Leaving No Tracks

Source: Washington Post

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."

The vice president has intervened in many cases to undercut long-standing environmental rules for the benefit of business. Here, Cheney is photographed during an August 2004 family vacation in Moose, Wyoming.

Wooldridge wrote off the message as a prank. It was not. Cheney had reached far down the chain of command, on so unexpected a point of vice presidential concern, because he had spotted a political threat arriving on Wooldridge's desk.

....

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.

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

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We here at DU saw this happening at the time. Where was the Washington Post then?

All of this just to try to get Oregon's 1/2 % vote in the next election?

What was that question again about the greatest loss of life caused by whom?

The media pretty much ignored it. They certainly ignored why it happened.

And Dick Cheney calling up someone 20 pay grades below him? Really incredible.

A lot of California gets their water from elsewhere. It wasn't a choice between destroying the environment and destroying jobs. They could have protected both.