Dick the ripper

[Guest guest]

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/cheney/chapters/leaving_no_tracks/index.html

 

Leaving No Tracks

By Jo Becker and Barton Gellman

Washington Post Staff Writers

Wednesday, June 27, 2007; Page A01

 

Sue Ellen Wooldridge, the 19th-ranking Interior Department official, arrived at

her desk in Room 6140 a few months after Inauguration Day 2001. A phone message

awaited her.

 

" This is Dick Cheney, " said the man on her voice mail, Wooldridge recalled in an

interview. " I understand you are the person handling this Klamath situation.

Please call me at -- hmm, I guess I don't know my own number. I'm over at the

White House. "

 

 

Enlarge PhotoThe vice president has intervened in many cases to undercut

long-standing environmental rules for the benefit of business. Here, Cheney is

photographed during an August 2004 family vacation in Moose, Wyoming. Getty

Images

More photos >>Wooldridge wrote off the message as a prank. It was not. Cheney

had reached far down the chain of command, on so unexpected a point of vice

presidential concern, because he had spotted a political threat arriving on

Wooldridge's desk.

 

In Oregon, a battleground state that the Bush-Cheney ticket had lost by less

than half of 1 percent, drought-stricken farmers and ranchers were about to be

cut off from the irrigation water that kept their cropland and pastures green.

Federal biologists said the Endangered Species Act left the government no

choice: The survival of two imperiled species of fish was at stake.

 

Law and science seemed to be on the side of the fish. Then the vice president

stepped in.

 

First Cheney looked for a way around the law, aides said. Next he set in motion

a process to challenge the science protecting the fish, according to a former

Oregon congressman who lobbied for the farmers.

 

Because of Cheney's intervention, the government reversed itself and let the

water flow in time to save the 2002 growing season, declaring that there was no

threat to the fish. What followed was the largest fish kill the West had ever

seen, with tens of thousands of salmon rotting on the banks of the Klamath

River.

 

Characteristically, Cheney left no tracks.

 

go to link for full story

 

 

" NOTICE: Due to Presidential Executive Orders, the National Security Agency may

have read this email without warning, warrant, or notice. They may do this

without any judicial or legislative oversight. You have no recourse nor

protection save to call for the impeachment of the current President. "