By Staff
You know that $2 billion oil company windfall that could reach $8 billion?
Two Republican congressmen suggested Aug. 3 that someone at the Interior Department may have deliberately removed provisions from offshore drilling contracts to provide it.
They also say the department refuses to divulge documentation that could resolve the mystery over contracts and provisions dictating how much in royalty payments companies must pay the government on leases issued in 1998-99.
"We believe the department may have deliberately withheld crucial information" that could determine if the issue involves deliberate action, complained Reps. Tom Davis, R-Va., and Darrell Issa, R-Calif.
Absent that provision those two years, leaseholders have not had to pay royalties and won't for years to come – although, as you might have guessed, oil and gas prices meanwhile soared well beyond the royalty trigger.
So, the Congressional Budget Office estimates the government has already missed $2 billion in royalties and stands to miss another $8 billion over the life of the leases.
Quips, quotes and qulunkers: "Even before the bombs fell on Baghdad, a group of senior Pentagon officials (was) plotting to invade another country. Their covert campaign once again relied on false intelligence and shady allies. But this time, the target was Iran. In recent weeks, the attacks by Hezbollah on Israel have given neoconservatives in the Bush administration the pretext they were seeking to launch what former House Speaker Newt Gingrich calls World War III."
– James Bamford in "The Next War," Aug. 10 Rolling Stone. His story on consultant John Rendon, "The Man Who Sold the War" in Iraq, won the 2006 National Magazine Award for reporting.
Bamford concludes that over the past six months, the administration has adopted almost all of the hardline stance advocated by the Pentagon war "cabal," backing up tough talk with $66 million for dissident groups to promote regime change inside Iran.
Bamford says convicted embezzler Ahmed Chalabi, whose Iraqi National Congress fed the administration faulty intelligence on weapons of mass destruction, is now suspected of dealings that furnished Iran with highly classified information on U.S. troop movements.
The CBS Evening News carried an exclusive report by correspondent Lesley Stahl that the U.S. government had "rock-solid" evidence that Chalabi passed extremely sensitive intelligence to Iran – evidence so sensitive it could "get Americans killed."
Larry Franklin, a former Bush administration official, pleaded guilty to passing classified information about Iran to a pro-Israel lobbying group, but Chalabi has not been indicted, let alone questioned by the FBI as part of an ongoing espionage investigation.
Last November, when Chalabi visited the United States for speeches and media events, the FBI could not interview him because he was under State Department protection.
Oh, and did you know that the State Department's Office of Iranian Affairs is overseen by Liz Cheney, Dick's daughter?
Her dad makes no secret of his desire to see Tehran fall.
On Inauguration Day 2005 he put Iran "right at the top" of "trouble spots" and suggested Israel "might well decide to act first" by attacking Iran.
The Israelis would "let the rest of the world worry about cleaning up the diplomatic mess afterward," Vice President Cheney said.