Cheney, energy and Iraq invasion

Supreme Court to rule on secrecy

The case Cheney vs. U.S. District Court is scheduled to be heard before the Supreme Court next month and could end up revealing more about the Bush administration's motives for the 2003 Iraq war than any conceivable investigation of U.S. intelligence concerning Iraq's purported weapons of mass destruction.

The plaintiffs, the Sierra Club and Judicial Watch, the conservative legal group based in Washington, argue that Vice President Cheney and his staff violated the open-government Federal Advisory Committee Act by meeting behind closed doors with energy industry executives, analysts and lobbyists.

The plaintiffs allege these discussions occurred during the formulation of the Bush administration's May 2001 "National Energy Policy."

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They included maps of Middle East and Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals, two charts detailing various Iraqi oil and gas projects, and a March 2001 list of "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts," detailing the status of their efforts. The documents are available at www.judicialwatch.org.

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http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/03/21/ING0H5LTDA1.DTL

also find the Afghanistan pipeline maps in those papers also - it was Enron's silver bullet to get gas for the Dahbold plant in India

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2001/123001a.html

And if we don't, Kerry should be all over it. He could do it in a way that criticizes Cheney and shrub, but not SCOTUS.

Let them try to say he is second-guessing the supreme court. They are the ones who are always yelling about activist judges.

of maps: http://www.judicialwatch.org/071703.b_PR.shtml

Judicial Watch is a plaintiff only to allow Cheney to escape. Judicial Watch is a pigfucking RW law group.

pulls the whole thing together very clearly.

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As early as April 17, 1995, the Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. petroleum giants realized that "Iraq is the biggie" in terms of future oil production, that the U.S. oil companies were "worried about being left out" of Iraq's oil dealings due to the antagonism between Washington and Baghdad, and that they feared that "the companies that win the rights to develop Iraqi fields could be on the road to becoming the most powerful multinationals of the next century."

U.N. sanctions against Iraq, maintained at the insistence of the United States and Britain, prevented these deals from being consummated.

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There are many other indications that, despite the Bush administration's repeated and insistent denials, petroleum politics may have played a crucial role in the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

For instance, both the State Department and the Pentagon had pre-war planning groups that included a focus on Iraq's oil industry; protecting the industry was an early U.S. objective in the war.

In October 2002, Oil and Gas International reported that U.S. planning was already under way to reorganize Iraq's oil and business relationships.

more>

Thanks for posting. Duly added to my collection of links.

"And all Iraqi military and civilian personnel should listen carefully to this warning: In any conflict, your fate will depend on your actions. Do not destroy oil wells, a source of wealth that belongs to the Iraqi people." - George W. Bush, March 17, 2003

*whew*