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Monday Notes

I'm not a Bush backer, but I play one on TV

Ever practical, BC04 has uncovered a new means of building a successful press event: Stage it with actors.

The smoking gun in Major Dick's secret energy policy deliberations?

This weekend I finally read Jane Mayer's February 16 New Yorker piece on Dick Cheney and Halliburton, which contains this passage:

In Ron Suskind's recent book The Price of Loyalty, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill charges that Cheney agitated for US intervention [in Iraq] well before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Additional evidence that Cheney played an early planning role is contained in a previously undisclosed National Security Council document, dated February 3, 2001. The top-secret document, written by a high-level NSC official, concerned Cheney's newly formed Energy Task Force. It directed the NSC staff to cooperate fully with the Energy Task Force as it considered the "melding" of two seemingly unrelated areas of policy: "the review of operational policies toward rogue states," such as Iraq, and "actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields."...

Mark Medish [a Clinton-era NSC staffer]... said, "People think Cheney's Energy Task Force has been secretive about domestic issues," referring to the fact that the Vice-President has been unwilling to reveal information about private task force meetings that took place in 2001, when information was being gathered to help develop President Bush's energy policy. "But if this little group was discussing geostrategic plans for oil, it puts the issue of war in the context of the captains of the oil industry sitting down with Cheney and laying grand, global plans."

Posted by Steve Perry at March 15, 2004 9:51 AM

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