Judge questions Bush request to halt Cheney suit
By the Associated Press (in the Houston Chronicle).

A federal appeals court today questioned the Bush administration’s request to stop a lawsuit delving into Vice President Dick Cheney’s contacts with energy industry executives and lobbyists.
Appeals Judges Harry Edwards and David Tatel suggested the White House had no legal basis for asking them to block a lower court judge from letting the case proceed.
The Bush administration took the unusual step of coming to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in the midst of the case.
U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan has ruled that the Sierra Club and Judicial Watch may be entitled to a limited amount of information about the meetings Cheney and his aides had with the energy industry in formulating the White House’s energy plan.
The plan, adopted four months after President Bush took office, favored opening up public lands to oil and gas drilling and a wide range of other steps backed by industry.
Among the industry executives that the Cheney energy task force has acknowledged meeting with were former Enron Corp. chief executive Ken Lay.
Tatel, an appointee of President Clinton, said the administration has failed to show that it is suffering legal harm at the hands of the lower court. Edwards, a Carter-era appointee, told a government attorney flatly that “you have no authority” to ask the appeals court to intervene in the middle of the lawsuit.
The government is seeking “a modest extension” of a previous court ruling, responded Gregory Katsas, a deputy assistant attorney general.
The third member of the panel, Appeals Judge A. Raymond Randolph, expressed doubt that the Cheney task force is required to disclose information about its inner workings. However, Randolph, an appointee of Bush’s father, also questioned whether the administration should be seeking appeals court intervention.

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“Cost plus” basis huh?
Iraq rebuilding contracts awarded
Halliburton, Stevedoring Services of America get government contracts for early relief work.
By Mark Gongloff for CNN/Money.

The Army Corps of Engineers told CNN Tuesday that Halliburton would be paid on a “cost plus” basis, meaning it would be reimbursed for the costs of its work and would get a certain percentage of those costs as a fee.
Since it’s still unknown how much damage has been or will be done to Iraqi oil fields in the war, it’s difficult to estimate the contract’s eventual dollar value.
But its biggest value could be that it puts Halliburton in a prime position to handle the complete refurbishment of Iraq’s long-neglected oil infrastructure, which will be a plum job.
Getting Iraq’s oil fields to pre-1991 production levels will take at least 18 months and cost about $5 billion initially, with $3 billion more in annual operating expenses, according to a recent study by the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, named for the first President Bush’s secretary of state during the first Gulf War.
“Certainly Halliburton would have the lead [in the competition for that job], even absent this contract, given the size and scope of their current operations,” said Pierre Conner, an analyst with Hibernia Southcoast Capital. “But there’s no question they’ll start with some footprint there. It clearly puts them in the position where they will know more about the situation and have a bit of an operation there.”
Though none of the potential administrators of such a contract — including the Defense Department, the State Department’s U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the United Nations — have claimed responsibility for handing out the job, Monday’s award and Bush’s request for funding seem to indicate the U.S. government will be in charge.

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