Where's Dick? | Suite101.com

President Bush is gearing the country up for war with Iraq in an effort ot stop global terrorism. The fact that no one has found any substantiated links between the Iraqi government and Osama Bin Laden and his Al-Qaida network seems to be irrelevant to G.W. and his administration. The fact is that Osama Bin Laden still seems to be alive and Al-Qaida is still active, suggesting that the war on terrorism has been a dismal failure. Sure, we got the Taliban out of Afghanistan, but they weren't the ones who attacked us, so ousting them was just a side project. Now, we don't even know where Osama Bin Laden is. Last year, we had his location narrowed down to some mountain in Afghanistan. Go Bush! That's progress.

In the meantime, under the shadow of what it calls Saddam Hussain's threat to the free world, the Bush administration is quietly declairing war on the American environment with energy policies dictated by the energy industry and on the American public with laws and policies designed to over ride our civil liberties. Ironically, these two seemingly unrelated issues are in fact quite connected.

How so you ask?

Before Sept. 11, 2001, allegations of a scandal were brewing about President Bush and Vice President Cheney's connections to the energy industry and how those connections may have influenced the Bush administration's energy policy. Dick Cheney acknowledged that he had met with Enron executives about the energy policy at least 6 times before Enron exploded into an economic crisis that wiped out the retirement accounts of thousands of Americans. Not surprising given both G.W.'s and Dick's ties to the energy industry, environmental groups not only were not invited to participate in the policy planning, they were all but shut out. Some of the ideas they tossed around were drilling in Alaskan forests and refusing to pass laws to make cars more energy efficient.

The environmental groups complained, congressional democrats demanded an investigation, and the General Accounting Office (GAO), the non-partisan investigating arm of congress, began to look into the matter but hit a brick wall. The Vice President's office, which had been coordinating the energy policy, refused to disclose the names of industry lobbyist who met with Cheney. The GAO took the administration to court to get them to dismiss this information. And then the terrorists attacked the Pentagon and the World Trade Center and the issue fell to the nether regions of the American consciousness. Conveniently for the Bush Administration, the public had something bigger to focus on. In the climate of fear that has defined our country for the last year or so, the Bush administration has been able to push through bill after bill that put limits