Lawrence B. Wilkerson’s Take On Development Of The USA Torture Policy
Friday, June 20th, 2008Wednesday, Lawrence B. Wilkerson, for sixteen years chief aide to Colin Powell, from Powell’s days at the Joint Chiefs of Staff to his days as Secretary of State, testified before the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties of the House Committee on the Judiciary on the subject of From the Department of Justice to Guantanamo Bay: Administration Lawyers and Administration Interrogation Rules. I was able to observe Wilerson’s testimony through C-Span’s streaming broadcast.
Wilkerson indicated in his prepared opening statement to the committee that while serving as Secretary Powell’s Chief of Staff:
…in April 2004, Secretary of State Colin Powell came through the adjoining door to our offices on the 7th floor of the Harry S Truman building and startled me with words to the effect of:
There is going to be a news story about prisoner abuse at a facility in Iraq. There will be very damaging photographs, some of which will be published. I’ve put Will Taft [Legal Advisor to the Secretary of State] on the legal aspects of this and I want you to work the other aspects—how we got to where we are, who did what to whom, a timeline—a chronology—and any other relevant facts you come up with. It’s important you do this as quickly as possible and that you work closely with Will.
From that moment to some time in the early fall, I labored to put together a dossier of classified, sensitive, and open source information that would help me and the Secretary understand how Abu Ghraib happened.
Wilkerson indicates that:
Almost immediately, I opened a channel to Admiral Church in the Pentagon because the Secretary alerted me to an effort by his fellow cabinet official, Donald Rumsfeld, also to get to the bottom of this issue and Admiral Church had been appointed to head that effort. I must say that after that initial telephone conversation with the Admiral and an agreement to exchange any information that we each developed, I never heard from him or any of his people again. I did ensure that whatever relevant documents I found at the
State Department were sent to the Defense Department, and Will Taft did the same. I never received a single document in return. The Defense Department documents I did manage to get my hands on I had to scrounge.
I also discovered—as I had many other times in my then-34 year career in government—that open source material afforded me a more complete picture of what had happened than classified material. I learned that people such as Jane Mayer at The New Yorker Magazine, Tim Golden at the New York Times, and a host of others had done yeoman service for the American people through some of the best investigative journalism I have encountered. It was through Mr. Golden’s research and writings, for example, that I learned that one of the first prison homicides had occurred—and its investigation slowed and obscured at numerous intervals and levels of command of the U.S. Army—in Afghanistan as early as December 2002. That homicide has been thoroughly examined in an award-winning documentary by Alex Gibney, entitled “Taxi to the Dark Side.”
Further along in his prepared opening statement, recounting how it was the Bush/Cheney torture policy came to be, Wilkerson indicates:
It’s my strong view that the legal proceedings were led by David Addington, who turned to Jay Bybee and John Yoo at the Department of Justice, and Alberto Gonzales in the White House, then counselor to the President.
These were the lawyers who set the legal background against which other-than-standard interrogation methods would be explained away as “in accord with the Geneva Conventions”, “not constituting torture”, “fully within the Article II powers of the Commander-in Chief”, and so forth. At Defense, Jim Haynes and Douglas Feith would adapt these views to their needs at the Pentagon. Indeed, in the recent book Torture Team by English barrister Philippe Sands, in extended interviews Mr. Feith appears to express no small degree of pride in having helped make the Geneva Conventions adaptable to the needs of the new interrogation regime. In my view, this was done largely through artifice not unlike the angels sitting on the pinhead. Such artifice may appeal to certain lawyers but I assure you soldiers have no use for it for they know how dangerous such arguments are when put to the hard act of execution in the field.
Meanwhile, the operational end of this affair was orchestrated by the Secretary of Defense and his subordinates, Haynes, Feith, Stephen Cambone and I’m quite certain others. Certain of these individuals, including Addington, even visited the prison at Guantánamo Bay in September 2002 to get a better grip on what was happening to
acquire actionable intelligence and to inform their own views about what was possible.
Feith, a former undersecretary of defense and the neofascist ideologue who oversaw creation of the Office of Special Plans, the Pentagon’s intelligence stovepiping operation which invented lots of the fake intelligence used to sell the invasion and subjugation of Iraq, was also scheduled to testify before the committee but backed out at the last minute. Committee chairperson Jerrold Nadler explained that:
Despite his prior commitment to testify, this morning, Mr. Feith informed this committee through his counsel that he would not appear today because he is not willing to appear alongside one of our other witnesses.
Presumably the “other witnesses” was a reference to Wilkerson who, had indicated in 2005 during a speech to the New American Foundation:
Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, whom most of you probably know Tommy Franks said was the stupidest blankety-blank [Franks actually used the term f***ing] man in the world. He was. Let me testify to that. He was. Seldom in my life have I met a dumber man.
Feith, a Likudnik by ideology, reportedly holds dual USA and Israeli citizenship, and is another who, if justice prevails, should become familiar with the inside of a jail cell.
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