Shortly after the Bush Administration took office, Vice President Dick Cheney held a series of secret meetings in the White House that have guided America’s energy policy over the last four years. The White House has refused repeated requests for a list of participants at the “task force” meetings. All we’ve known for sure is who wasn’t invited: enironmentalists and anyone else who might bring a perspective critical of America’s dependence on fossil fuels.
We’ve long suspected that Cheney’s special guests were top oil company executives and that these consultants largely wrote the energy guidelines that came out of the meeting. The policy strong favor the economic interests of “Big Oil” over environmental or national security concerns. The oil companies have repeatedly denied being at the meetings: Just last week, oil industry officials from Exxon Mobil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips testified at a joint hearing of the Senate Energy and Commerce committees that their employees had been part of Cheney’s energy task force.
Liar liar, pants on fire.
The Washington Post has obtained a White House document that executives from Big Oil did indeed meet with the energy task force in 2001. Investigations are in order. Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey said “The White House went to great lengths to keep these meetings secret, and now oil executives may be lying to Congress about their role in the Cheney task force.” This issue is important not only to Washington Beltway insiders but to all of us. Disasters like Hurricane Katrina and the ongoing quagmire in iraq are fueled by American energy needs. As long as we have Big Oil dictating our energy policy we will continue to have these wars and climate tragedies. People will die, lives will be ruined and we will all be taxed for our oil misadventures.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Tag Archives ⇒ dick cheney
Cheney Team Trying to Muzzle Al Jazeera
January 30, 2005
Apparently the U.S. is pressuring “Qatar to sell the Al Jazeera TV network”:www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/international/middleeast/30jazeera.html The best line in the New York Times article:
bq. Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and other Bush administration officials have complained heatedly to Qatari leaders that Al Jazeera’s broadcasts have been inflammatory, misleading and occasionally false, especially on iraq.
So I suppose Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Powell have never given out misleading or occasionally false information about iraq?
Al Jazeera is watched by 30 million to 50 million viewers. It’s coverage has been inflammatory and I’m not going to defend that, but it’s the most important media source in the Middle East and should not be shut down by American pressure. Qatar is only considering selling it, but potential buyers for the financially-strapped network are few. And the Cheney team wouldn’t be involved if they weren’t interested in making it’s content more U.S. friendly.
Why don’t we say that charity and love are Christian issue?
November 3, 2004
In this election, religious conservatives were able to craft a message making same-sex marriages look like an afront to apple pie and baseball and of course people voted against it. What if we could have somehow framed this election with the details of human suffering that these laws suggest?
Now available for the fashionable Bush-era bumper. Proceeds go to support the Nonviolence.org websites:
Vote for War (Or Else)
September 8, 2004
On Tuesday Vice President Dick Cheney told an Iowa audience that there would be more terrorism in the U.S. if he wasn’t re-elected Vice President:
bq. “It’s absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice,” Mr. Cheney told a crowd of 350 people in Des Moines, “because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we’ll get hit again and we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States.”
His words underscore just how much the Bush/Cheney Administration have relied on the 9/11 terrorist attacks for their political legitimacy. Terror breeds terror and fear, anger and violence escalates in its wake. The wars in Afghanistan and iraq are shaping a new generation of America haters, as much because the post-war rebuilding has been so careless and self-serving to American economic interests. War-mongerers in one country support the war-mongerers in another by providing each another with targets and arguments. The cycle goes on.
Images of Patriotism and the Swift Boat Controversy
August 23, 2004
The U.S. election campaign has many ironies, none perhaps as strange as the fights over the candidates’ war records. The current President George W. Bush got out of active duty in Vietnam by using the influence of his politically powerful family. While soldiers killed and died on the Mekong Delta, he goofed off on an Alabama airfield. Most of the central figures of his Administration, including Vice President Dick Cheney also avoided fighting in Vietnam.
Not that I can blame them exactly. If you don’t believe in fighting, then why not use any influence and loophole you can? It’s more courageous to stand up publicly and stand in solidarity with those conscientious objectors who don’t share your political connections. But if you’re both antiwar and a coward, hey, loopholes are great. Bush was one less American teenager shooting up Vietnam villages and for that we commend him.
Ah, but of course George W. Bush doesn’t claim to be either antiwar or a coward. Two and a half decades later, he snookered American into a war on false pretences. Nowadays he uses every photo-op he can to look strong and patriotic. Like most scions of aristocratic dynasties throughout history, he displays the worst kind of policial cowardice: he is a leader who believes only in sending other people’s kids to war.
Contrast this with his Democratic Party rival John Kerry. He was also the son of a politically-connected family. He could have pulled some strings and ended up in Alabama. But he chose to fight in Vietnam. He was wounded in battle, received metals and came back a certified war hero. Have fought he saw both the eternal horrors of war and the particular horrors of the Vietnam War. It was only after he came back that he used his political connections. He used them to puncture the myths of the Vietnam War and in so doing became a prominent antiwar activist.
Not that his antiwar activities make him a pacifist, then or now. As President I’m sure he’d turn to military solutions that we here at Nonviolence.org would condemn. But we be assured that when he orders a war, he’d be thinking of the kids that America would be sending out to die and he’d be thinking of the foreign victims whose lives would inevitably be taken in conflict.
Despite the stark contrast of these Presidential biographies, the peculiar logic of American politics is painting the military dodger as a hero and the certified war hero as a coward. The latter campaign is being led by a shadowy group called the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Today’s Guardian has an excellent article on the “Texas Republicans funding the Swift Boat controversy”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/story/0,13918,1288272,00.html. The New York Times also delves the “outright fabrications of the Swift Boat TV ads”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/20/politics/campaign/20swift.html?ex=1094018686&ei=1&en=691b4b0e81b8387f. A lot of Bush’s buddies and long-time Republican Party apparatchiks are behind this and its lies are transparent and easy to uncover. It’s a good primer on dirty politics 2004 style.
One of the big questions about this election is whether the American voters will believe more in image or substance. It goes beyond politics, really, to culture and to a consumerism that promises that with the right clothes and affected attitude, you can simply buy yourself a new identity. President Bush put on a flight jacket and landed a jet on an aircraft carrier a mile off the California beach. He was the very picture of a war hero and strong patriot. Is a photo all it takes anymore?
Dick Cheney’s Rambo Complex
March 12, 2002
U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney is touring England this week, trying to find co-producers on Gulf War II, the sequel to the disappointing minor hit of 1991. You remember the original: it was briefly popular until Bill Clinton’s “Peace and Properity” broke all previous records for an unprecedented run.
In Gulf War II, Dick Cheney is playing Rambo. It’s twelve years later and he and his sidekick George Bush Jr. are going to re-fight the war against Iraq singlehandedly. No other countries will join them this time in their fight for justice.
Like all shot-em-up movies, this one needs a convincing villain. There’s no connection between Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden but so what? They’re both shifty Arabs with facial hair. Throw in a spicy subplot if you want – “Dashing American pilots secretly held prisoner since 1991.” Americans barely notice plot and motivations. After 9/11 the White House is betting that the audience wants more war and retribution.
Unfortunately, this isn’t a Hollywood movie. Dick Cheney and the second President Bush are indeed trying to start a second war against Iraq. There’s no new provocation from Saddam Hussein. There’s no connection between him and Osama bin Laden or the 9/11 terrorist attacks. None of our allies from the first Gulf War want to join us in a second.
But Cheney and Bush want a fight anyway. It’s hard not to conclude this is some sort of “Rambo Complex.” The U.S. is led by two men fighting legacies that won’t let them put 1991 behind them. One is the son of the president accused of prematurely stopping the 1991 war before U.S. troops got to Baghdad. The other is the dying aide to both father and son, who has waited almost twelve years for a chance to prove he was right.
This week rumors of an American pilot supposedly held for eleven years have appeared out of nowhere. President Bush has been diverting attention to Saddam Hussein even while Osama bin Laden runs free. And Dick Cheney is indeed in England trying to drum up support for a new Gulf War.
While the Vice President is off wandering the margins of stage right, real tragedy and drama are holding the world’s attention center stage. Palestine and Israel are close to an all-out war. The mounting violence has worried important countries like Saudi Arabia and Syria so much that they’re proposing new peace plans. So much of the Mideast’s anger against the U.S. revolves around the Palestinian question. A war there could topple friendly Muslim governments and rip apart our current alliances.
This is where the world’s attention is focused. But President Bush and Cheney are ignoring the situation. They have not followed past Presidents’ lead in leading peace negotiations. American pressure and involvement is certainly needed to craft real peace between Palestine and Israel.
But Bush and Cheney are snoring in the bleacher seats when it comes to the world’s most pressing and intractable conflict. They’re dreaming of cinematic glory. It’s 2002 and two lone G.I.‘s are paratrooping into Iraq, knives clenched in teeth, machine guns at the ready. One dreams of avenging the cowardice and failure of his father. The other of winning just one more war before the curtains close in on him.