Leaving No Tracks (Cheney!) By Jo Becker and Barton Gellman / WaPo

[Demeter]

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/cheney/chapters/leaving_no_tracks/index.html


Leaving No Tracks

By Jo Becker and Barton Gellman

Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, June 27, 2007; Page A01

Sue Ellen Wooldridge, the 19th-ranking Interior Department official, arrived at her desk in Room 6140 a few months after Inauguration Day 2001. A phone message awaited her.

"This is Dick Cheney," said the man on her voice mail, Wooldridge recalled in an interview. "I understand you are the person handling this Klamath situation. Please call me at -- hmm, I guess I don't know my own number. I'm over at the White House."

In Oregon, a battleground state that the Bush-Cheney ticket had lost by less than half of 1 percent, drought-stricken farmers and ranchers were about to be cut off from the irrigation water that kept their cropland and pastures green. Federal biologists said the Endangered Species Act left the government no choice: The survival of two imperiled species of fish was at stake.

Law and science seemed to be on the side of the fish. Then the vice president stepped in.

First Cheney looked for a way around the law, aides said. Next he set in motion a process to challenge the science protecting the fish, according to a former Oregon congressman who lobbied for the farmers.

Because of Cheney's intervention, the government reversed itself and let the water flow in time to save the 2002 growing season, declaring that there was no threat to the fish. What followed was the largest fish kill the West had ever seen, with tens of thousands of salmon rotting on the banks of the Klamath River.

Characteristically, Cheney left no tracks.

LONG AND INTERESTING LIST OF CHENEY'S DIRTY LAUNDRY--THE RATS ARE STARTING TO SQUEAL IN PROTEST!

[Demeter]

1. The Secret Service Should Call Him Jaws, Not Angler!

[maddezmom]

2. K&R