Rupert Cornwell: Behind every US disaster has been the hand of Dick Cheney - and still he goes on

[marmar]

from the Independent UK:


Rupert Cornwell: Behind every new US disaster has been the hand of Dick Cheney - and still he goes on
Insofar as one can divine such things in Kremlinesque Washington, his influence appears as strong as ever

Published: 20 July 2007

So now we know - sort of. Six years after the event, The Washington Post published this week a partial list of those consulted by the task force headed by Vice-President Dick Cheney, set up by President George Bush soon after he took office in January 2001, to map a new energy strategy for the US.

In a way, it's no big deal. The list, which the administration has fought tooth and nail through the courts to keep secret, reveals that the task force relied preponderantly upon experts from, and lobbyists for, the big oil, gas and utility companies.

Given the industry backgrounds of thePresident and the Vice-President, and the massive campaign contributions they and their Republican Party received from the energy companies, this was precisely as everyone suspected. Environmental groups were ignored, until a token meeting near the end of the task force's deliberations. The final report, issued in mid-2001, was no great surprise either, with its emphasis on boosting supplies - by opening up the Arctic wildlife refuge for oil drilling, among other things - rather than curbing consumption, as the environmentalists had demanded in vain .

But the symbolic importance of the affair was, and remains, enormous. It set the tone for everything that would come after. It offered a first taste for the obsessive secrecy of the incoming administration, underlining how the old adage about government in the Soviet Union - that you knew nothing but understood everything - applied to this White House almost as much as it did to the Communist-era Kremlin.

It demonstrated how Bush, prodded by Cheney, would use every means at his disposal to remove shackles from the executive branch. In short, it was an early, and deadly accurate, clue to how Bush rule would work.

The untried and incurious President would reign. But his government would be shaped largely by his vastly experienced Vice-President, contemptuous of Congress and so skilled in the ways of Washington bureaucracy that his authority across every branch of the administration would come to resemble that of a British prime minister. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article2785430.ece