Bush War Lies #14

I touched on it yesterday, but I want to expand upon this today: some of you who actually remember anything political from more than, say, a year ago may recall that a group called Judicial Watch gave President Clinton an awful lot of grief over his various alleged (and one actual) wrongdoing. They in particular led the charge to against Clinton fundraiser John Huang (quite rightly, too) and went after Hillary Clinton's rather dodgy accounting records with gusto.

At the time, a lot of us dismissed the self-proclaimed "conservative watchdog" group because they were being funded by psychotically-obsessed Clinton-hater and billionaire Richard Mellon Scaithe. I don't have time to go into a lot of backstory about him, suffice it to say he has a lot to answer for when it comes to trumped-up, made-up charges against the Clintons and their administration.

The group, however, insisted that they were independent of Scaithe. And now (as Tom Tomorrow has pointed out), it looks like the left may owe JW an apology.

Judicial Watch has finally obtained the first of what will probably turn out to be a barnful of incredibly damning documents from Dick Cheney's super-secret and bitterly-fought-to-keep-it-so Energy Task Force, which occupied much of the Vice President's first year in office. Most of you will dimly remember this if at all, but basically the Task Force met in secret for a year, then issued a slim report that amounted to three conclusions:

1. More foreign oil! More American oil! More British and Mexican oil! MORE OIL!!!!
2. Conservation is for communists.
3. Alaska! Florida! Why has nobody ruined these states looking for oil yet??

DIGRESSION: Incidentally, this seems like a good opportunity to remark upon Republican Hypocrisy #1,316: When Hillary Clinton holds secret meetings to craft a national health care policy, Republicans jump all over it, sue, screech, call for her removal, etc.

When Dick Cheney holds a year's worth of secret meetings from which almost nothing significant is ever heard about, and fights ferociously hard to keep the contents of those meetings secret (even defying an order from his own government!), neither the media nor the public bother to pick up on it. Now, where did you say that Liberal Media Establishment was again? (end digression)

So what do the first documents from that secret cabal of energy "experts" (who included Ken Lay of Enron, incidentally) have to say?

Fascinatingly enough, they include maps of Iraqi oilfields, including pipelines, refineries and shipping ports. They also include an even more interesting report called "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts." This is highly interesting because at this very moment, the Bush administration is divvying up ... you guessed it ... contracts for the Iraqi oilfields!

Incidentally, the meeting that produced these documents was held in March 2001 -- seven months prior to the September 11th attacks. Incidentally, other maps for Saudi and United Arab Emirates oilfields were in there as well.

I got a bad feeling about this ...