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Site Map CHENEY KNEW -- CHAPTER 2 FROM "CROSSING THE RUBICON" |
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by Michael C. Ruppert The Cheney report is very guarded about the amount of foreign oil that will be required. The only clue provided by the [public] report is a chart of net US oil consumption and production over time. According to this illustration, domestic oil field production will decline from about 8.5 million barrels per day (mb/d) in 2002 to 70 mb/d in 2020, while consumption will jump from 19.5 mb/d to 25.5 mb/d. That suggests imports or other sources of petroleum ... will have to rise from 11 mb/d to 18.5 mb/d. Most of the recommendations of the NEP [National Energy Policy, May 2001] are aimed at procuring this 75 mb/d increment, equivalent to the total oil consumed by China and India. -- Professor Michael Klare, "Bush-Cheney Energy Strategy: Procuring the Rest of the World's Oil," Foreign Policy in Focus, January 2004 The White House Stonewall goes on, as the Bush administration continues to deny the non-partisan General Accounting Office's request for information on who the White House Energy Task Force met with while formulating national energy policy. For the first time in history, the GAG has sued the executive branch for access to the records. It has been 42 days since the GAG filed their suit against the Bush administration and 333 days since the White House first received the GAG request. Why is the White House going to such lengths? What are they trying to hide? -Truthout, <www.truthout.org>, "White House Stonewall," April 5, 2002 The Supreme Court said Monday it will settle a fight over whether Vice President Dick Cheney must disclose details about secret contacts with energy industry officials as the Bush administration drafted its energy policy ... The Supreme Court will hear the case sometime in the spring, with a ruling expected by July. -- Associated Press, December 15, 2003 Bush and Blair have been making plans for the day when oil production peaks, by seeking to secure the reserves of other nations. -- George Monbiot, "Bottom of the Barrel," The Guardian, December 2, 2003 China and India are building superhighways and automobile factories. Energy demand is expected to rise by about 50 percent over the next 20 years, with about 40 percent of that demand to be supplied by petroleum ... "Oil supplies are finite and will soon be controlled by a handful of nations; the invasion of Iraq and control of its supplies will do little to change that. One can only hope that an informed electorate and its principled representatives will realize that the facts do matter; and that nature -- not military might -- will soon dictate the ultimate availability of petroleum -- Alfred Cavallo, "Oil: The Illusion Of Plenty," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Jan-Feb 2004 The 9/11 attacks gave the US an ideal pretext to use force to secure its global domination ... The plan ("Rebuilding America's Defenses", Project for a New American Century -- 2000) shows Bush's cabinet intended to take military control of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power ... The overriding motivation for this political smokescreen is that the US and the UK are beginning to run out of secure hydrocarbon energy supplies ... As demand is increasing, so supply is decreasing, continually since the 1960s. -- Michael Meacher MP, UK Environment Minister 1997- 2003, "The War on Terrorism is Bogus," The Guardian, September 6, 2003 How could the US government facilitate such attacks and launch aggression throughout the world? What would make America do such a thing? I have said for two years that the deepest, darkest secrets of September 11th lie buried in the records of the US National Energy Policy Development Group (NEPDG) which began its work almost the same day the Bush administration took office and produced its final report in May of 2001, just four short months before the World Trade Center ceased to exist. Part of the proof of this lies in the blatantly illegal and vehement manner in which the task force, headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, has failed to release its records for public scrutiny, in a clear and blatant violation of US constitutional law. This indicates that there is something to conceal. When, in May 2001, the American conservative legal "watchdog" group Judicial Watch filed suit to see the NEPDG records, it was the first to protest the unheard of secrecy that had surrounded the task force's deliberations. As the White House stonewalled, the Government Accounting Office (GAO) -- the official investigative arm of the Congress -- filed suit the following February. Congress had, after all, funded the project. Non-governmental officials had played major roles in its deliberations and under the Constitution, the GAO had an obligation to see how the money was spent and what was produced. White House refusals prompted media speculation about deals with Enron and big oil companies: a divvying of spoils, a rape of the environment. Judicial Watch was later joined in its suit by the progressive Sierra Club from the left. A scandal for everyone! It's a sure bet that of all the plaintiffs from Congressman Henry Waxman (D -CA) and Comptroller General David Walker who fought for the GAO, to Judicial Watch's Larry Klayman, who had previously fought Bill Clinton, to the environmentalists, none had a clue as to what they were really asking for or why Dick Cheney fought them so ruthlessly and still does as of this writing. The fight was, in fact, just beginning. As reported in the congressional newspaper The Hill on February 19, 2003, the GAO dropped its suit after the administration made threats of heavy cuts to its budget. The offer GAO couldn't refuse was delivered by Republican Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, where a lot of new drilling was expected to take place. Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club stood firm. Both had the money to see their suits through. The controversy boiled throughout 2001-2002. Were it not for the "war on terror," this might have been one of the biggest US constitutional crises of all time. The Enron scandal seems like a pleasant diversion in retrospect. All these battles started before the first plane hit the Twin Towers. That's one reason why everyone was shocked at the blatantly illegal secrecy and the manner in which the administration fought. This was long before the Patriot Act, Homeland Security, Patriot Act II, and all the major lies of the Bush administration that have since been revealed. One of the administration's bets was that, in the wake of 9/11, the NEPDG records would be forgotten. They lost that one. Hints as to what was discussed in the secret task force are now on the table. They strongly suggest that inside the NEPDG records lay the deepest, darkest secrets of 9/11. The motive; the apocalyptic truth that would compel such carnage and a wrenching hairpin turn in the course of human history; the thing that no one ever wanted to know; the thing that makes it utterly believable that the U.S. government could have deliberately facilitated the attacks of September 11th, stands on the brink of full disclosure -- maybe. Shortly after it was announced that the US Supreme Court would render a decision in the suits in July of 2004,1 Dick Cheney found it convenient to go duck hunting with Justice Antonin Scalia who would hear arguments in the case in March and April. The vice president paid all expenses for the trip and even provided Justice Scalia with Secret Service protection and transporration.2 In spite of widespread complaints and arguments that this posed a conflict of interest in the case, Scalia has refused to recuse himself and will cast what may be the deciding vote to keep the secrets of 9/11 from public view.3 A seven-page glimpse under the door Last July, after appealing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for NEPDG documents, Judicial Watch won a small victory with the release of seven pages. They included:
The documents may be viewed online at: <www.judicialwatch.org/071703.c_shtml> . In their austerity, the documents scream of what NEPDG was debating. If 7.5 mb/d of new oil production was to be secured, there was only one place to get it: the Persian Gulf. All told, including Qatar (firmly under US control and the home of headquarters for US Central Command) and Iran, the Gulf is home to 60 percent of all the recoverable oil on the planet. Not only would these oil fields have to be controlled, billions of dollars in new investment would be required to boost production to meet US needs, simultaneously denying that same production to the rest of the world where demand is also soaring. Klare wrote: According to the Department of Energy, Saudi Arabia's net petroleum output must grow by 133 percent over the next 25 years, from 10.2 mb/d in 2001 to 23,8 mb/d in 2025, in order to meet anticipated world requirements at the end of that period. Expanding Saudi capacity by 13.6 mb/d, which is the equivalent of total current production by the United States and Mexico, will cost hundreds of billions of dollars. The Cheney report calls for exactly that. However, any effort by Washington to apply pressure on Riyadh is likely to meet significant resistance from the royal family. Not to mention from Muslim fundamentalists and ordinary Saudi citizens who oppose the corrupt and teetering regime. Sixty percent of all the recoverable oil on the planet is in an area no larger than the state of Kansas. Herein lies the motive behind America's eagerness to quietly and wrongly implicate the Saudi government in 9/11. A closer look at the maps obtained by Judicial Watch explains why. When placed side by side the maps reveal that roughly 60 percent of the world's recoverable oil is in a "golden" triangle running from Mosul in northern Iraq, to the Straits of Hormuz, to an oil field in Saudi Arabia 75 miles in from the coast, just west of Qatar, then back up to Mosul. Almost all of Iran's oil lies near its western shoreline on the Gulf. This whole area would fit easily inside the northern portion of Texas, America's premier oil state. When the maps from Cheney's Energy Task Force are superimposed on a map of that state, the contrast in size is striking.
Maps obtained from the NEPDG showing the worlds major oil fields and other documents show clearly what was of major concern in the secret proceedings. This map, prepared by the author, is a compilation of maps released in a bitter US lawsuit to release all of the Energy Task Force's records. The US military already occupies part of this area and surrounds the remainder. So it's quite consistent with our stated motive to ask how easy it would be for American forces to occupy the entire oil-bearing region in the event that the Saudi monarchy should become unstable, as it surely will someday soon. I have been predicting such a US occupation for some time, and it's likely that the US government will begin the project with covert destabilization efforts. I will discuss the destabilization of Saudi Arabia later in the book. The list of countries and companies already invested in new development projects in the region reads like the perfect answer to the question: "OK, whom do we have to deal with to get this done? Who will come with us if we offer them a piece, and who will refuse, no matter what, because they can't afford to have their share reduced?" Look at the documents and answer that question, and you have perfectly separated the investor nations into two camps: those nations who supported the Iraqi invasion and those who opposed it.4 As Michael Klare points out in this chapter's epigraph, the simple fact is, given that oil is peaking, to secure imports equivalent to the amounts consumed by China and India is to take that same oil away from China and India, or from some other mix of countries. The question is, from whom? Other global battles for the oil that remains have already begun, albeit quietly for the time being. China has passed Japan as the world's second largest oil importer. A January 3, 2004, article by James Brooke in the New York Times, Japan and China Battle for Russia's Oil and Gas," described the fierce high-stakes contest underway. Russia is going to build only one pipeline east from its Siberian fields. It is either going to terminate in the middle of China, or on Russia's Pacific coast where it can supply Japan, Korea, and the Philippines. Brooke wrote, "With the choice Russia faces, the political and economic dynamics of northeast Asia stand to be profoundly shaped for years to come."5 Russia has 60 billion barrels (Gb) of proven reserves, a 690-day supply for planet Earth, and there is no great likelihood that more significant quantities of oil will be discovered anywhere inside or outside of Russia. West Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia The public NEPDG report also addresses (in oblique fashion) areas of the world that have increasingly become inflamed since 9/11: West Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia. For more than two years, FTW has paid close attention to a shift in US and NATO military presence in West Africa, Venezuela, Colombia, the Philippines, and Indonesia.6 Of particular interest here are the facts that on May 1, 2003, through the CIA's Voice of America, NATO commander James Jones announced that NATO was shifting its focus to West Africa; new US naval bases are being negotiated in the tiny West African island nations of Sao Tome and Principe (Klare); and the US gave six naval warships to Nigeria last summer (Reuters, CNN). Isn't it convenient that aUS-friendly coup toppled the Sao Tome government last July?7 As detailed by Klare, the importance of these regions is that, while they contain far smaller reserves than the Gulf, they can be brought online (and drained) quickly to meet current demand without destabilizing the economies of the world in general and the US in particular. The tens and perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars needed to invest in infrastructure to increase production in the Gulf will come only when oil prices have soared enough to provide that capital. Don't expect Wall Street to drain their reserves. They aren't going to pay for it. You are. Make no mistake, the oil companies and Wall Street are banking on severe oil price spikes to fund this short-lived development and, almost as importantly, to reduce consumption on an ad hoc basis as people in the US find they can't afford five or six-dollar gasoline and businesses shut down. There are, at best, between 500 and 600 billion barrels in the Gulf, which can only be pumped at needed rates if the investment is begun immediately and sustained over the next ten years. Do the math, and it's clear: when will the price spikes come? Within six months to a year after the 2004 election. Not before then, if the Bush group can prevent it. I am not optimistic about the outcome. Nor am I optimistic about what will happen when the reality of Peak Oil sets in. Noted economist James Kenneth Galbraith has well described how current market forces really prevent any realistic addressing of the problem and only tend to exacerbate it by continuing to urge increased consumption.8 Oil companies lie about reserves to protect share value and defray tax burdens. Financial markets deny there is a problem to avoid investor panic. Yet the first months of 2004 have seen an avalanche of stories in the major press organs of the world finally acknowledging, at least in some measure, the reality of Peak Oil. More such stories are appearing every day as this book goes to press. Shock waves rippled through the markets in 2004 as it was announced that Saudi Arabia, with 25 percent of the world's recoverable reserves may have passed its peak of production and could therefore never accommodate the production increases described by Michael Klare and mandated by NEPDG requirements.9 The United States has chosen to address the problem of Peak Oil in the most brutal, venal, and shortsighted way available: by using military force to commandeer what remains of the world's rapidly vanishing fossil fuels. The true attitude of American political leaders is that "the American way of life is not negotiable," especially if such negotiations would reduce their power or influence. Cheney knew in 1999 In November 1999, then Halliburton Chairman Dick Cheney gave a speech to the London Institute of Petroleum. What he said in that speech was not widely known to researchers until a discussion of it appeared in the April 2004 issue of Middle East magazine. Professor Kjell Aleklett of the University of Uppsala in Sweden, who is also the 2004 president of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas, caught some key quotes and saw that it was apparent that Dick Cheney was aware of Peak Oil issues at the time. Aleklett reported that transcript of the remarks, previously available on the institute's website had been removed. 10 A few days later Aleklett, having successfully located a transcript, forwarded it to me. Cheney's remarks speak for themselves: We as an industry have had to deal with the pesky problem that once you find oil and pump it out of the ground you've got to turn around and find more or go out of business ... Every year you've got to find and develop reserves equal to your output just to stand still, just to stay even. This is true for companies as well in the broader economic sense as it is for the world. A new merged company like Exxon-Mobil will have to secure over a billion and a half barrels of new oil equivalent reserves every year just to replace existing production. ... For the world as a whole, oil companies are expected to keep finding and developing enough oil to offset our 71 million-plus barrel a day of oil depletion, but also to meet new demand. By some estimates there will be an average of two percent annual growth in global oil demand over the years ahead along with conservatively a three percent natural decline in production from existing reserves. That means by 2010 we will need on the order of an additional 50 million barrels a day ... So where is the oil going to come from? Looking back to the early 1990s, expectations were that significant amounts of the world's new resources would come from such areas as the former Soviet Union and from China ... For most companies the majority of their profits come from core areas, that is areas where they have significant investments, economies of scale and large license areas locked up, but many of these core areas are now mature, and it can be difficult to replace the earnings from the high margin barrels there. Some of the oil being developed in new areas is obviously very high cost and low margin ... Clearly the main driver behind the biggest mergers are the cost savings that are anticipated as a result of economies of scale ... There are also cases where difficulty in sustaining and growing the companies has led management to offer the firm to a bigger player. In the worldwide competition for capital, there are imperatives for size and scale. Larger companies tend to have the highest credit ratings and therefore the lowest borrowing costs, but they also tend to have higher multiples in the stock market. The share price premium becomes a valuable currency for takeovers ... Oil is unique in that it is so strategic in nature. We are not talking about soapflakes or leisurewear here. Energy is truly fundamental to the world's economy. The Gulf War was a reflection of that reality It is the basic, fundamental building block of the world's economy ... Our constituency is not only oilmen from Louisiana and Texas, but software writers in Massachusetts and especially steel producers in Pennsylvania ... Well, the end of the oil era is not here yet, but changes are afoot, and the industry must be ready to adapt to the new century and to the transformations that lie ahead.11 Three Days of the Condor There is a deeper part of human nature that covers the planet in a sickly, light-sweet-crude blanket of denial. It is perfectly epitomized by the closing lines of Sidney Pollack's extraordinary 1975 film, Three Days of the Condor. As FTW has shown in recent stories -- using declassified CIA documents -- the Agency was already well aware of Peak Oil in the mid 1970s.12 Three Days of the Condor took that awful truth and said then, what few in the post-9/11 would have had the courage to say now. I can guarantee you that it is the overriding rationale in Dick Cheney's mind, in the mind of every senior member of the Bush administration, and in the mind of whomever it is that will be the next US president. Getting rid of George W Bush will not address the underlying causative factors of energy and money, and any solution that does not address those issues will prove futile.
Turner (Robert Redford): Do we have plans to invade the Middle East? |
