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May 08, 2007

A preference for secrecy has long been a Cheney character trait, and he showed it immediately after taking office. He formed the National Energy Policy Development Group and used it to create a national energy policy, but refused to name the members of the task force and claimed an executive privilege to keep the nature of the discussions secret. In Nov. 2001, Bush made Cheney the first vice-president in American history to hold the same executive privilege to classify information as the president.

The policy that came out of the NEPDG focused on the need to establish new sources of oil, to make “energy security a priority of U.S. trade and foreign policy,” and to promote outside investment in oil and gas industries of Middle East and Persian Gulf countries. The task force worked quickly by Washington standards, meeting for less than 100 days to prepare a comprehensive national policy regarding a complex and critical aspect of modern life.
The Sierra Club, Judicial Watch and the Government Accounting Office filed separate lawsuits against Cheney, seeking the release of all documents related to the energy task force. Cheney had refused the GAO’s direct agency-to-agency request, saying that it would compromise “the confidentiality of communications among a President, a Vice-President, the President’s other senior advisors and others.”

In July 2003, the Supreme Court denied Cheney’s bid for secrecy and ordered the NEPDG to release its documents to the public, which showed that members of the task force included Ken Lay, CEO of an already-troubled Enron, along with six other Enron executives; ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond and others from ExxonMobil, and representatives from the American Petroleum Institute.

Other documents described which countries and transnational companies had agreements with Saddam Hussein to develop Iraq’s oil. There were maps and charts detailing Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries, terminals and gas projects. There were also maps of all oil and gas development in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The documents are dated March 2001, two years before the invasion of Iraq.

Cheney’s personal insistence on secrecy didn’t interfere with his role in leaking the identity of Valerie Plame, a covert CIA officer who had the misfortune of being married to a man who became a target for what Gore Vidal refers to as “the Cheney/Bush junta.” The perjury trial of Cheney’s former Chief of Staff, Lewis Libby, has revealed that Cheney was deeply involved in the attempt to discredit Plame’s husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, after he blew the whistle on Bush’s claim that Saddam Hussein was seeking uranium from Niger to build a nuclear weapon.

According to Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, “Cheney enlisted Libby to act as his surrogate and personally respond to reporters’ queries about the veracity of Wilson’s allegations by authorizing his chief of staff to leak classified information to journalists.

The classified information that was leaked may have included Plame’s covert status,” Fitzgerald said, “In retaliation for her husband’s stinging rebukes of the administration’s Iraq policies.”

“There is a cloud over the vice president. ... a cloud over the White House over what happened,” Fitzgerald told the jury. “That cloud is something you just can’t pretend isn’t there.”

It was Cheney’s office that wrote up the 2002 “torture memos” claiming the Geneva Conventions don’t apply to “enemy combatants.” It was Cheney himself who described Sen. John McCain’s legislation banning inhumane treatment of detainees as a law that “would cost thousands of American lives.” Based on that record, Admiral Stansfield Turner, a former director of the CIA, referred to Cheney as “the Vice President for torture.”

“Cheney’s manner and authority of voice far outstrip his true abilities,” according to Chas Freeman, who was an ambassador to Saudi Arabia in the first Bush administration. “It was clear from the start that George W. Bush required adult supervision – but it turns out Cheney has even worse instincts. He does not understand that when you act recklessly, your mistakes will come back and bite you on the ass.”

The Casper Star Tribune isn’t too pleased with Cheney these days either, saying in a December 2006 editorial: “During Cheney’s tenure as VP, Wyoming has seen a virtual takeover of our public lands by the oil and gas industry. As the chief architect of the Bush energy policy, Cheney deserves much of the credit (or blame) for the unplanned, uncontrolled sprawl of oil and gas development across Wyoming’s open spaces. So far, it seems that the vice president has brought little more than destruction and embarrassment to Wyoming during his term in office.”

Cheney’s not even a true conservative, according to David Payne, a national security expert and occasional Fox News commentator – a man so conservative that he considers George W. Bush to be a “centrist” President.
“For a long time, I was willing to look past Cheney’s growing list of false assertions and support for dubious and decidedly un-conservative policies,” Payne wrote in July 2004. “For over three years, I observed his misguided embrace of neo-conservatism and his record as chief propagandist for the administration’s
unprovoked war against Iraq.”

Payne’s ultimate conclusion was that in order for the Republican party to get back to “a Reaganite policy of conservative realism that puts America’s national interests first,” the Vice President that he once supported “simply has to go.”

Rob Lafferty