The Puzzle of the Enron Coverups
Thursday, July 13th, 2006 by RLRFrom The Albion Monitor
By Ron Callari
Enron is a scandal so enormous that it’s hard to wrap your mind around it. Not just a single financial disaster, it’s actually a jigsaw of interlocking scandals, each outrageous in its own right. There’s Enron the Wall St. con game, where company bookkeepers used slight of hand to turn four years of steady losses into stunning profits. There’s Enron the reverse Robin Hood, which stole from its own employees even as its executives were hauling millions of dollars out the backdoor. There’s Enron’s Ken Lay the Kingmaker, who used the corporation’s fraudulent wealth to broker elections and skew public policy to his liking. And then there are the Enron coverups, as documents are shredded and the White House seeks to conceal details about meetings between Enron and Vice President Cheney.
The coverups are still very much a mystery. What were the documents that were fed into the shredder — even after the corporation declared bankruptcy? What is the White House fighting to keep secret, even going to the length of redefining executive privilege and inviting the first Congressional lawsuit ever filed against a president? Were the consequences of releasing these documents more damaging than the consequences of destroying them?
Could the Big Secret be that the highest levels of the Bush Administration knew during the summer of 2001 that the largest bankruptcy in history was imminent? Or was it that Enron and the White House were working closely with the Taliban — including Osama bin Laden — up to weeks before the Sept. 11 attack? Was a deal in Afghanistan part of a desperate last-ditch “end run” to bail out Enron? Here’s a tip for Congressional investigators and federal prosecutors: Start by looking at the India deal. Closely.
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