Vice (3 page)

Among the documents released are a number of pages that demonstrate what Cheney is hiding. Perhaps the most stunning of all the documents obtained by Judicial Watch are maps of
Iraqi
oil
fields, with a long list of corporate "suitors" for each oilfield. Why were the vice president and a group of oilmen poring over maps of Iraq long before there was any pretext to invade the country? Iraq's oil was technically embargoed and under U.N. control—why make plans for divvying up its oil reserves?

Most likely because this fit into a larger scheme Cheney had supported for years. For more than a decade, the vice president had been involved with a small group of conservative foreign policy hawks, who as they came together to advise George W. Bush began to refer to themselves as "the
Vulcans."
Among the hard-liners in this decidedly hard-line group are Paul Wolfbwitz,
Richard Perle
,
Donald Rumsfeld
, and Dick Cheney. Six of the Vulcans—Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz,
Colin Powell
,
Richard Armitage
, and
Condoleezza Rice
—ended up in the Bush-Cheney administration. Armitage and Powell represented the most moderate faction of the so-called Vulcans. The public first began to hear of some of the Vulcans in 1998, when associates of a small think tank known as the
Project for the New American Century
went public with their proposal that Bill Clinton invade Iraq. Perle, Wolfowitz,
Douglas Feith
, and
Weekly Standard
editor
William Kristol
did the big thinking on the plan to take military action against Iraq and turn it into a model democracy that would transform the Middle East. Cheney, while not a member of PNAC, had signed the group's statement of principles and was a supporter. (As events played out, the PNAC motto might as well have been "Small Group, Big War.")

Fitton's conservative instincts led him to doubt that Cheney was looking at Iraqi oilfields in preparation for war. But Fitton is bothered by the fact that there is no way to know. "We don't know because we weren't given the context," he says. "We have no way of knowing what they were deliberating."

Actually, there is some context. As Cheney and his task force studied maps of Iraq, administration officials were also calling in oil ministers from friendly Persian Gulf states surrounding Iraq. No one seemed to notice or report the facts and the context. While
Saddam Hussein
was in power in Iraq, and the country's oil revenue was under U.N. control, the vice president of the United States, U.S. Department of Energy officials, and Persian Gulf oil ministers were discussing the disposition of the region's petroleum reserves. The names and dates of visits from Middle Eastern oil ministers were obtained through the NRDC requests in the FOIA lawsuit. The lists of meetings with Persian Gulf oil ministers, and the maps obtained by the NRDC, were all included in Department of Energy files released long after a federal judge ordered them turned over to the plaintiffs—and after Bush and Cheney started the war in Iraq.

American vice presidents and presidents have studied Middle Eastern oil maps since before the Saud clan beat the Arabian Peninsula into one sovereign petroleum monarchy. And there were oilfield maps of other countries. The
United Arab Emirates
, for example. And Iran, which raises another huge set of issues. Earlier, as CEO of Dallas-based oilfield construction giant Halliburton, Cheney was making the argument that State Department sanctions keeping U.S. energy companies out of Iran and other state sponsors of terrorism were unfair to American business and should be lifted. The Iranians desperately wanted U.S. oilfield technology, and Cheney wanted to provide it. The Bush Doctrine, however, which would become more hardened after the September 11 attacks, would keep
U.S. business interests
out of Iran. Iran's maps were useful only within the context of a plan for regime change.

The focus on the Iraqi oilfield maps on the eve of an unprovoked war suggests that preliminary war planning was under way in the first three months of the Bush-Cheney administration, well before the September 11 attacks that Cheney and Bush were to use as the justification for the invasion. In fact, those plans had already been developed by Paul Wolfowitz. First securing, then unlocking Iraqi oil could only serve the interests of the United States. There was, after all, euphoric prewar speculation in the business press about the positive effect Iraq's oil would have on world markets in the long run. And Assistant Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz predicted that
rebuilding
Iraq would be paid for by tapping into Iraqi oil reserves. Some things don't work out as planned.

There is more the administration did not want made public.

Small embarrassments, such as task force executive director Joseph Kelliher e-mailing natural gas lobbyist
Dana Contratto
to ask what he would do about natural gas policy "if you were king, or Il Duce."

And a "fill-in-the-blanks" executive order drafted by the American Petroleum Institute, under a heading that read:

Executive Order ——
Energy Policy
March ——, 2001

On May 11, 2001, the draft became
Executive Order 13211
, which included, verbatim, the policy that American Petroleum Institute federal relations director
Jim Ford
spelled out, even if it was executed in May rather than March. Using the president as cover, Ford cut through government regulation and exempted certain industry acts from judicial review.

There were larger issues. On March 1,
Irl F. Engelhardt
and
Fred Palmer
, the CEO and vice president of
Peabody Energy
, met with task force director
Andrew Lundquist
, Secretary of Energy
Spencer Abraham
, and Bush economic adviser
Lawrence Lindsey
. Peabody, the world's largest
coal
company, was preparing a stock offering. Coal policy recommendations in the task force report would influence the market's response to Peabody's IPO. On March 16, the task force released its report, hyping the use of coal. On March 21, Peabody went public, raising $420 million— $60 million more than analysts had predicted. The task force was, in effect, flogging a stock offering.

There were other embarrassments.

The EPA representative on the task force had blocked the recommendation of a procedure called
hydraulic fracturing
. 'Tracking" involves high-pressure injection of chemicals into gas formations to break up rock and move the gas to the wellhead. It also contaminates aquifers used for drinking water and irrigation. In response to EPA concerns, fracking was pulled from the draft version of the report. It was reinserted in the final report. Halliburton is the nation's leader in hydraulic fracturing.

Many of the lobbyists and executives who made it to the task force table were major Bush-Cheney contributors, engaging in what looked like pay-to-play government. But the only "lobbyists" whose names and photographs the task force released to the press were representatives of
environment
al groups, all brought in on one day as a response to criticism that the
environmental
community was being shut out.

Four years after the task force went out of business, the secrecy and dishonesty continued to dog the vice president and his corporate clients, as executives for the major oil companies all told a Senate committee that they had not attended or didn't recall attending task force meetings. But after a
Secret Service
visitors' log that included their names was leaked to
The Washington Post,
and New Jersey Senator
Frank Lautenberg
announced that he was referring their testimony to the
Justice Department
, their memories improved so much that they amended their testimony.

Yet the task force's most far-reaching policy change was coldly executed by Dick Cheney himself. In one bold move, the vice president killed the environmental centerpiece of George Bush's presidential campaign. Bush had repeatedly promised that if elected, he would cap emissions of carbon dioxide, one of the known causes of
global warming
. After he took office, he turned the campaign promise into policy. Bush directed his EPA administrator Christine Whitman to move toward the carbon caps. "George Bush was very clear during the course of the campaign that he believed in a multipollutant strategy, and that includes
CO
₂
," Whitman said on
CNN
's
Crossfire.
White House senior adviser Karl Rove, who was standing beside Bush when he made the C0
₂
pledge at an Austin press conference in 1999, confirmed that the president was committed to reducing CO
₂
emissions. Bush treasury secretary Paul O'Neill was even more dramatic, observing that on "nuclear holocaust and global warming, there is no second chance."

Bush stuck by his policy even as his fellow Texans in the House,
Tom DeLay
and
Joe Barton
, attacked it. At a
Group of Eight summit
of industrial nations in early March in Italy, EPA director Whitman repeated the president's position. But while Whitman was speaking in Trieste, the vice president was at work in Washington. On March 1, Cheney received a personal note, released through the Natural Resources Defense Council's
FOIA suit
, from lobbyist Haley Barbour: "Regarding Cheney
Energy Policy
& Co."

"A moment of truth is arriving in the form of a decision whether this Administration's policy will be to regulate and/or tax C0
₂
as a pollutant," Barbour wrote. "Demurring on the issue of whether the C0
₂
idea is eco-extremism, we must ask, do environmental initiatives, which would greatly exacerbate the energy problems, trump good energy policy, which the country has lacked for eight years?"

Cheney's response to Barbour was almost as quick and reflexive as his response to Ken Lay's call for help in California. Cheney received Barbour's memo on March 1. Bush had already announced the U.S. withdrawal from the Kyoto environmental accords, but Whitman was telling the press the president was still committed to a "multi-pollutant" bill that would cap CO
₂
emissions. On March 8, an angry and embarrassed Whitman showed up at the Treasury building for a breakfast meeting with Paul O'Neill. She had in hand a letter from four Republican senators—
Chuck Hagel
,
Larry Craig
,
Jesse Helms
, and
Pat Roberts
—regarding the
Kyoto Accords
and the regulation of carbon dioxide. The letter made it clear that the carbon caps were in serious trouble in the Senate and the Kyoto Accords were dead. The letter had been faxed to her from Hagel's office two days earlier.

O'Neill was suspicious about the emphasis, the tone, and the language in the letter. It read like words "right out of Dick Cheney's mouth." They were. In the documents released to the NRDC is a copy of Chuck Hagel's floor speech on
carbon dioxide caps
, from the files of the Energy Department. Hagel was working in concert with Cheney, according to Suskind's book—and to a Senate committee source. The vice president was undermining and making a fool of Whitman. On March 13, Whitman arranged a private meeting with Bush to discuss carbon dioxide caps. She began by reminding him of the scientific evidence and of the international cooperation she had been working to build on environmental issues.

Bush interrupted her. "Christie, I've already made my decision." He said he had written a letter to Hagel, agreeing to drop the carbon dioxide caps and withdraw from Kyoto. According to O'Neill's book with Ron Suskind, as Whitman left her Oval Office meeting with the president, one of the secretaries in the atrium said: "Mr. Vice President, here's the letter for Senator Hagel." Cheney picked up the letter and left to meet with Hagel on Capitol Hill, where Cheney made a speech to the Senate Republican Conference. The topic of the speech was the reversal of policy on CO
₂
emissions.

O'Neill saw in the killing of Kyoto and the CO
₂
caps the same tactics Cheney had used when the two men served together under Presidents Nixon and Ford: "Quietly select an issue, counsel various participants, manufacture the exchange of seemingly impromptu letters or reports . . . then guide unfolding events toward the intended outcome."

It was by O'Neill's observation a "clean kill," done in the style of Dick Cheney. No fingerprints. No accountability. Cheney collaborated with four senators who were working against White House policy, then persuaded the president to join them.

A few fingerprints were later found when a federal judge ordered the release of the
Barbour memo
. And because Christine Whitman happened to be departing the White House as the vice president walked out, she saw the smoking gun in his hand.

What occurred in early 2001—in the vice president's offices in the Executive Office Building and out of the public eye—is remarkable. In the place of an open process that might have considered sustainable and renewable energy (and conservation, which the vice president described as a "private virtue"), a government-sanctioned industry cabal drew up a plan for more oil, gas, coal, and nuclear power, with far fewer protections for the environment. A smaller cabal considered the oil reserves they could liberate in
Iraq
. The 163-page report the group produced was illustrated with color prints of wildlife and even fly fishermen. Among its one hundred recommendations were more refineries with fewer environmental restrictions, 1,300 to 1,900 new power plants, and more natural gas pipelines. "Reality is not 'Well, gee, we can conserve ourselves out, we don't have to produce any more,' " Cheney said after the report was released.

The documents that Judicial Watch and the NRDC obtained are the only public record of a policy conducted behind what Fitton describes as disturbing secrecy. The secrecy in this case was essential. In four months of meetings in early 2001, industry interests created a national energy blueprint that could not bear the public embarrassment that would come with connecting each initiative to its industry sponsor. "There's nothing conservative about secrecy," says Fitton.