[Mb-civic] Another Thunderbolt from Wilkerson - Dan Froomkin - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Another Thunderbolt from Wilkerson

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Friday, November 4, 2005; 12:45 PM

Another shocking accusation by former administration insider Lawrence 
Wilkerson appears to be going under the media radar today.

On NPR yesterday, the former chief of staff to the secretary of state 
said that he had uncovered a "visible audit trail" tracing the practice 
of prisoner abuse by U.S. soldiers directly back to Vice President 
Cheney's office.

Here's the audio of Wilkerson's interview with Steve Inskeep. The 
transcript is not publicly available, but here are the relevant excerpts:

"INSKEEP: While in the government, he says he was assigned to gather 
documents. He traced just how Americans came to be accused of abusing 
prisoners. In 2002, a presidential memo had ordered that detainees be 
treated in a manner consistent with the Geneva Conventions that forbid 
torture. Wilkerson says the vice president's office pushed for a more 
expansive policy.

"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, 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."

Addington, incidentally, was promoted this week to the position of vice 
presidential chief of staff, replacing his indicted former boss, Scooter 
Libby. (For more on Addington, read my columns from Tuesday and Wednesday .)

The only news service I have found that covered Wilkerson's comments on 
NPR was Agence France Presse .

But if past is prologue, it will get picked up by more people soon.

In my October 20 column , I expressed surprise that Wilkerson's last 
thunderbolt hadn't made the front pages.

(continued)...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2005/11/04/BL2005110401072.html?nav=hcmodule
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