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Powell Aid Calls Cheney a War Criminal
(BBC NEWS, 29 November 2005)
Col Lawrence Wilkerson accused Mr Cheney of ignoring a decision by President Bush on the treatment of prisoners in the war on terror. . . . Asked by the BBC's Today if Mr Cheney could be accused of war crimes, he said: "It's an interesting question." . . . "Certainly it is a domestic crime to advocate terror," he added. . . . "And I would suspect, for whatever it's worth, it's an international crime as well." . . . This is an extraordinary attack by a man who until earlier in the year was Mr Cheney's colleague in the senior reaches of the Bush team, the BBC's Justin Webb in Washington says. . . . Col Wilkerson has in the past accused the vice-president of responsibility for the conditions which led to the abuse of prisoners. . . . But this time he has gone much further, appearing to suggest Mr Cheney should face war crimes charges, our correspondent adds. . . . He said that there were two sides of the debate within the Bush administration over the treatment of prisoners. . . . Mr Powell and more dovish members had argued for sticking to the Geneva conventions, which prohibit the torture of detainees. . . . Meanwhile, the other side "essentially wanted to do away with all restrictions". . . . Mr Bush agreed a compromise, that "Geneva would in fact govern all but al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda look-alike detainees". . . . "What I'm saying is that, under the vice-president's protection, the secretary of defence [Donald Rumsfeld] moved out to do what they wanted in the first place, even though the president had made a decision that was clearly a compromise," Col Wilkerson said. . . . He said that he laid the blame on the issue of prisoner abuse and post-war planning for Iraq "pretty fairly and squarely" at Mr Cheney's feet. . . . "I look at the relationship between Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld as being one that produced these two failures in particular, and I see that the president is not holding either of them accountable... so I have to lay some blame at his feet too," he went on. . . . In the BBC interview, Col Wilkerson also developed his views on whether or not pre-war intelligence was deliberately misused by the White House. . . . He said that he had previously thought only honest mistakes were made. . . . But recent revelations about doubts in the intelligence community that appear to have been suppressed in the run-up to the war have made him question this view.

posted by Lorenzo 7:08 AM