July 17, 2003

Ninth Grader Is Cheney's Energy Report Source

Teen Used Internet and Library to Write Term Paper

The White House said today that the chief source for a controversial Bush Administration energy plan was a term paper written by a ninth grader in Casper, Wyoming, the home town of Vice President Dick Cheney.

The Administration made the revelation after being rebuffed last week by a Federal appeals court that refused to block a lawsuit to force disclosure of the Energy Task Force sources. The Sierra Club and Judicial Watch, a Washington group that sues Federal officials as often as possible, had filed suit claiming oil industry executives became de facto members of the Administration in preparation of the energy plan.

The Administration refused to identify the student, but Bartholomew Lopez, the editor of the Casper Daily Standard Bearer, said the student, now in the eleventh grade, was Melissa Henderson, who plays the tuba in the Casper High School marching band and works nights at McDonald's.

In a statement revealing the report's source, the White House said that "while the Administration still believes it is unconstitutional to force the Executive Branch to disclose its inner workings, in order to move forward in securing each and every American's energy future we have decided to reveal the source."

Lopez said it was widely known in Casper that Henderson's paper was the source. "Everybody here has known for at least two years," Lopez said. "We wrote about it several times on the front page and even published the entire term paper after the Vice President called her personally to thank her for letting them use it."

Henderson wrote the paper for a social studies class taught by Greta Koehler, who sat two rows behind Cheney in the Casper High School social studies class when both were seniors in 1960. Lopez said that Koehler, who gave the term paper a B-plus grade, forwarded it to Cheney in the early months of the Bush Administration when she read that the vice president would head up an energy task force.

Lopez said it was titled "Why Is the Price of Gasoline so High?" and that Henderson did all of her research for it on the Internet using the computer at the public library.

"She was the first student in Casper to write a term paper off the Internet," Lopez said. "It created quite a stir because we don't have many Internet kind of people."

On Wall Street, an oil analyst at Goldman Sachs who had read the paper said that it "didn't have much in the way of new data" but that the author reached some "intriguing conclusions" from her analysis.
"I was struck by her suggestion that one way to get gasoline prices lower at the pump would be to lower the numbers that appear in the little price-per-gallon window on the pump," said Ahmed al-Tikriti, director of the crude oil analytical section at the brokerage house. "That might work, but I need some time to consider the longer-term ramifications."

A spokesman for Judicial Watch said that pending completion of an analysis of the Henderson paper, the group planned to broaden its lawsuit to include Henderson, her parents, the Casper library, the Caper City Council and the Casper school board as defendants. "We know there was a conspiracy and that Cheney was at the center of it," the spokesman said.

Lopez expressed puzzlement that the national media had never learned of the Henderson paper. "When that lawsuit was first filed, I called the Denver office of the New York Times to tip them off," he said. "I left a phone message telling them that the source was this girl right here in Casper. But they never followed up."

Separately, the White House announced that President Bush intends to posthumously nominate Robert Bork to the Supreme Court "just as soon as he dies."

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