{"id":134,"date":"2005-11-23T00:35:32","date_gmt":"2005-11-23T06:35:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/?p=134"},"modified":"2005-11-22T16:37:41","modified_gmt":"2005-11-22T22:37:41","slug":"another-thunderbolt-from-wilkerson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/nada\/dump-duhbya\/another-thunderbolt-from-wilkerson\/","title":{"rendered":"Another Thunderbolt from Wilkerson"},"content":{"rendered":"

Another Thunderbolt from Wilkerson<\/a><\/p>\n

“Mr. WILKERSON: What happened was that the secretary of Defense, under the cover of the vice president’s office, began to <\/p>\n

create an environment<\/strong> — and this started from the very beginning when David Addington, the vice president’s lawyer [Addington, <\/p>\n

incidentally, was promoted this week to the position of vice presidential chief of staff, replacing his indicted former boss, Scooter <\/p>\n

Libby], was a staunch advocate of allowing the president in his capacity as commander in chief to deviate from the Geneva Conventions. <\/p>\n

Regardless of the president having put out this memo, they began to authorize procedures within the armed forces that led to, in my view, <\/p>\n

what we’ve seen.<\/p>\n

“INSKEEP: We have to get more detail about that because the military will say, the Pentagon will say they’ve <\/p>\n

investigated this repeatedly and that all the investigations have found that the abuses were committed by a relatively small number of <\/p>\n

people at relatively low levels. What hard evidence takes those abuses up the chain of command and lands them in the vice president’s <\/p>\n

office, which is where you’re placing it?<\/p>\n

“Mr. WILKERSON: I’m privy to the paperwork, both classified and unclassified, that the <\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

office through the secretary of Defense down to the commanders in the field that in carefully couched terms<\/strong> — I’ll give you <\/p>\n

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, <\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

the spirit of the Geneva Conventions and the law of war.<\/p>\n

“You just — if you’re a military man, you know that you just don’t do <\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

of that. There are those in the leadership who will feel so pressured that they have to produce intelligence that it doesn’t matter <\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

just given in essence, though you may not know it, carte blanche for a lot of problems to occur.”
\n—–<\/p>\n

Former Insider Lashes Out<\/a>
\nBy Dan <\/p>\n

Froomkin
\nSpecial to washingtonpost.com
\nThursday, October 20, 2005; 1:12 PM<\/p>\n

It didn’t make the front page this morning, but <\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

president has hijacked U.S. foreign policy, inveigled the president, condoned torture and crippled the ability of the government to <\/p>\n

respond to emergencies<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell until both men <\/p>\n

resigned in January, unleashed his blistering attack on the Bush White House yesterday at a luncheon at a Washington think tank. …<\/p>\n

“The comments, made at the New America Foundation, a Washington think-tank, were the harshest attack on the administration by a <\/p>\n

former senior official since criticisms by Richard Clarke, former White House terrorism czar, and Paul O’Neill, former Treasury <\/p>\n

secretary, early last year.”
\n—–<\/p>\n

The White House Stonewall<\/a><\/p>\n

It seems that Addington is who Libby turned to, <\/p>\n

after his breakfast with New York Times reporter Judy Miller, when he needed more information about Plame. …<\/p>\n

Addington was one <\/p>\n

of the authors of the White House memo that critics said justified the use of torture on terrorism suspects. And he formally requested <\/p>\n

that a website making fun of Lynne Cheney, the vice president’s wife, take down its material.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading Another Thunderbolt from Wilkerson<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dump-duhbya"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}