May 14 2009

Lawrence Wilkerson Drops an Iraq-Torture Bombshell

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

On Wednesday, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson dropped a bombshell (h/t Heather):

    what I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002 — well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion — its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa’ida.

   So furious was this effort that on one particular detainee, even when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney’s office that their detainee “was compliant” (meaning the team recommended no more torture), the VP’s office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods. The detainee had not revealed any al-Qa’ida-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, “revealed” such contacts. Of course later we learned that al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the torture to stop.

   There in fact were no such contacts. (Incidentally, al-Libi just “committed suicide” in Libya. Interestingly, several U.S. lawyers working with tortured detainees were attempting to get the Libyan government to allow them to interview al-Libi….)

MORE: http://www.antemedius.com/content/lawrence-wilkerson-drops-iraq-torture-bombshell by Bob Fertik

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    • Edger on May 14, 2009 at 17:53
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    Whatever you do don’t release them. :-/

  2. for a number of years, interviewed on NPR, etc.  He’s always been pretty damn straight.

    Well, now he has just flat out laid out the TRUTH for all to digest.  BRAVO for him!  I urge everyone to read this article and watch the video!

    Thanks, Edger!

  3. Yes, this underscores what McClatchy was reporting in April.

    Report: Abusive tactics used to seek Iraq-al Qaida link

    By Jonathan Landay, McClatchy Newspapers

    The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist…

    The use of abusive interrogation – widely considered torture – as part of Bush’s quest for a rationale to invade Iraq came to light as the Senate issued a major report tracing the origin of the abuses and President Barack Obama opened the door to prosecuting former U.S. officials for approving them.

    The question is did Wilkerson have 1st hand evidence, or is this hearsay based on what he read in the newspaper?

  4. I dropped this comment over at the orange, its posted there too…

    Levin, Senate Armed Services Committee…

    with their Report a few weeks ago… didn’t Levin’s committee nail this already? I mean, doesnt everybody already KNOW the reason they authorized and implemented a state sanctioned program of torture was to falsely justify an unjustifiable war in Iraq?

  5. discussing the secret decision making processes that went on between 2002 and 2005, and how he had perceived that they would lead to disaster.  He spoke of failures and more.

    The White House cabal

    By Lawrence B. Wilkerson

    October 25, 2005

    IN PRESIDENT BUSH’S first term, some of the most important decisions about U.S. national security — including vital decisions about postwar Iraq — were made by a secretive, little-known cabal. It was made up of a very small group of people led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

    When I first discussed this group in a speech last week at the New American Foundation in Washington, my comments caused a significant stir because I had been chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell between 2002 and 2005.

    But it’s absolutely true. I believe that the decisions of this cabal were sometimes made with the full and witting support of the president and sometimes with something less. More often than not, then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice was simply steamrolled by this cabal.

    Its insular and secret workings were efficient and swift — not unlike the decision-making one would associate more with a dictatorship than a democracy. This furtive process was camouflaged neatly by the dysfunction and inefficiency of the formal decision-making process, where decisions, if they were reached at all, had to wend their way through the bureaucracy, with its dissenters, obstructionists and “guardians of the turf.”

    But the secret process was ultimately a failure. It produced a series of disastrous decisions and virtually ensured that the agencies charged with implementing them would not or could not execute them well. . . .  

    Here is another very good article by Wilkerson, on Guantanamo.  

    Guest Post by Lawrence Wilkerson: Some Truths About Guantanamo Bay

    Tuesday, Mar 17 2009, 7:27PM

     

    • kj on May 15, 2009 at 03:32
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    is coming apart at the seams, and i couldn’t be happier.

    funny exchange at work, btw,  torture talk is now ‘on the table.’  ðŸ˜€   (i got one of the wingers to flash me the peace sign, he is a very smart dude, more up on things than i am by far, and i zinged him and another guy re: cheney and torture. so he gave the peace sign as an ‘good one!’  heh.  he’ll get me back, probably in spades, but score one anyway.)  (and yes, they’re pissed about the torture, but they’re pissed at PELOSI.  of course, so am i.  so we agree on that.  it’s taken awhile to get to this point.  anyway)  (all in parens.  i must be rambling!)  

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