"RELEASE THE DOCUMENTS"
Newsmax.com/Boot's Blasts
By John LeBoutillier
Sunday, July 21, 2002
The noted conservative, former Congressman John LeBoutillier - author of HARVARD HATES AMERICA - writes strong - and unique commentary and analysis on all things political.
President Bush – and the Republican Party – are in real trouble because of the stock market meltdown and the sure-to-follow economic slowdown, which threaten our control of the House this November.
But what imperils his presidency even more is his refusal to release all the documents relating to his Harken Energy stock sale back in 1990. He says that deal has been “vetted” and “nothing found.” OK, so why not take away a Democratic and media target – these so-far unreleased documents still sitting under lock and key inside the SEC – and get the focus off himself and back on the macro-problems of Wall Street?
Similarly, why doesn’t Vice President Dick Cheney open his Energy Task Force papers and show the world he, too, has nothing to hide?
We conservatives are begging the President and Vice President to take these issues away from the Democrats and the so-called ‘mainstream media’ by releasing all the documents and thus putting these issues in the rear-view mirror.
Instead, the Bush Administration has gone into total lockdown and behaves like a police state. In the past week we have the Feds ‘forcibly detaining’ a National Review reporter, Joel Mowbrey, inside the State Department for reporting on ‘easy’ visas obtained in Saudi Arabia, and federal agents running around Capitol Hill questioning elected members of the House and Senate about leaks from within the Bush Administration of Iraq war plans.
Why all the secrecy – especially from a Republican administration that should believe – unlike the grifter Clintons – in openness and honesty?
Let us examine what may be behind this politically damaging ‘stonewall’:
DC insiders now are speculating that this contract was in fact a way to ingratiate Bahrain with then-President George Bush. And some even suspect that the June 1990 sale of Bush’s Harken stock to the still-secret buyer may have been yet another way for someone – Bahraini perhaps – to further make the Bush family happy.
What a scam that would have been! Award a contract, thus boosting the stock price, then buy the stock privately as a ‘backdoor payment.’
The 1991 SEC investigation of G.W. Bush was deemed “inconclusive.” Then why not release those documents and get rid of this news story?
Why not make all these papers public and thus deprive our political enemies of the ammo to attack us?
Knowledgeable insiders have suspected that Enron and Halliburton had undue influence over the Cheney Task Force and may even have been working on a pre-9-11 pipeline deal with the Taliban to build a pipeline through Afghanistan.
Perhaps the Bush/Cheney Team is afraid that this revelation in the post-September 11 and post-Enron environment would have devastating political consequences.
But hiding and stonewalling almost always fail. It is always better to release everything and move on.
The Bush Administration is in real trouble. Some of these problems - Wall Street’s accounting frauds - are beyond their control.
But their own ‘secrecy’ and paranoid behavior are causing deep concern – even among their staunchest supporters. Many conservatives are beginning to wonder, “What are Bush and Cheney hiding?”
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