Dan Froomkin's got the
scoop. Apparently Lawrence Wilkerson was on NPR yesterday and was talking about the abuse of prisoners by US soldiers.
He says that there may be documentation tracing the torture policies to Cheney himself. Froomkin says that no other media outlets are pushing the story. This could be big. We've got to help push this into the media ciculation.
details below ...
"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 .... 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. (emphasis mine)
Wilkerson (the former chief of staff to Colin Powell), of course, received a huge amount of attention for a speech a couple of weeks ago blasting Cheney's cabal for taking over the national security decision-making process. E.g.
link. This could be even bigger. We must push this story.