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Darth Cheney: Triumph of the Sith
This just in:
Appeals Court Sides With Cheney in Lawsuit
WASHINGTON - A lawsuit seeking to force Vice President Dick Cheney to reveal details about the energy policy task force he headed and the pro-industry recommendations it made was scuttled Tuesday by a federal appeals court.
The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit unanimously found that two private groups that sued Cheney failed to establish that the federal government had a legal duty to produce documents detailing the White House's contacts with business executives and lobbyists.
--emphasis mine
more on the flip...
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The appeals court disagreed. "There is nothing to indicate that nonfederal employees had a right to vote on committee matters or exercise a veto over committee proposals," it said. The court ordered a lower court to dismiss the case.
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The Bush administration has succeeded in keeping secret the influence that the energy industry had in crafting the government's energy policy, David Bookbinder, a senior attorney at the Sierra Club, said.
"The decision is not going to be helpful in assuring open and accountable government," Bookbinder said.
Well, i guess that settles it. We're probably never gonna know about who met with Darth Cheney and what they were discussing, though I'm sure we all have our guesses and and I'm sure we all agree that they had only the best interests of the republic in mind.
Oh, and I wonder if we'll ever find out who in the spring of 2001 was so hot to explore "foreign suitors for Iraqi oil-field contracts".
Update [2005-5-10 17:32:55 by lipris]:
Some more from the Times:
Court Sides With Bush on Secrecy of Cheney Energy Panel
A federal appeals court handed the Bush administration a resounding victory today when it unanimously ruled that Vice President Dick Cheney does not have to divulge details on how White House energy policies were shaped.
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The only people actually named to the energy development group were federal officials, the court noted, and only they signed the group's final report. The judges also brushed aside arguments that participation - "even influential participation" - in the energy development group's meetings somehow made outsiders members of the group.
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But the senior lawyer for the Sierra Club, David Bookbinder, said the issues raised in the lawsuit were "more relevant today than ever," given the Bush administration's pending energy legislation, which he called "an energy industry wish list." Mr. Bookbinder said he would study today's decision in hope of finding grounds to get the appeals court to reconsider, or perhaps to persuade the Supreme Court to review the case.
Details on the evolution of energy policy seemed to have potentially damaging political implications for the Bush administration in the 2004 election year, given Mr. Cheney's former stint as president of Halliburton, the giant oil-services company, and President Bush's own Texas oil-industry background and his former friendships with high executives of Enron, the energy corporation that collapsed amid scandal early in Mr. Bush's first term in the White House.
So now the very energy bill that these folks from the oil industry wrote for Dick and crew (and spare me, please. I think we all know who actually wrote it, OK?) looks like it might finally have a chance at passing.
Can you imagine for a second that fucking howls of outrage we would be hearing from the other side if Clinton had formulated an energy policy after weeks of secret meetings with the Sierra Club and Greenpeace and then refused to say who had attended or what was discussed? Imagine for a second that the plan he offered was heavy with renewables and a hefty increase in CAFE standards? The roar would be deafening.
I doubt we'll hear much of a peep about this.
Update [2005-5-10 18:23:40 by lipris]:
The reaction from one of the plaintiffs, Judicial Watch:
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said, “The court’s ruling is without any basis in the text of the open meetings law and is contrary to the intent of the law, which is to allow broad public participation in certain types of meetings between government officials and private lobbyists. Further, it means that, going forward, the public will simply have to take the word of the government that no outsiders are improperly influencing the decisions of their government.
“The American people have a right to know whether lobbyists became de facto members of the Energy Task Force, which helped to write our nation’s energy policies. Today’s decision means that now the public may never know the truth about how these policies were formulated.”
Yep. I'd say that bout says it all.