Carl Pope has more to say about the grim news today that a federal appeals court ruled — against the Sierra Club and Judicial Watch — that Cheney can keep the participants and deliberations of his 2001 energy task force secret. This was a real blow. Says Pope:
The whole saga has been sordid, from the secretive operation of the Task Force, in which Enron enjoyed preferential access, Peabody Coal was enabled to time a public stock offering at a highly advantageous moment, huge public subsidies were granted to favored insiders, Judge Scalia went hunting with the vice-president while considering his case and ultimately awarding him the victory that prevented the public from seeing what happened before the election, to this final decision today.
We may never know the details of what happened — but we certainly know now that keeping those details secret was worth a great deal to the vice-president and probably worth even more to his campaign contributors.
