Big oil involved in Iraq invasion?

Dick Cheney

Document puts lie to oil executives’ testimony

Did Big Oil participate in planning invasion of Iraq?

An official White House document recently acquired by the Washington Post puts the lie to testimony given by executives of five leading oil firms on November 9 before a joint meeting of the Senate Energy and Commerce committees regarding their collaboration in 2001 with Vice President Dick Cheney’s “energy task force,” officially known as the National Energy Policy Development Group.

Even before the hearings, the oil bosses had been offered a blank check to lie by Republican Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Stevens of Alaska. Stevens, in a transparent attempt to spare the executives possible charges of perjury, waived the normal procedure of swearing in witnesses before congressional committees. The hearings were ostensibly called to discuss the suspiciously rapid increase in oil prices in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, but Stevens’s maneuver suggests that he expected the matter of Cheney’s task force might arise. Nonetheless, the executives have placed themselves in potential legal jeopardy through their apparently false testimony. According to US Code, it is illegal to make “any materially false, fictitious or fraudulent statement or representation” before Congress.

Read on...