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Skriven 2006-08-16 02:17:00 av ROSS SAUER (1:123/140)
     Kommentar till en text av JOHN MASSEY
Ärende: Cheney's "energy task for
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JOHN MASSEY said to BOB KLAHN,

JM> WC>>>>> Now some years ago I recall making a big stink in fidonet
JM> WC>>>>> about Dick Cheney having classified the U.S. national energy
JM> JM>> policy.

JM> JM>>>> And you were wrong. You had a snit over the makeup of the
JM> JM>>>> energy advisory panel, and all the "big oil" people on in.
JM> JM>>>> The official U.S. energy policy is, and has been all along,
JM> JM>>>> on line as a pdf file

JM> BK>>>   The official policy may be, but the Advisory panel policy is
JM> BK>>>   not.

JM> JM>> Since when is an advisory panel a big deal?

JM> BK>   When it is the real policy, and the official policy is just
JM> BK>   eyewash.

JM>That sounds like something paranoid person would say, OR maybe a
JM>conspiracy theorist certainly not something a rational person would
JM>believe.

JM> JM>> Administrations have had unofficial advisors since before
JM> JM>> the kitchen cabinet

JM> JM>> The fact remains,  the official  U.S. national energy
JM> JM>> policy is and has been on line. IT IS NOT CLASSIFIED as
JM> JM>> some people claim.

JM> BK>   Nor is it significant.

JM>In my mind for someone to claim a falsehood as truth after having
JM>been shown the facts is a significant marker in that persons
JM>character.

Oh John...

Cheney's day before Supreme Court 
Sierra Club, Judicial Watch eye energy task force

By Tom Curry

National affairs writer
MSNBC

Updated: 10:49 a.m. CT April 26, 2004

WASHINGTON - On Tuesday, Vice President Dick Cheney, represented by 
Solicitor General Theodore Olson, will be a petitioner before the 
Supreme Court in a case arising out of his battle with two antagonists, 
the Sierra Club and the gadfly group Judicial Watch. 

In the case, called Cheney vs. U.S. District Court for the District of 
Columbia, the vice president is urging the justices to block his 
adversaries from using the legal discovery process to get documents 
revealing the workings of the National Energy Policy Development Group, 
a task force Cheney headed three years ago. 

According to the Washington Post, Cheney met in early 2001 with 
executives from the oil and gas industries, including Anadarko 
Petroleum’s Robert Allison and then-Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay.

The Sierra Club and Judicial Watch charge that the Cheney task force 
included energy industry bigwigs as de facto members and therefore was 
subject to a 1972 law called the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), 
which requires disclosure of the work of advisory groups that include 
non-federal employees.

There are odd aspects to this controversy:

Many of the task force’s recommendations for expanding energy supplies 
were the very same ones Bush had made during the 2000 campaign, 
including more oil and gas drilling on federal lands in Western states, 
more subsidies for using cleaner-burning coal to generate electricity, 
and oil drilling in part of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. 
What the task force came up with was neither new nor surprising, given 
the platform on which Bush had campaigned.
None of the legislative recommendations sketched out in the Cheney 
group’s report has been enacted by Congress, partly due to the hubbub 
over energy companies having a voice in crafting the proposals. 
One of Cheney’s adversaries in the case, Carl Pope, the head of the 
Sierra Club, is also the co-founder of a group called America Coming 
Together, which is working to defeat Bush and Cheney by registering 
Democratic voters and in its words "highlighting the extremist positions 
of the Bush Republican agenda."
The Sierra Club filed a motion urging Supreme Court Associate Justice 
Antonin Scalia to recuse himself from the case, after the Los Angeles 
Times reported that he had gone on a duck hunting trip in Louisiana last 
January with Cheney, at the invitation of Scalia’s friend Wallace 
Carline, who owns a firm that provides services to oil rigs in the Gulf 
of Mexico. 
Cheney and Scalia have been friends since their days serving in the Ford 
administration 30 years ago.

Scalia issued a memorandum last month explaining why he did not believe 
his impartiality could reasonably be questioned in the case. He had 
spent almost no time alone with Cheney during the hunting trip and "of 
course we said not a word about the present case," he wrote.

Scalia noted, "there could be political consequences from disclosure of 
the fact (if it be so) that the Vice President favored business 
interests. ... But political consequences are not my concern. ... To 
expect judges to take account of political consequences ... is to ask 
judges to do precisely what they should not do."

Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said the suit against Cheney is 
driven by the need for open government. 

"The administration has an interest in making sure that the American 
people do not know whether or not folks like Ken Lay or any other energy 
industry executives had a hand in conducting government business," 
Fitton said. "We have right to know that. It is not improper to ask 
those questions. And it is not improper for the court to ask them. The 
court is only saying, ‘Tell us what outsiders, if any, were involved and 
what was the extent of their involvement.’"

(snip)

© 2006 MSNBC Interactive

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