The thing about the article in the Smoking Gun that make me interested enough to post was this: "Tom Fitton, the group's (Judicial Watch) president, said he had no way to guess what interest the task force had in the information...". He's not leaping to conclusions on flimsy evidence. I respect that.

One thing in the article from the Sidney Morning Herald: "Simultaneously, the energy task force of the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, was working to tackle a looming US oil crisis." What looming oil crisis? This must be the part the US media doesn't know. For that matter, neither did anyone in the oil business in the US. It just wasn't about to happen. Longer term concerns of course; looming? No. The whole article falls apart if you realize that there was no reason for concern at this time.

While I can understand some policy wonks wrote papers arguing for direct action to defend the US's oil supply, I've never seen anything that suggested that there was any eminent threat to it. That's actually one of the more baffling things about the timing of the war with Iraq. If it was just about neutralizing the threat Iraq posed to the stability of the region, why this year? If you really knew they didn't have WMDs, if it was all a lie, why bother? Frankly if all you want is cheap oil supplies, the smarter move would have been to lift the Iraqi embargo. That would have dropped oil prices into the $12 a barrel range without costing a drop of blood. The course finally chosen was the longest, most costly way to get access to the oil if that's all it was about.

Likewise, simply discovering all the discussions in military journals and white papers related to defending oil supplies doesn't prove anything. That's what military planners do. The US military had been studying plans for war with Japan for 20 years prior to WWII. These plans were not the reason the US went to war with Japan. They were plans, nothing more. You'll have to come up with better than this if you want to "prove" all that been said here.