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The week before he
flew to Washington for his Supreme Court rendezvous with Vice President
Cheney, I asked Club attorney Sanjay Narayan why we are seeking disclosure
of documents related to the vice president’s 2001 energy task
force. Don’t we already know what’s in these documents?
Maybe we don’t have a printed guest list, but we know it included
representatives from the fossil fuel industries, not wind turbine
advocates or tree huggers.
True enough, said Narayan. There’s the scandal we know about,
which is that energy executives wrote the energy bill. But a second
possibility, he said, is that there’s a scandal we don’t
know about—that the documents could reveal something about the
alleged "overlap between energy policy and ‘rogue state
policy.’"
This overlap was reported by Jane Meyer in a February New Yorker story
about Cheney and Halliburton. She cited a National Security Council
document directing staff to cooperate with the energy task force as
it "considered the ‘melding’ of two seemingly unrelated
areas of policy: ‘the review of operational policies towards
rogue states,’ such as Iraq, and ‘actions regarding the
capture of new and existing oil and gas fields.’"
Club Executive Director Carl Pope alluded to that possibility as well
in an April 23 interview on Bill Moyers’ NOW. Pope said yes,
we know what the industry groups asked for and what they got. "What
we don’t know," he said, "is what the administration
gave up in return...for example, whether the oil industry was given
advance information about the administration’s plans to invade
Iraq."
Certainly there’s a place for secrecy, but the Bush administration
has been using the pretext of national security to deny public access
to information in unprecedented ways. For example, a month after 9/11,
Attorney General John Ashcroft ordered all government agencies to
deny Freedom of Information requests wherever possible. It’s
not just Joe Public being kept in the dark either. In Meyer’s
New Yorker story, California Representative Henry Waxman remarks that,
in Iraq: "We can’t even find out how much Halliburton charges
to do the laundry."
Information is no panacea, but it’s a starting point. Because
of right-to-know provisions in the Superfund law, major polluters
are required to document their emissions. We don’t know if these
reports result in cleaner air and water. But reported emissions decreased
by nearly 50 percent between 1988 and 1996. As Carl Pope says in his
recently published book, Strategic Ignorance, for U.S. industries,
"it was better business to clean up their toxic emissions than
admit to their neighbors just how dirty they were."
—John Byrne Barry
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