Washington ? Democratic presidential contender Howard Dean has demanded release of secret deliberations of Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force. But as Vermont governor, Dean had an energy task force that met in secret and angered state lawmakers.

Dean’s group had one public hearing and after-the-fact volunteered the names of industry executives and liberal advocates it consulted in private, but the Vermont governor refused to open the task force’s closed-door deliberations.

In 1999, Dean offered the same argument the Bush administration uses today for keeping deliberations of a policy task force secret.

“The governor needs to receive advice from time to time in closed session. As every person in government knows, sometimes you get more open discussion when it’s not public,” Dean was quoted as saying.

Dean’s own dispute about the secrecy of a Vermont task force that devised a policy for restructuring the state’s near-bankrupt electric utilities has escaped national attention, even though he has attacked a similar arrangement used by President Bush.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Dean defended his recent criticism of Cheney’s task force and his demand that the administration release its private energy deliberations even though he refused to do that in Vermont.

Dean said his group developed better policy, was bipartisan and sought advice not just from energy executives but environmentalists and low-income advocates. He said his task force was more open because it had one public hearing and divulged afterward the names of people it consulted even though the content of discussions with them was kept secret.

The Vermont task force “is not exactly the Cheney thing,” Dean said. “We had a much more open process than Cheney’s process. We named the people we sought advice from in our final report.”