Colonel of truth

Former Bush insider Lawrence Wilkerson blasts Dick Cheney's "paranoia" -- and says Cheney and Rumsfeld are to blame for Abu Ghraib.

By Mark Follman

Read more: George W. Bush, Terrorism, Politics, Saddam Hussein, News, Iraq, Colin Powell, Army, Torture, Weapons of mass destruction, Dick Cheney, Abu Ghraib, Mark Follman, Rendition

Lawrence Wilkerson

Feb. 27, 2006 | WASHINGTON -- There's been no shortage of former high-level insiders going public with fierce criticisms of the Bush administration. But since first speaking out last fall, Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel who served as former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff, has proved the fiercest. In a watershed speech at the New America Foundation in October, Wilkerson delivered a blistering indictment, charging that on vital national-security matters, the White House was run by an anti-democratic "cabal" led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Wilkerson has also suggested that he and his boss at the State Department were duped by the case for war forged inside the Pentagon and CIA under the close watch of Cheney and his top aides. He and Powell were kept in the dark about doubts over Iraq's WMD capabilities, even as they worked to vet the intelligence before Powell's landmark pro-war presentation to the U.N. Security Council in February 2003. It turned out to be built on a stockpile of fictions.

But Wilkerson said bogus intelligence isn't his principal reason for coming forward -- it's the use of American forces to torture prisoners in the war that it launched. In mid-February, against a backdrop of new revelations about torture at Abu Ghraib and a call by U.N. investigators to shut down the U.S. prison at Guantánamo Bay, Wilkerson sat down for an interview with Salon, following a panel on national security at the University of Maryland. Last fall, he had spoken of a "visible audit trail" on torture leading from the soldiers in the field all the way up to Rumsfeld and Cheney.

Wilkerson said that by the time of the Abu Ghraib revelations in spring 2004, he began to realize how "deeply contaminated" the military had become due to post-9/11 interrogation policies. A military man of 31 years, he knew that the widespread abuses could have taken place only if sanctioned from high up in the civilian and military leadership.

Powell, who had served as the nation's top general under the first President Bush, apparently knew so, too. "When the word was out that the Abu Ghraib photographs were about to break, the secretary of state walked through my door and said, 'Larry, I need you to get together with Will Taft [Powell's lawyer] and build me an audit trail. I need all the paperwork -- I need a description of how we got to where we are.'"

Over the next several months, Wilkerson developed a dossier of both internal and public materials that pointed to the vice president's office. "I saw a chain of information and orders going out to the field that were codified in memoranda," Wilkerson said. "Reading between the lines -- and sometimes even reading the lines -- they essentially said, 'This is a new war. These people are different. Geneva doesn't apply, and we need intelligence. So smack these guys, stack 'em up. Use whatever means you need.'" The materials he gathered and the many communications he had with people in the field formed a clear picture. "What got implemented in the field," he said, "was the position Cheney and Rumsfeld argued for all along: gloves off."

In response to the initial wave of Abu Ghraib revelations, Rumsfeld said in a congressional hearing on May 7, 2004: "Mr. Chairman, I know you join me today in saying to the world: Judge us by our actions. Watch how Americans, watch how a democracy deals with wrongdoing and scandal and the pain of acknowledging and correcting our own mistakes and weaknesses."

While a handful of enlisted soldiers have since been convicted of crimes, no high-level U.S. officials have been brought to justice for wrongdoing. International law as well as the U.S. military's doctrine of command responsibility holds that officials -- military or civilian -- who condone or allow subordinates to commit torture can also be held criminally liable. But the military has thwarted investigation "every step of the way," Wilkerson said. "I got little help from the services," he said of his work on the torture dossier. "Vice Admiral [Albert] Church [who led one of the military's own investigations into torture] more or less stonewalled me. Others stonewalled me. There's been an awful lot of coverup."

According to Wilkerson, one of several memos signed by Rumsfeld approved dozens of interrogation techniques, which were posted in Abu Ghraib. One item on the list sanctioned the use of military dogs. "When you tell an E-4 [an Army corporal] or E-6 [staff sergeant] they can use a dog as long as it's muzzled -- and you also put heavy pressure on them to get intelligence -- it's clear what happens next. Once that muzzled dog fails in that interrogation session, the next thing they're going to do is take the muzzle off."

More abominable, Wilkerson said, is that these conditions weren't set just for suspected al-Qaida or Taliban members, but for any of the tens of thousands of prisoners taken in Iraq whom Bush had declared entitled to Geneva protections. The military has acknowledged that the vast majority of prisoners in Iraq -- as well as the majority of those in Guantánamo -- have been of little or no intelligence value.

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