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June
27, 2003
Jason
Leopold
CIA: Seven Months Prior to 9/11 Iraq
Posed No Threat to US
David
Lindorff
The Catch and Release of "Comical
Ali"
Ray McGovern
Cheney, Forgery and the CIA
June
26, 2003
Sen.
Robert Byrd
The Road of Cover-Up is a Road to Ruin
Jason
Leopold
Wolfowitz Instructed the CIA to Investigate
Hans Blix
Paul
de Rooij
Ambient Death in Palestine
Chris Floyd
Mass Graves and Burned Meat in Bush's New Iraq
Elaine
Cassel
Wolfowitz as Lord High Executioner
CounterPunch
Wire
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Sheldon
Hull
Squatting in Mansions
Ben Tripp
A Guide to Hating Almost Anyone
Uri
Avnery
The Best Show in Town
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/25
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Ordinary Vistas:
The Photographs of Kurt Nimmo
June
25, 2003
Bruce
Jackson
Buffalo Cops Wage War on Pedal Pushers
Mickey
Z.
The New Dark Ages
David Lindorff
Indonesia's War on Journalists
Dan
Bacher
Butterflies and Farmworkers Confront USDA and Riot Cops
Adam Federman
"Success is Not the Issue Here"
Elaine
Cassel
"Ain't No Justice": Fed Judge Quits, Assails Sentencing
Guidelines
Bill Kauffman
My America vs. the Empire
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/25
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of the Day
You Are Being Watched:
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June
24, 2003
Elaine
Cassel
Supreme Indemnity
Holocaust Denial at the High Court
Roya
Monajem
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John
Chuckman
The Real Clash of Civilizations
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WMD Damage Control at the Times
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Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/24
June
23, 2003
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Pritzke
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Conn
Hallinan
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Wayne Madsen
Commercials, Disney & Amistad
Edward
Said
The Meaning of Rachel Corrie
Steve Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/23
June
21 / 22, 2003
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Cockburn
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William
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June
28, 2003
Meet Steven Griles:
Big
Oil's Inside Man
By
JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
Steven Griles is finally on the run. Griles is
Interior Gale Norton's top lieutenant, the man who holds the
keys to the nation's oil and mineral reserves. For the past two
years, he's used those keys to unlock nearly every legal barrier
to exploitation, opening the public lands to a carnival of corporate
plunder. He became the toast of Texas. But now Griles is hiding
out from reporters and congressional investigators after accounts
of his ongoing sleazy relationships with his former associates
in big oil have begun to ooze out into the open.
Griles's recent misfortunes are scarcely
a surprise. From the time he took his oath of office, Griles
was a congressional investigation waiting to happen. The former
coal industry flack was one of Bush's most outrageous appointments,
an arrogant booster of the very energy cartel he was meant to
regulate. His track record could not be given even the slightest
green gloss. A veteran of the Reagan administration, Griles schemed
closely with disgraced Interior Secretary James Watt to open
the public lands of the West to unfettered access by oil and
mining companies, many of whom funded Watt's strange outpost
of divinely-inspired environmental exploitation, the Mountain
States Legal Center.
As Deputy Director of Surface Mining,
Griles gutted strip-mining regulations and was a relentless booster
of the oil-shale scheme, one of the most outlandish giveaways
and environmental blunders of the last century. He also pushed
to overturn the popular moratorium on off shore oil drilling
on the Pacific Coast, a move of such extreme zealotry in the
service of big oil that it even caught Reagan off guard.
After leaving public office, Griles quickly
cashed in on his iniquitous tenure in government by launching
a DC lobbying firm called J. Stephen Griles and Associations.
He soon drummed up a list of clients including Arch Coal, the
American Gas Association, National Mining Association, Occidental
Petroleum, Pittston Coal and more than 40 other gas, mining and
energy concerns, big and small, foreign and domestic.
Then Griles was tapped as Norton's chief
deputy. After contentious senate hearings that exposed his various
and lucrative entanglements with the oil and gas industry, Griles
was finally confirmed to office on July 7, 2001. He later signed
two separate statements agreeing to recuse himself from direct
involvement any Interior Deparment matters that might involve
his former clients. He has since flouted both of those agreements,
as disclosed by his own calendar of meetings, liberated through
a Freedom of Information Act filing made by Friends of the Earth.
As the calendar and meeting notes reveal,
Griles has used the cover of the 9/11 attacks and the war on
Iraq to advance his wholesale looting of the public domain for
the benefit of some of his former clients and business cronies.
He has pushed rollbacks in environmental standards for air and
water; advocated increased oil and gas drilling on public lands;
tried to exempt the oil industry from royalty payments; and sought
to create new loopholes in regulations governing stripmining.
Griles wasted no time compiling a wish
list from his pals. Within days of assuming office, Griles convened
a series of parleys between his former clients and Interior Department
officials to chart a gameplan for accelerating mining, oil leasing
and coal-methane extraction from public lands. Between August
of 2001 and January of this year, Griles met at least 7 times
with former clients; 15 times with companies represented by his
former client the National Mining Association; on at least 16
occasions he arranged meetings between himself, former clients,
and other administration officials to discuss rollback of air
pollution standards for power plants, oil refineries and industrial
boilers; on 12 occasions he arranged similar meetings between
regulators and former clients regarding coal mining.
In the early days of his tenure, Griles
huddled on at least three occasions with Harold Quinn, Jr., a
chief lobbyist with the National Mining Association. Quinn and
his association are Griles' former clients.
Quinn had business that needed urgent
attention. He prodded Griles to move quickly to loosen restrictions
on the most environmentally malign form of coal mining, the aptly-named
mountaintop removal method, where entire streams and valleys
are buried in mining waste. Although both the Clinton and Bush
administrations saw nothing wrong with the practice, a federal
judge though it was going too far and ordered an injunction on
this kind of mining. Griles agreed to do what he could to overturn
the ban, a move that would accrue to the benefit of one of his
former clients, Arch Coal.
At another meeting, Quinn also reminded
Griles of Bush's pledge to preserve the archaic 1872 Mining Law,
which gives away gold-rich public lands for as little as $2.50
an acre. The giveaway law had come under attack even from Republicans.
Griles also convened a meeting on September
10, 2001 with a dozen top executives from the Edison Electric
Institute, another former client of his lobbyshop. The energy
bosses came to congratulate Griles on Bush's plans to scale-back
enforcement actions on filthy and aging coal-fired power plants.
But they also came to gripe. They were unhappy with Bush's pledge
to toughen-up emission standards on sulfur dioxide, nitrogen
oxide and mercury. Griles, who was then the Bush administration's
point man on the financial impacts of air quality rules on the
energy industry, bent a sympathetic ear.
From July 27, 2001 to February 20 of
last year, Griles's logs show that he met on at least 32 occasions
with other administration officials to discuss pending regulatory
matters that were a concern to his former clients.
These meetings flout federal ethics rules
which prohibit executive branch officials from participating
in any "particular matter" which could advance their
own financial interests or that involves former employers or
clients. Griles claims that the meetings were merely social visits,
utterly lacking in political intent. "We don't talk about
work," Griles assured the Washington Post last year in an
interview. "We're not allowed. We are all as scrupulous
as we can be to assure that I will not be involved in any particular
matter that would violate the ethics agreement or even have the
appearance of a conflict of interest. The president said he wanted
this administration to be held to the highest ethical standards.
And I don't ever want it said that I didn't."
But it now turns out that not only was
Griles shilling for his former clients, he is also pushing policies
that will also plump up his own pocketbook. Griles was an ownership
partner in a DC lobbying firm called National Environmental Strategies,
a polluter's lobby founded in 1990 by Marc Himmelstein and Haley
Barbour. Barbour soon left the firm to become head of the Republican
National Committee. Griles moved in.
When he was nominated as deputy secretary
of Interior, Griles was forced to sell his interest in the firm
for $1.1 million , and he fixed up aq deal with Himmelstein,
a friend and Republican powerbroker. Instead of paying Griles
off in a lump sum, Himmelstein will pay the Bush official $284,000
each year over the next four years. Griles claims he arranged
this kind of payment plan so as not to leave NES "strapped
for cash."
But in effect Griles remains financially
tied to the health of Himmelstein's firm. And, in fact, Himmelstein
has admitted that over the past two years he and Griles have
gotten together several times over beers and dinner.
One of the issues high on the list of
priorities for some of NES's clients was coal-methane gas drilling.
In April of 2002, Griles directly intervened in a bitter dispute
over the huge deposits of coal methane in Power River Basin in
Montana and Wyoming_deposits worth billions of dollars and long
craved by the natural gas industry. This looms as the largest
energy development project in the country and has been assailedby
environmentalists and native groups as an environmental nightmare.
The project, which calls for the development
of more than 80,000 coal-methane wells, is so fraught with danger
that even the Bush administration's own EPA issued a report sharply
criticizing the environmental consequences of the scheme. Among
the findings:
the 80,000 coal methane wells will discharge
nearly 20,000 gallons of salty water each day onto the ground
surface, fouling the land, creeks and aquatic life; over its
lifepsan, the project will deplete the underground aquifer of
more than 4 trillion gallons of water, that will take hundreds
of years to replenish; full-scale production will also entail
17,000 miles of new roads, 20,000 miles of pipelines and will
turn nearly 200,000 acres of rangeland into an industrial zone.
This rare rebuke from the normally supine
EPA roused Griles into furious action. On April 12, 2002, Griles
sent a scorching memo under his
Department of Interior letterhead chastising
the EPA for dragging its feet on the project. He chided the agency
of being uncooperative with industry. It turns out that Griles
had formerly represented the very companies that he was now accusing
the EPA of failing to give proper deference. As a lobbyist, Griles's
clients included the Coal Bed Methane Ad Hoc Committee, Devon
Energy, Restone and Western Gas Resources, all companies seeking
to gain access to the Powder Basin gas fields. His old firm,
NES, also hosted an industry-sponsored tour of Powder Basin for
EPA and Interior Department officials. NES also represents Griles'
former
client Devon Energy, which stands to
make a killing if the deal is approved.
Griles's meddling in this matter came
to the attention of the Department's lawyers. On May 8, they
forced Griles to sign an agreement disqualifying himself from
any further involvement in the coal-methane issue. He later said
he did so "for all the world to know that I'm not even going
to be talking to anybody about it again."
Now the Inspector General of the Department
of Interior has launched an investigation into Griles's entanglements
with his clients and Griles isn't talking to anybody, especially
the press.
But on May 9, reporter Roberta Baskin
tracked Griles down at a discreet ribbon-cutting ceremony for
the opening of the Meadowood Farm Trail in Lorton, Virginia.
Baskin approached Griles with a cameraman and began asking him
unsettling questions about Powder Basin. As Baskin zoomed in
for the kill, Griles grabbed hold of the nearest object he could
find: a 94-year old woman named Gladys Bushrod, a ceremonial
guest of the Interior Deparment. Basking Griles used the befuddled
Bushrod as "a human shield" to deflect unpleasing questions
about his incestuous ties to his friends in big oil until he
reached his waiting limo, whereupon he relinquished the woman
and made his getaway like Beelzebub amid a puff of dust and hydrocarbons.
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