Another Thunderbolt from Wilkerson
“Mr. WILKERSON: What happened was that the secretary of Defense, under the cover of the vice president’s office, began to
create an environment — and this started from the very beginning when David Addington, the vice president’s lawyer [Addington,
incidentally, was promoted this week to the position of vice presidential chief of staff, replacing his indicted former boss, Scooter
Libby], was a staunch advocate of allowing the president in his capacity as commander in chief to deviate from the Geneva Conventions.
Regardless of the president having put out this memo, they began to authorize procedures within the armed forces that led to, in my view,
what we’ve seen.
“INSKEEP: We have to get more detail about that because the military will say, the Pentagon will say they’ve
investigated this repeatedly and that all the investigations have found that the abuses were committed by a relatively small number of
people at relatively low levels. What hard evidence takes those abuses up the chain of command and lands them in the vice president’s
office, which is where you’re placing it?
“Mr. WILKERSON: I’m privy to the paperwork, both classified and unclassified, that the
secretary of State asked me to assemble on how this all got started, what the audit trail was, and when I began to assemble this
paperwork, which I no longer have access to, it was clear to me that there was a visible audit trail from the vice president’s
office through the secretary of Defense down to the commanders in the field that in carefully couched terms — I’ll give you
that — that to a soldier in the field meant two things: We’re not getting enough good intelligence and you need to get that evidence,
and, oh, by the way, here’s some ways you probably can get it. And even some of the ways that they detailed were not in accordance with
the spirit of the Geneva Conventions and the law of war.
“You just — if you’re a military man, you know that you just don’t do
these sorts of things because once you give just the slightest bit of leeway, there are those in the armed forces who will take advantage
of that. There are those in the leadership who will feel so pressured that they have to produce intelligence that it doesn’t matter
whether it’s actionable or not as long as they can get the volume in. They have to do what they have to do to get it, and so you’ve
just given in essence, though you may not know it, carte blanche for a lot of problems to occur.”
—–
Former Insider Lashes Out
By Dan
Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Thursday, October 20, 2005; 1:12 PM
It didn’t make the front page this morning, but
it seems to me that it’s a big deal when a former top administration official declares that a secret cabal led by the vice
president has hijacked U.S. foreign policy, inveigled the president, condoned torture and crippled the ability of the government to
respond to emergencies.
Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell until both men
resigned in January, unleashed his blistering attack on the Bush White House yesterday at a luncheon at a Washington think tank. …
“The comments, made at the New America Foundation, a Washington think-tank, were the harshest attack on the administration by a
former senior official since criticisms by Richard Clarke, former White House terrorism czar, and Paul O’Neill, former Treasury
secretary, early last year.”
—–
It seems that Addington is who Libby turned to,
after his breakfast with New York Times reporter Judy Miller, when he needed more information about Plame. …
Addington was one
of the authors of the White House memo that critics said justified the use of torture on terrorism suspects. And he formally requested
that a website making fun of Lynne Cheney, the vice president’s wife, take down its material.