore rig since 1993.

The U.S. considered requiring a remote-controlled shut-off mechanism several years ago, but drilling companies questioned its cost and effectiveness, according to the agency overseeing offshore drilling. The agency, the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service, says it decided the remote device wasn't needed because rigs had other back-up plans to cut off a well.

The U.K., where BP is headquartered, doesn't require the use of acoustic triggers.

The Journal's report doesn't come out and say this, but the environmental lawyer, Mike Papantonio, said on the Schultz show in an interview you can watch here that it was Cheney's energy task force - the secretive one that he wouldn't say much about publicly - that decided that the switches, which cost $500,000, were too much a burden on the industry. The Papantonio segment starts at around 5:00 in and lasts three minutes or so.

So Dick Cheney's Energy Task Force, that was supposed to "promote dependable, affordable and environmentally sound energy for the future," consulted with wolves on how best to guard the sheep

A White House document shows that executives from big oil companies met with Vice President Cheney's energy task force in 2001 -- something long suspected by environmentalists but denied as recently as last week by industry officials testifying before Congress.

The document, obtained this week by The Washington Post, shows that officials from Exxon Mobil Corp., Conoco (before its merger with Phillips), Shell Oil Co. and BP America Inc. met in the White House complex with the Cheney aides who were developing a national energy policy, parts of which became law and parts of which are still being debated.

In a joint hearing last week of the Senate Energy and Commerce committees, the chief executives of Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp. and ConocoPhillips said their firms did not participate in the 2001 task force. The president of Shell Oil said his company did not participate "to my knowledge," and the chief of BP America Inc. said he did not know.

Chevron was not named in the White House document, but the Government Accountability Office has found that Chevron was one of several companies that "gave detailed energy policy recommendations" to the task force. In addition, Cheney had a separate meeting with John Browne, BP's chief executive, according to a person familiar with the task force's work; that meeting is not noted in the document.

Separately, the conservative Judicial Watch filed a FOIA request of their own and found that

on the grounds that the administration was not "in compliance with the Federal Advisory Commission Act (FACA), which mandates that certain documents, task force members, meetings, and decision-making activities be open to the public." Judicial Watch argued that the acting as energy lobbyists -- "regularly attended and fully participated" in the group's meetings held behind closed doors, and were in fact members of the group. The Sierra Club also filed suit. (The two actions were later merged.) "At issue is whether Cheney allowed private energy lobbyists and big-name campaign contributors to participate in the work of the group, and if so, whether that information should be made public," UPI reported.

They also found:

that documents turned over by the Commerce Department, under court order as a result of Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit concerning the activities of the Cheney Energy Task Force, contain a map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals, as well as 2 charts detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects, and "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts." The documents, which are dated March 2001, are available on the Internet at: www.JudicialWatch.org.

The Saudi Arabian and United Arab Emirates (UAE) documents likewise feature a map of each country’s oilfields, pipelines, refineries and tanker terminals. There are supporting charts with details of the major oil and gas development projects in each country that provide information on the projects, costs, capacity, oil company and status or completion date.

You can view the documents here.

When you tie the whole thing together, you end up with a compelling case for the following points, none of which is original and all of which are familiar to you, but taken as whole, detail an abuse of executive power that has resulted in preventable disasters:

-- Cheney appointed cronies to positions within the Bush Administration where they could be the most helpful to the fossil fuel industry, rubber-stamping the industry's every wish;

-- The Cheney Energy Task Force recommended rules and guidelines that allowed the fossil fuel industry to be self-"regulating;"

-- The Cheney Energy Task Force may have specifically recommended against a safety device that might have averted the loss of 11 lives;

-- The Cheney Energy Task Force appeared to have some interest in early 2001 in Iraq's oil industry, including which foreign companies were pursuing business there

Does anyone besides me think Dick Cheney ought to rear his orange-jumpsuit-clad head over a prison yard for the rest of his life? If so, can you contact an elected official to suggest that an investigation into Cheney's role in the abomination in the Gulf that he helped create (in addition to pulling us into a war of aggression) is at least as worthy of investigation as Tony Hayward?

Please remember to rec the BP Catastrophe Liveblog Mothership!

Post-coffee update: Thanks to those who've clicked through many of the links. In the semi-cold light of morning, I feel even more strongly that no matter how culpable Tony Hayward is, Dick Cheney played a pivotal role in enabling the cost-cutting measures that cost 11 lives on Deepwater Horizon, not to mention the thousands of lives lost or shattered in two wars of aggression.

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