Wilkerson Charges Cheney Responsible for Prisoner Abuse
By E&P Staff
Published: November 04, 2005 2:30 PM ET
NEW YORK His initial blast, on Oct. 19, at a luncheon in Washington, D.C. drew wide press attention. Now Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, is at it again. In an interview for National Public Radio he charged that Vice President Cheney's office--and new chief aide David Addingtoon--was responsible for directives which led to U.S soldiers abusing prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Wilkerson said he had some hard evidence: a trail of memos and directives authorizing questionable detention practices up through Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's office directly to Cheney's staff. The directives, he said, contradicted a 2002 order by President Bush for the military to abide by the Geneva Convention rules against torture.
The former Powell aide, in his October statements, declared that Cheney and Rumsfeld operated a "cabal" that had hijacked U.S. foreign and military policy.
Now, talking to NPR, he said, "There was a visible audit trail from the Vice President's office through the Secretary of Defense, down to the commanders in the field," authorizing practices that led to the abuse of detainees.”
He said that Powell had assigned him to investigate this after stories emerged about U.S troops abusing detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he was “privy to the paperwork, both classified and unclassified, that the secretary of State asked me to assemble on how this all got started.”
Wilkerson called Addington "a staunch advocate of allowing the president in his capacity as commander-in-chief to deviate from the Geneva Conventions."
The former Powell aide is 31-year military veteran and former director of the Marine Corps War College. Some have noted that he often expresses what Colin Powell believes, but can't or won't say.
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