Mylroie: Big Error by O'Neill Author on 60 Minutes

I decided to go ahead and transcribe what Brit Hume had to say regarding O'Neill today, since I've received more requests for details. Here is the transcript I just made from excerpts of my videotape of the program:

Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace
1-11-2004 - Second half hour of the program.

Chris Wallace (after reading some Paul O'Neill quotes), asks Brit Hume this question:

"Brit, what is all this -- and you know we're gonna hear a lot more -- what does all this tell you about President Bush, and what does it tell you about Paul O'Neill?"

Brit Hume: "It tells you very little, I think, about President Bush, but it tells you a great deal about Paul O'Neill who has also said that if these passages that you cited, and I suppose from others as well from the book, are all that anybody takes away from it, he will be extremely disappointed.

And what in the world could he possibly expect having written this highly critical explosive stuff about a president with whose policies he never really agreed, which was the main problem he had. He was a terrible salesman for the president's tax cut plan, which he said on Capitol Hill repeatedly, 'wouldn't do any harm' - THAT was his pitch for it.

He didn't have a good round at the Treasury Department, I don't think, on anybody's scorecard, and was ousted probably later than perhaps he needed to be. He was very bitter, remained so, and it comes through in this book. He is also a guy, as you can tell from his comments, what people take away from it, who clearly doesn't get it."

Mara Laisson: (sp?) NPR-type comments.

Bill Kristol comments, the gist of which is: "The talk about 'verbatim transcripts' from cabinet meetings is BS." And "Of course we had a plan for regime change in Iraq, we had one three years before the Bush Administration took office".

Juan Williams: NPR-type comments.

Brit Hume: "Right. Stick to Mara's point that this will stoke the fires of people who aren't going to vote for Bush anyway and not anybody else.

It is striking, and one thing I think the Democrats will not pick up on, is this idea that there was 'a secret plan' for post-Saddam Iraq. Because one of the primary lines of attack on the president from the Democrats these days, is that 'he had no plan for post-war Iraq, and now it turns out he had one from the day he set foot in ofice. So I assume we're gonna hear less about that accusation from the Democrats on that."

Juan Williams, the gist of his comments: "O'Neil said that Cheney called him and said 'the president has made some changes, and you're part of the changes - you're out. I'm not going to lie about it, I'm too old to start lying now.'"

Brit Hume: "One point about that. Paul O'Neill started talking - even before he was confirmed - about how HE was not going to allow anyone to tell HIM what to say and that HE was too old to start doing that now, and that HE, from the beginning, thought that HIS tenure in office was about HIM, and what HE thought HE wanted to do, and what policies HE had. And it was very clear that he didn't really support all the policies that he was trying to sell - which is the principal job of a treasury secretary in any and all administrations - is to do that job.

He didn't believe in it. He believed mainly in HIMSELF, and he had never gotten past that."

Mara comments - backing Brit up quoting O'Neill as saying, 'Nobody can tell me what to say.' His tenure was marked by a lot of candor.."

Brit [interrupting]: "[You mean] a lot of gaffs."

Chris Wallace then changes the subject to President Bush's plans to renew the space program.

End of transcript.

Who is Ron Suskind...

In print and on television, Pulitzer-Prize winner Ron Suskind is among the nation’s leading innovators of narrative journalism. His writings over the last 20 years have evolved into what the Chicago Tribune calls "a new kind of nonfiction"--a potent and deeply personal journalistic ideal—and his documentaries for network television and PBS have been hailed as luminous. Along with his book projects, he writes for various national magazines, including Esquire and the New York Times, and gives performances around the country. He is also a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Dartmouth College each summer.

Suskind wrote...

The single most influential adviser to the president of the United States is going home to Texas with her family to live a simpler life. Perhaps Andy Card, the White House chief of staff, says it best: "Oh, God."

http://www.esquire.com/features/articles/2002/021202_mfe_rove.html

Who is John DiIulio...

"old, Madison-minded American government professor"

http://www.esquire.com/features/articles/2002/021202_mfe_diiulio_1.html

CONFIDENTIAL
To: Ron Suskind
From: John DiIulio
Subject: Your next essay on the Bush administration
Date: October 24, 2002

SNIP

the contrast with Clinton is two-sided. As Joe Klein has so strongly captured him, Clinton was "the natural," a leader with a genuine interest in the policy process who encouraged information-rich decision-making. Clinton was the policy-wonk-in-chief. The Clinton administration drowned in policy intellectuals and teemed with knowledgeable people interested in making government work. Every domestic issue drew multiple policy analyses that certainly weighted politics, media messages, legislative strategy, et cetera, but also strongly weighted policy-relevant information, stimulated substantive policy debate, and put a premium on policy knowledge. That is simply not Bush's style. It fits not at all with his personal cum presidential character. The Bush West Wing is very nearly at the other end of this Clinton policy-making continuum.

Besides the tax cut, which was cut-and-dried during the campaign, and the education bill, which was really a Ted Kennedy bill, the administration has not done much, either in absolute terms or in comparison to previous administrations at this stage, on domestic policy. There is a virtual absence as yet of any policy accomplishments that might, to a fair-minded non-partisan, count as the flesh on the bones of so-called compassionate conservatism. There is still two years, maybe six, for them to do more and better on domestic policy, and, specifically, on the compassion agenda. And, needless to say, 9/11, and now the global war on terror and the new homeland and national security plans, must be weighed in the balance.

SNIP

at the six-month senior staff retreat on July 9, 2001, an explicit discussion ensued concerning how to emulate more strongly the Clinton White House's press, communications, and rapid-response media relations—how better to wage, if you will, the permanent campaign that so defines the modern presidency regardless of who or which party occupies the Oval Office. I listened and was amazed. It wasn't more press, communications, media, legislative strategizing, and such that they needed. Maybe the Clinton people did that better, though, surely, they were less disciplined about it and leaked more to the media and so on. No, what they needed, I thought then and still do now, was more policy-relevant information, discussion, and deliberation.

In eight months, I heard many, many staff discussions, but not three meaningful, substantive policy discussions. There were no actual policy white papers on domestic issues. There were, truth be told, only a couple of people in the West Wing who worried at all about policy substance and analysis, and they were even more overworked than the stereotypical, non-stop, 20-hour-a-day White House staff. Every modern presidency moves on the fly, but, on social policy and related issues, the lack of even basic policy knowledge, and the only casual interest in knowing more, was somewhat breathtaking—discussions by fairly senior people who meant Medicaid but were talking Medicare; near-instant shifts from discussing any actual policy pros and cons to discussing political communications, media strategy, et cetera. Even quite junior staff would sometimes hear quite senior staff pooh-pooh any need to dig deeper for pertinent information on a given issue.

Likewise, every administration at some point comes to think of the White House as its own private tree house, to define itself as "us" versus "them" on Capitol Hill, or in the media, or what have you, and, before 100 days are out, to vest ever more organizational and operational authority with the White House's political, press, and communications people, both senior and junior. I think, however, that the Bush administration—maybe because they were coming off Florida and the election controversy, maybe because they were so unusually tight-knit and "Texas," maybe because the chief of staff, Andy Card, was more a pure staff process than a staff leader or policy person, or maybe for other reasons I can't recognize—was far more inclined in that direction, and became progressively more so as the months pre-9/11 wore on.

This gave rise to what you might call Mayberry Machiavellis—staff, senior and junior, who consistently talked and acted as if the height of political sophistication consisted in reducing every issue to its simplest, black-and-white terms for public consumption, then steering legislative initiatives or policy proposals as far right as possible. These folks have their predecessors in previous administrations (left and right, Democrat and Republican), but, in the Bush administration, they were particularly unfettered.

I could cite a half-dozen examples, but, on the so-called faith bill, they basically rejected any idea that the president's best political interests—not to mention the best policy for the country—could be served by letting centrist Senate Democrats in on the issue, starting with a bipartisan effort to review the implementation of the kindred law (called "charitable choice") signed in 1996 by Clinton. For a fact, had they done that, six months later they would have had a strongly bipartisan copycat bill to extend that law. But, over-generalizing the lesson from the politics of the tax cut bill, they winked at the most far-right House Republicans who, in turn, drafted a so-called faith bill (H.R. 7, the Community Solutions Act) that (or so they thought) satisfied certain fundamentalist leaders and beltway libertarians but bore few marks of "compassionate conservatism" and was, as anybody could tell, an absolute political non-starter. It could pass the House only on a virtual party-line vote, and it could never pass the Senate, even before Jeffords switched.

Not only that, but it reflected neither the president's own previous rhetoric on the idea, nor any of the actual empirical evidence that recommended policies promoting greater public/private partnerships involving community-serving religious organizations. I said so, wrote memos, and so on for the first six weeks. But, hey, what's that fat, out-of-the-loop professor guy know; besides, he says he'll be gone in six months. As one senior staff member chided me at a meeting at which many junior staff were present and all ears, "John, get a faith bill, any faith bill." Like college students who fall for the colorful, opinionated, but intellectually third-rate professor, you could see these 20- and 30-something junior White House staff falling for the Mayberry Machiavellis. It was all very disheartening to this old, Madison-minded American government professor.

Why Are These Men Laughing?
Esquire, January 2003

http://www.ronsuskind.com/writing/esquire/esq_rove_0103.html

"Looks like the Demoncrats at work!"

July 27, 2003

Documents Show Cheney Eyeing Iraq In Early 2001
Group: Cheney Task Force Eyed on Iraq Oil

By H. Josef Hebert for the Associated Press.

Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force appeared to have some interest in early 2001 in Iraq's oil industry, including which foreign companies were pursuing business there, according to documents released Friday by a private watchdog group.

Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group, obtained a batch of task force-related Commerce Department papers that included a detailed map of Iraq's oil fields, terminals and pipelines as well as a list entitled "Foreign Suitors of Iraqi Oilfield Contracts."

The papers also included a detailed map of oil fields and pipelines in Saudi Arabia and in the United Arab Emirates and a list of oil and gas development projects in those two countries.

The papers were dated early March 2001, about two months before the Cheney energy task force completed and announced its report on the administration's energy needs and future energy agenda.

Judicial Watch obtained the papers as part of a lawsuit by it and the Sierra Club to open to the public information used by the task force in developing President Bush's energy plan.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/nationworld/politics/wire/sns-ap-iraq-cheney-energy,0,7562329.story

WASHINGTON -- Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force appeared to have some interest in early 2001 in Iraq's oil industry, including which foreign companies were pursuing business there, according to documents released Friday by a private watchdog group.

Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group, obtained a batch of task force-related Commerce Department papers that included a detailed map of Iraq's oil fields, terminals and pipelines as well as a list entitled "Foreign Suitors of Iraqi Oilfield Contracts."

The papers also included a detailed map of oil fields and pipelines in Saudi Arabia and in the United Arab Emirates and a list of oil and gas development projects in those two countries.

The papers were dated early March 2001, about two months before the Cheney energy task force completed and announced its report on the administration's energy needs and future energy agenda.

Judicial Watch obtained the papers as part of a lawsuit by it and the Sierra Club to open to the public information used by the task force in developing President Bush's energy plan.

Tom Fitton, the group's president, said he had no way to guess what interest the task force had in the information, but "it shows why it is important that we learn what was going on in the task force."

"Opponents of the war are going to point to the documents as evidence that oil was on the minds of the Bush administration in the run-up to the war in Iraq," said Fitton. "Supporters will say they were only evaluating oil reserves in the Mideast, and the likelihood of future oil production."

The task force report was released in May 2001. In it, a chapter titled "Strengthening Global Alliances" calls the Middle East "central to world oil security" and urges support for initiatives by the region's oil producers to open their energy sectors to foreign investment. The chapter does not mention Iraq, which has the world's second largest oil reserves after Saudi Arabia.

Commerce Department spokesman Trevor Francis said: "It is the responsibility of the Commerce Department to serve as a commercial liaison for U.S. companies doing business around the world, including those that develop and utilize energy resources. The Energy Task Force evaluated regions of the world that are vital to global energy supply. The final report, released in May of 2001, contains maps of key energy-producing regions in the world, including Russia, North America, the Middle East and the Caspian region."

A spokeswoman for the vice president did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment Friday.

A two-page document obtained with the map and released by Judicial Watch lists, as of March 2001, companies in 30 countries that had an interest in contracts to help then-President Saddam Hussein develop Iraq's oil wealth.

The involvement of Russia and France has been documented. Also on the list were companies from Canada, Australia, China, Germany, Indonesia, Ireland, India and Mexico. Even Vietnam had interest in a service contract and, according to the paper, was close to signing an agreement in October 1999.

So far nearly 40,000 pages of internal documents from various departments and agencies have been made public related to the Cheney task force's work under the Judicial Watch-Sierra Club lawsuit. The task force itself has refused to turn over any of its own papers.

http://216.239.41.104/search?q=cache:T0aTYISICfwJ:www.onlisareinsradar.com/archives/001559.php+Foreign+Suitors+for+Iraq+Oilfield+contracts&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

Dems Launch Campaign To Get The Word Out About WMD Lies
Dems to Launch Ad Campaign on Bush, Iraq
By Will Lester for the Associated Press.

Democrats said Sunday they will launch a new television ad in Wisconsin accusing President Bush of misleading Americans on the threat from Iraq.

Republicans warned broadcasters not to air the ad, scheduled to start Monday, calling it ``deliberately false and misleading.''

The Democratic National Committee has been raising money through an e-mail campaign that started July 10 to help pay for an ad that sharply questions President Bush's veracity on Iraq's weapons.

The ad says: ``In his State of the Union address, George W. Bush told us of an imminent threat. ... America took him at his word.''

The video shows Bush saying, ``Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.''

The ad continues: ``But now we find out it wasn't true.

``A year earlier, that claim was proven false. The CIA knew it. The State Department knew it. The White House knew it.

``But he told us anyway.''

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,1282,-2929554,00.html

Dems to Launch Ad Campaign on Bush, Iraq

Sunday July 20, 2003 8:09 PM

By WILL LESTER

Associated Press Writer

CRAWFORD, Texas (AP) - Democrats said Sunday they will launch a new television ad in Wisconsin accusing President Bush of misleading Americans on the threat from Iraq.

Republicans warned broadcasters not to air the ad, scheduled to start Monday, calling it ``deliberately false and misleading.''

The Democratic National Committee has been raising money through an e-mail campaign that started July 10 to help pay for an ad that sharply questions President Bush's veracity on Iraq's weapons.

The ad says: ``In his State of the Union address, George W. Bush told us of an imminent threat. ... America took him at his word.''

The video shows Bush saying, ``Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.''

The ad continues: ``But now we find out it wasn't true.

``A year earlier, that claim was proven false. The CIA knew it. The State Department knew it. The White House knew it.

``But he told us anyway.''

Republicans claim the ad improperly quotes Bush because his entire statement was: ``The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.''

Democratic spokesman Tony Welch said: ``With the British in there, the president's information is still false and misleading. It is exactly what the president said.''

Some Republicans have argued Bush's statement was technically accurate because it attributed the findings about uranium to the British.

``You can say whatever you want in a fund-raiser,'' Republican spokesman Jim Dyke said, ``but it steps over the line when you knowingly mislead people in your advertising.''

Welch said the ad would be aired in Madison, Wis., starting Monday for about a week and the amount spent would be almost $20,000. The ad would be paid for, at least partially, by the Democrats' e-mail campaign, he said.

Efforts to get comment from TV stations in Madison were not successful Sunday.

The ad squabble comes at a time when public trust in the president has been eroding, according to results released Sunday from a CNN-Time poll.

The poll found that 47 percent view Bush as a leader they can trust, while 51 percent said they have doubts and reservations. That's down from 56 percent who saw him as a leader they could trust in late March, with 41 percent having doubts.

The poll of 1,004 people taken Wednesday and Thursday had an error margin of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

http://www.onlisareinsradar.com/archives/001558.php

When I see, read or hear Michael Isikoff and/or Evan Thomas, I immediately disregard anything being said.

November 12, 2003

Newsweek: How Dick Cheney Sold The War

An interesting Newsweek feature explaining how Dick Cheney bought into the Shrub War and then proceeded to sell it to everyone else.

Of particular interest is the quote below where Cheney says that "we believe that he [Saddam Hussein] has in fact reconstituted nuclear weapons" and then Newsweek clarifies that "Cheney later said that he meant "program," not "weapons."

However, in Donald Rumsfeld's Meet The Press Interview, Rumsfeld claims that "they [Iraq] had programs relating to nuclear weapons that they were reconstituting. Not that they had nuclear weapons. No one said that.

So it looks like somebody did say that Saddam had nuclear weapons, and it was Dick Cheney.

Cheney's Long Path to War

By Mark Hosenball, Michael Isikoff and Evan Thomas (With Tamara Lipper, Richard Wolffe and Roy Gutman) for Newsweek.

Of all the president's advisers, Cheney has consistently taken the most dire view of the terrorist threat. On Iraq, Bush was the decision maker. But more than any adviser, Cheney was the one to make the case to the president that war against Iraq was an urgent necessity. Beginning in the late summer of 2002, he persistently warned that Saddam was stocking up on chemical and biological weapons, and last March, on the eve of the invasion, he declared that "we believe that he [Saddam Hussein] has in fact reconstituted nuclear weapons." (Cheney later said that he meant "program," not "weapons." He also said, a bit optimistically, "I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators.") After seven months, investigators are still looking for that arsenal of WMD.

Cheney has repeatedly suggested that Baghdad has ties to Al Qaeda. He has pointedly refused to rule out suggestions that Iraq was somehow to blame for the 9/11 attacks and may even have played a role in the terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. The CIA and FBI, as well as a congressional investigation into the 9/11 attacks, have dismissed this conspiracy theory. Still, as recently as Sept. 14, Cheney continued to leave the door open to Iraqi complicity. He brought up a report--widely discredited by U.S. intelligence officials--that 9/11 hijacker Muhammad Atta had met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in April 2001. And he described Iraq as "the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault for many years, but most especially on 9/11." A few days later, a somewhat sheepish President Bush publicly corrected the vice president. There was no evidence, Bush admitted, to suggest that the Iraqis were behind 9/11.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.msnbc.com/news/991209.asp?0cv=KA01&cp1=1

page 1 of 3

Cheney's Long Path to War

By Mark Hosenball, Michael Isikoff and Evan Thomas, Newsweek

Every Thursday, President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have lunch together in a small dining room off the Oval Office. They eat alone; no aides are present. They have no fixed agenda, but it's a safe assumption that they often talk about intelligence--about what the United States knows, or doesn't know, about the terrorist threat.

THE PRESIDENT RESPECTS Cheney's judgment, say White House aides, and values the veep's long experience in the intelligence community (as President Gerald Ford's chief of staff, as a member of the House Intelligence Committee in the 1980s and as secretary of Defense in the George H.W. Bush administration). As vice president, Cheney is free to roam about the various agencies, quizzing analysts and top spooks about terrorists and their global connections. "This is a very important area. It's the one the president asked me to work on ... I ask a lot of hard questions," Cheney told NBC's Tim Russert last September. "That's my job."

Of all the president's advisers, Cheney has consistently taken the most dire view of the terrorist threat. On Iraq, Bush was the decision maker. But more than any adviser, Cheney was the one to make the case to the president that war against Iraq was an urgent necessity. Beginning in the late summer of 2002, he persistently warned that Saddam was stocking up on chemical and biological weapons, and last March, on the eve of the invasion, he declared that "we believe that he [Saddam Hussein] has in fact reconstituted nuclear weapons." (Cheney later said that he meant "program," not "weapons." He also said, a bit optimistically, "I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators.") After seven months, investigators are still looking for that arsenal of WMD.

Cheney has repeatedly suggested that Baghdad has ties to Al Qaeda. He has pointedly refused to rule out suggestions that Iraq was somehow to blame for the 9/11 attacks and may even have played a role in the terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. The CIA and FBI, as well as a congressional investigation into the 9/11 attacks, have dismissed this conspiracy theory. Still, as recently as Sept. 14, Cheney continued to leave the door open to Iraqi complicity. He brought up a report--widely discredited by U.S. intelligence officials--that 9/11 hijacker Muhammad Atta had met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in April 2001. And he described Iraq as "the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault for many years, but most especially on 9/11." A few days later, a somewhat sheepish President Bush publicly corrected the vice president. There was no evidence, Bush admitted, to suggest that the Iraqis were behind 9/11.

Cheney has long been regarded as a Washington wise man. He has a dry, deliberate manner; a penetrating, if somewhat wintry, wit, and a historian's long-view sensibility. He is far to the right politically, but in no way wild-eyed; in private conversation he seems moderate, thoughtful, cautious. Yet when it comes to terrorist plots, he seems to have given credence to the views of some fairly flaky ideologues and charlatans. Writing recently in The New Yorker, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh alleged that Cheney had, in effect, become the dupe of a cabal of neoconservative full-mooners, the Pentagon's mysteriously named Office of Special Plans and the patsy of an alleged bank swindler and would-be ruler of Iraq, Ahmad Chalabi.

A Cheney aide took strong exception to the notion that the vice president was at the receiving end of some kind of private pipeline for half-baked or fraudulent intelligence, or that he was somehow carrying water for the neocons or anyone else's self-serving agendas. "That's an urban myth," said this aide, who declined to be identified. Cheney has cited as his "gold standard" the National Intelligence Estimate, a consensus report put out by the entire intelligence community. And, indeed, an examination of the declassified version of the NIE reveals some pretty alarming warnings. "Baghdad is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program," the October 2002 NIE states.

Nonetheless, it appears that Cheney has been susceptible to "cherry-picking," embracing those snippets of intelligence that support his dark prognosis while discarding others that don't. He is widely regarded in the intelligence community as an outlier, as a man who always goes for the worst-case --scenario and sometimes overlooks less alarming or at least ambiguous signs. Top intelligence officials reject the suggestion that Cheney has somehow bullied lower-level CIA or Defense Intelligence Agency analysts into telling him what he wants to hear. But they do describe the Office of the Vice President, with its large and assertive staff, as a kind of free-floating power base that at times brushes aside the normal policymaking machinery under national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice. On the road to war, Cheney in effect created a parallel government that became the real power center.

Cheney, say those who know him, is in no way cynically manipulative. By all accounts, he is genuinely convinced that the threat is imminent and menacing. Professional intelligence analysts can offer measured, nuanced opinions, but policymakers, Cheney likes to say, have to decide. As he put it last July in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute, "How could any responsible leader have ignored the Iraqi threat?" And yet Cheney seems to have rung the warning bell a little too loudly and urgently. If nothing else, his apparently exaggerated alarms over Iraq, WMD and the terror connection may make Americans slow to respond the next time he sees a wolf at the door.

MORE....

http://www.onlisareinsradar.com/archives/byebye_cheney/index.php

CBS seems to have an AGENDA...

Cheney Loses In Court

WASHINGTON, Sept. 12, 2003

(CBS/AP) A federal appeals court rebuffed Vice President Dick Cheney, refusing to intervene in a lawsuit delving into the role of business executives and industry lobbyists in formulating the Bush administration's energy plan in 2001.

The administration won only three votes in favor of rehearing the request to step into the case in which Cheney and his energy task force are being ordered to turn over a large number of documents to the conservative group Judicial Watch and the environmental group Sierra Club. The request for a rehearing went to nine appeals court judges.

The rejection Wednesday by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit leaves the Bush administration two choices.

The first is to ask the Supreme Court to consider the case. The other is to return to U.S. District Court where Judge Emmet Sullivan says the administration must comply with requests for documents or give detailed explanations about the materials it intends to withhold from disclosure.

The administration argues that the constitutional need for the president to receive candid advice demands confidentiality.

Documents from the task force already handed over to Judicial Watch include maps of Middle Eastern countries — including Iraq — and catalogues of current oil exploration and extraction projects, including one document titled "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts."

The General Accounting Office in February dropped a suit aiming to force Cheney to hand over the documents after a federal court indicated it did not wish to intervene in a dispute between two branches of government.

Last month, the GAO said it was unable to determine how much the White House's energy policy was influenced by the oil industry because they were denied documents by Cheney.

Some Democratic congressmen had requested information in the spring of 2001 about which industry executives and lobbyists the Cheney task force was meeting with in creating the Bush administration's energy plan.

Investigators also came up short trying to find out how much money various agencies spent on creating the national energy policy, the GAO report said.

The unwillingness of Cheney's office to turn over records and other information "precluded us from fully achieving our objectives" and limited its analysis, the GAO said.

The National Energy Policy Development Group, chaired by Cheney, was formed by President Bush in January 2001 to develop a national energy policy.

The task force submitted its final report in May 2001. Congress is now considering the energy-related legislative proposals.

The Cheney energy plan called for expanded oil and gas drilling on public land and easing regulatory barriers to building nuclear power plants. Among the proposals: drilling in the Arctic wildlife refuge and possibly reviving nuclear fuel reprocessing, which was abandoned in the 1970s as a nuclear proliferation threat.

The GAO said the task force's report was the "product of a centralized, topdown, short-term, and labor-intensive process that involved the efforts of several hundred federal employees government wide."

In the few months between the start of the energy task force and its presentation of the final report, the vice president, some Cabinet-level and other senior administration officials and support staff controlled most of the report's development, according to the GAO.

They met frequently with energy industry representatives and only on a limited basis with scholars and environmentalists, the GAO said. The extent to which any of these meetings or information obtained from the energy industry influenced policy can't be determined, based on limited information made available to the GAO, the report said.

http://216.239.39.104/search?q=cache:pUI57TdK0EMJ:www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/08/26/politics/main570137.shtml+Foreign+Suitors+for+Iraq+Oilfield+contracts&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

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