Gore's Elk Hills/Occidental Oil Scandal: Bigger Than Teapot Dome
Michael Savage
Monday, Sept. 25, 2000
Vice President Al Gore endorsed the sale of a government oil field in 1998, the largest sale of federal property in the history of the U.S. government.
The Elk Hills Naval Petroleum Reserve, located near Bakersfield, California, was established in 1912 to help fuel Navy ships. President Clinton proposed the sale in 1995 saying the oil field no longer served a military purpose!
The DOE (Energy Department) received a total of 22 bona fide offers but decided to sell this "crown jewel" of oil and gas fields to Occidental Petroleum Corp. By selling off this resource the Clinton/Gore team eliminated the U.S. Navy's primary source of emergency crude oil. They argued that this field "no longer serves a national security purpose."
"We view this asset as becoming the crown jewel of our domestic operations," said Occidental Oil and Gas C.E.O. David Hentschel.
Couching this questionable attack on our National Security in conservative jargon, Patricia Godley, DOE's Assistant Secretary for Fossil Energy, claimed the sale was part of Al Gore's efforts to "reduce the size of government" and "return inherently non-federal functions to the private sector." The largest federal divestiture was also said to help "pay off the national debt."
The sale of this government oil field to Occidental Petroleum may have directly benefited Al Gore through his ownership of Occidental stock. While his aides denied Gore encouraged this sale, his booklet "Reinventing Government" called on the government to sell these precious oil reserves. Gore wrote "...Elk Hills Naval Petroleum Reserves... no longer serves its original strategic purpose for the Navy."
Gore called for the sale of this prime contingency source of fuel for the Navy, calling it "Common Sense Government." In an emergency, where will our Navy get its fuel? From Iraq?
The same Al Gore witnessed the loss, theft or sale of the crown jewels of our nuclear war know-how from Los Alamos National Laboratory. Whether these events are interconnected we do not know. That our national security has been seriously damaged is a certainty.
