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This Website is Dedicated to Alvin Alexander Cheyne January 10, 1921 - June 17, 2005 |
Cheney
and the Klamath salmon kill
The
Oregonian Editorial
T he Washington Post
concluded an amazingly detailed series on Vice President Dick Cheney
this week with a disturbing revelation involving
Cheney, the paper said,
played a key role in events leading to the 2002 die-off of more than
70,000 salmon in the
If true, the political
interference may have broken laws under the Endangered Species Act. The
allegations call for a serious inquiry, and they're going to get just
that in the form of a congressional hearing.
Credit Rep. Darlene
Hooley, D-Ore., for responding quickly to The Washington Post
disclosure. She and Rep. Mike Thompson, D-Calif., circulated a letter
Wednesday and got 34 colleagues, including Oregon Democrats Peter
DeFazio, Earl Blumenauer and David Wu, to join in asking the House
Resources Committee to investigate.
The panel's chairman,
Rep. Nick Rahall, D-W.Va., agreed, and that's welcome news. Also welcome
is the fact that
The four-part Post series
was deeply troubling even before it wrapped up with the Klamath
fish-kill revelation. Most Americans who follow the news were already
aware that Cheney possesses unprecedented power as vice president, but
the Post's investigation exposed in astonishing and sometimes chilling
detail just how extensive that power is, and how he wields it.
The series showed, in
painstaking depth, how Cheney aggressively employs the broad authority
handed to him by a complaisant President Bush to bend the
decision-making process to meet his own political or ideological
objectives. Cheney uses that power like no vice president before him,
steamrolling Cabinet officers, undermining department heads and
reinterpreting treaties, laws and executive orders to meet his own ends
and purposes, even to the extent of reshaping the definition of torture.
One of his favorite
tools, the Post series showed, is secrecy -- pulling strings in ways
unseen by the public, Congress or even other administration insiders.
"Stealth," the series concluded, "is among Cheney's most
effective tools."
His use of that tool was
a central theme of the series' fourth and final installment, on the
Klamath fish kill. A midlevel Interior Department official told the Post
about getting a phone call from Cheney in 2001, setting in motion a
secret move to undermine the science of federal biologists who had said
diverting water from the Klamath would violate the Endangered Species
Act and devastate two imperiled species of fish.
Cheney's Machiavellian
tactics worked. He reportedly strong-armed the National Academy of
Sciences into providing the Interior Department a murky justification
for overruling the Bureau of Land Management, and the Klamath water was
diverted.
That led to the largest
adult salmon die-off in the modern history of the West, and the biggest
commercial fishing closure in the history of the country.
Outraged critics
complained of possibly unlawful political meddling at the time but
couldn't prove it. The Washington Post's series offers strong evidence
they may have been right.
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Source: http://www.oregonlive.com/editorials/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/
editorial/118316312853900.xml&coll=7