| MAINA |
Posted
on 01-Apr-02 11:53 AM
Where There's a Pipe, There's Smoke
By James Ledbetter
Posted Thursday, March 28, 2002, at 10:53 AM PT
There's nothing that stimulates the juices of investigative journalists quite as much as the release of heretofore hidden documents. The notion of irrefutable proof of corruption—people lie, but memos always tell the truth—is so central to the myth of crusading journalism that it's part of the national language: the paper trail or, most significantly, "The Smoking Gun."
And thus Enron junkies (we know who we are) were eagerly anticipating some 11,000 pages of documents pulled out of the Department of Energy this week, thanks to lawsuits from the Natural Resources Defense Council and others. While not specifically focused on Enron, the paperwork surrounding Dick Cheney's energy task force gives a glimpse into the cozy world of energy executives and federal policy-makers.
Do the documents deliver? To an extent. The administration's claim that it balanced the views of huge Republican contributors like Enron's Kenneth Lay with the concerns of environmentalists and consumer groups has been amply demonstrated to be a fib. Both Cheney and Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham refused to meet with NRDC and related green groups, at best whisking them off to lower-level staffers. By contrast, as the New York Times reported yesterday, the most powerful doors were almost always open to anyone whose hands were dripping with oil.
The DOE documents give a clear view of the policy implications flowing from this privileged access. I hope there are still U.S. citizens who find it shocking that substantial portions of the executive order for energy policy that Bush signed on May 18 were literally drafted by the American Petroleum Institute. (You can read it, with the accompanying e-mail message from API, here.)
Personally, the debt of the Bush clan to the oil industry seems like such an a priori political assumption that having API write the federal policy almost looks like an efficiency. Letting the regulated write the regulations may be wrong, but it's kind of a GOP tradition, the Bush administration's homage to Reagan and Gingrich.
Defending the Darth Vader of Campaign Reform
How the Yankees Could Blow It
Are 9/11 Victims More Deserving?
And that's where the impact of these DOE documents hits its limit. If you've paid any attention to the Cheney task force stories, you know that energy executives wrote the administration's policies; the rest is just connecting the dots.
But this story is far from over, and the DOE documents do give the sense that some smoke might yet emerge from this pistol, for a very simple reason: The administration seems incredibly paranoid about the release of this information. Cheney's refusal to disclose even rudimentary facts about his deliberations, while frustrating and probably counterproductive, at least has the fig leaf of constitutional justification surrounding it. But the DOE documents have been censored (the official term is "redacted") so heavily and seemingly unnecessarily that they give off an odor of coverup.
Aficionados of the Freedom of Information Act are of course familiar with memos that have portions blackened out. There are several legal justifications for withholding information, many of them valid, such as protecting national security (e.g., the location of a nuclear missile) or protecting the identity of confidential informants, whether in law enforcement or spying.
When the issues at stake are as innocuous as who met with whom and what they discussed, one generally encounters a lower level of redaction. But not in this instance; some of the DOE pages, for example, are entirely blank. One page is blank except for the words "I hope this information helps, PJD." What information? It's a maddening tease.
There may be innocent explanations for the overwhelming secrecy. People tend to forget that the DOE, while responsible for soft-sounding issues like energy policy, also has substantial nuclear responsibilities; it's probably the federal department most thoroughly integrated with the military after the Department of Defense. The DOE's secrecy habit is deeply ingrained. Even so, it's hard to shake the sense that something potent is being intentionally withheld.
|
| MAINA |
Posted
on 01-Apr-02 12:05 PM
Monday, April 1, 2002 (Washington):
Former US President Bill Clinton has said that international terrorist Osama bin Laden had planned to kill him and had special hitmen trained to carry out the task.
"He was training people to kill me, which is fair enough -- I was trying to get him," Clinton told Newsweek magazine in an interview due on stands today.
He says he tried repeatedly to kill bin Laden and recounts a tough decision in the fall of 2000 when the US received intelligence about his possible whereabouts.
"But there were very large number of women and children in that compound and it's almost like he (bin Laden) was daring me to kill them."
Clinton considered the option of a commando raid but "the closest we could get was about 1400 kilometres away on a boat, since we didn't have any basing rights then, and we didn't have anything like the international support that existed following September 11".
On President George W Bush's 'war on terrorism', Clinton says he supports it and does not believe that the events of September 11 would overshadow his presidency. He was, however, critical of his successor's approach towards North Korea.
"We ended their nuclear programme in 1994 and we nearly came to blows. It was about as close as we came to an all out war when I was President. We kept it quiet because I didn't want to score anybody. But I knew I couldn't afford to let North Korea develop nuclear weapons," he adds. (PTI)
|
