Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's Chief of Staff and a Republican, has put out a rebuttal to Cheney's claims that are similar to Democrat Paul Begala's.
He makes an additional zinger of a point: As soon as the Abu Graib photos came out in the spring of 2004, the whole torture enterprise came to a screeching halt. No one did anything for fear of consequences for themselves.
So, when Cheney claims that Obama's forbidding this form of interrogation is endangering the nation, exactly that happened under Cheney's watch in 2004 -- and continued for the remainder of the second Bush/Cheney term. If it endangers us now, it must have also endangered us for the past four years.
A second zinger point from Wilkerson: it's true that there have been no further attacks on American soil since 9/11; but more than 4,200 American troops have been killed in Iraq since 9/11, a war that should not have happened and that Dick Cheney -- probably more than any one single other person -- is responsible for.
So, even giving him the right to claim he kept Americans safe at home, he more than offset that by making American troops very unsafe in Iraq.
Thanks to Mickey Nardo for calling my attention to this. The full text of Wilkerson's article is at:
http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/2009/05/the_truth_about/
Ralph
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Wilkerson has now talked with CNN and made his charge even more explicit:
ReplyDelete"Finding a "smoking gun" linking Iraq and al Qaeda became the main purpose of the abusive interrogation program the Bush administration authorized in 2002, a former State Department official told CNN on Thursday."
" "Its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at preempting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al Qaeda," Wilkerson wrote in The Washington Note, an online political journal.
"Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel, said his accusation is based on information from current and former officials. He said he has been "relentlessly digging" since 2004, when Powell asked him to look into the scandal surrounding the treatment of prisoners at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.
"I couldn't walk into a courtroom and prove this to anybody, but I'm pretty sure it's fairly accurate," he told CNN."