BBC: Cheney accused by Wilkerson on prisoner abuse

A top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell has launched a stinging attack on US Vice-President Dick Cheney over abuse of prisoners by US troops. Col Lawrence Wilkerson accused Mr Cheney of ignoring a decision by President Bush on the treatment of prisoners in the war on terror.

Asked by the BBC's Today if Mr Cheney could be accused of war crimes, he said: "It's an interesting question."

"Certainly it is a domestic crime to advocate terror," he added. "And I would suspect, for whatever it's worth, it's an international crime as well."



This is an extraordinary attack by a man who until earlier in the year was Mr Cheney's colleague in the senior reaches of the Bush team, the BBC's Justin Webb in Washington says.

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Link:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4480638.stm

Wilkerson may have been confused about white house influence the stuff he, powell and others let in the UN presentation. But he wasn't confused about the white house style of doing intelligence until he after the new America talk, he knew a whole lot on the stuff that didn't make it to the UN presentation.

*read this*: http://web.archive.org/web/20040505230702/http://us.gq.com/plus/content/?040429plco_01

Seriously, read it, its a may 2004 “going away ego stroking reputation salvaging” interview with Powell and his staff in “Gentleman's quarterly”, its great stuff and I can't believe I missed it at the time.

From Wilkersons recent AP interview (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/28/AR2005112801246_pf.html): “He said he has almost, but not quite, concluded that Cheney and others in the administration deliberately ignored evidence of bad intelligence and looked only at what supported their case for war”

From Wilkersons 2004 GQ magazine interview : “Powell's chief of staff, Larry Wilkerson, described those four days at the CIA as a battle, with Powell's team scrambling in the final hours to save the general from humiliation. "I was down at the agency as his task-force leader," Wilkerson said. "And we fought tooth and nail with other members of the administration to scrub it and get the crap out." ”

Now If Wilkerson read the interview he gave he read that his colleagues said this: “Rice even described Powell as enthusiastic about the presentation, spending four days and nights at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, just before the speech, munching on delivery pizza and scouring the evidence against Saddam for ways to punch it up. In her words, "He wanted to be sure that we put in the best, strongest aerials we had, both from the point of view of the ones that were best documented but also the ones that were going to be punchiest."

By contrast, members of Powell's staff, including his two closest advisers, Richard Armitage and Larry Wilkerson, described Powell's four-day immersion at the CIA in very different terms—not punching up the evidence but breaking it down, frantically sifting through droves of poor intelligence and false claims that the Pentagon, the intelligence services, and the vice president's office had slipped into his presentation, throwing out hype in an effort to preserve his reputation and avoid the kind of humiliation that he wound up with anyway.

"Four days!" Armitage practically shouted when I mentioned Powell's visit to the CIA. "Four days! And three nights! The secretary is a man of honor! He values being credible. To be credible, you have to be able to stand behind what you say. That's why he fieldstripped it. Just like, you ever heard of fieldstripping cigarettes back in Nam?" He was referring to the process of tearing up smoked cigarettes so they will decompose quickly and leave no trace for the enemy. "That means tear it up and shake the tobacco that's left to the wind," Armitage said. "He fieldstripped it." ”

Well, thats got a lot that would make a person in Wilkersons place worry doesn't it? Intel from the “vice president's office” , Intel being “crap” everyone with Powell agreeing and communicating on this, “crap” evidence being used by the rest of the white house....

Wilkerson, also the GQ article: “ "I call them utopians," he said. "I don't care whether utopians are Vladimir Lenin on a sealed train to Moscow or Paul Wolfowitz. Utopians, I don't like. You're never going to bring utopia, and you're going to hurt a lot of people in the process of trying to do it." “

Comparing Wolfowitz and Lenin, how cool is that ;-)

Posted by: BE6-II at November 29, 2005 07:23 PM

http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/001121.html

... -- but we shouldn't, we can't, and we won't.

We remember that it was Wolfowitz who, in the run up to the war, mocked Gen. Shinseki as "wildly off the mark" for saying the U.S. would need at least 200,000 troops on the ground in Iraq. "It's hard to conceive," Wolfowitz told Congress three weeks before the invasion, "that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army. Hard to imagine." That failure of imagination has led to the death and mutilation of thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis.

And we remember how Wolfowitz pooh-poohed the idea that the U.S. would be saddled with the bill for the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq. "The idea that going to be eclipsed by these monstrous future costs ignores the nature of the country we're dealing with," he lectured Congress, going on to explain that Iraq had "$10 to $20 billion in frozen assets from the Gulf War," and generated "on the order of $15 billion to $20 billion a year in oil exports." "There's a lot of money there," he insisted, "and to assume that we're going to pay for it is just wrong."

"Just wrong," indeed. The taxpayer tab for Iraq is a "monstrous" $250 billion -- and rising.

No wonder World Bank Wolfie wants to leave Wartime Wolfie in the past and move on -- without being held accountable.

We mustn't let it happen.

From When Did the World Bank Become the Home for Wayward Architects of War? by Arianna Huffington on November 29, 2005

Link:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/when-did-the-world-bank-b_b_11422.html

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"You begin to speculate, you begin to wonder -- Was this intelligence spun? Was it politicized? Was it cherry-picked? Did in fact the American people get fooled? I'm beginning to have my concerns," Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff for former Secretary of State Colin Powell, said.

Wilkerson added that in recent days he's started to question a number of other deeply held personal beliefs, saying he now suspects that Madonna is not really a natural blonde, that many congressional campaign contributions are nothing more than thinly diguised bribes, and that the personal interactions shown on "reality" television shows are often scripted in advance.

"My years spent climbing bureacratic ladders at the Pentagon and in the State Department simply didn't prepare me to deal with such devious behavior," Wilkerson explained. "It's been a shattering experience."

Posted by billmon at November 29, 2005 04:29 PM

Link:
http://billmon.org/archives/002343.html