Perhaps this is why our “energy bill” looks like it does, why even after the Enron scandal those meetings remained a secret, why the oil companies are raking in profits over the last quarter that dwarf budgets of many countries, why we rushed into war, and why Libby lied.

From “President Cheney’s Goose Is Cooked,” Trey Ellis, 10.28.2005, The Huffington Post:

So once in office Cheney looks around the world and what does he see? Does he want to beat the Democrats into insignificance like Karl Rove and Tom Delay? Not particularly. Does he have some utopian ideal of stabilizing and democratizing the globe like Paul Wolfowitz? Are you kidding? As CEO of Halliburton he lobbied Congress to ease sanctions against Lybia, Syria and even Iran. No, once handed the keys to the kingdom this guy looked around the world and saw money.

Remember his first significant act in office? He presided over a secretive, closed-door energy task force. Bush’s biggest donor Ken Lay was there. And what was on the table? Talk of conservation to buy us more time before oil reserves dry up? Aggressive investment in new technologies to free us of our dependence on foreign oil? Nope. According to Judicial Watch what were on the table were maps. Maps of Saudi and UAE oil fields and also a map of a country over which we, at that time, had no control — Iraq. That was in March of 2001. We all know what happened next. In the days after 9/11 people like former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke and Prime Minister Tony Blair were shocked to hear Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld talking about Iraq when none of the hijackers came from that country. Just as Cheney saw a golden opportunity for himself in being picked to pick Bush’s VP, he saw 9/11 as opportunity dripping with oil. Hiding behind a national tragedy he could mobilize the strongest army in the history of the world to do his corporate bidding.

We know this to be true because of the rush to war. No one, not the CIA, the State Department, or any foreign intelligence outfit thought that Iraq’s threat was imminent. They all thought there was a threat because Saddam kept saying there was one, but no one thought that it was less than years away. The United States with the help of our little buddy Great Britain, rushed into war without the backing of any other major nations because Dick Cheney didn’t want to have to share the spoils of war with them.