Steve Clemons has some interesting things to say about Larry Wilkerson. Wilkerson, you might recall, was Colin Powell’s chief of staff during his time at the State Department. And Wilkerson came to the conclusion that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are insane.
Now Wilkerson is essentially calling Cheney and Rumsfeld war criminals and suggesting that some international court might be inclined to convict them for murder and torture based on already publicly available evidence.
There is, in my view, insufficient evidence to walk into an American courtroom and win a legal case (though an international courtroom for war crimes might feel differently).
Now, here is what Clemons says:
Wilkerson has the goods on Cheney. He has the memos, emails, files, and other briefs that show that the environment Cheney & Co. created produced horrible behaviors that popped up in many different parts of the military mission. This was a systemic problem — not a bunch of coincidental, isolated incidents.
TWN again applauds the honesty and candor of Col. Wilkerson who is making sure that the history of what happened inside the Bush administration is told relatively squarely and that when the political pendulum swings that accountability can be fixed on those that crippled America’s position in the world.
Maybe Steve is just trying to burnish Wilkerson’s credentials. Or maybe Wilkerson intends to turn over some documents to the appropriate tribunal or committee whenever the time comes. He certainly isn’t pulling any punches with language like this:
there is enough evidence for a soldier of long service — someone like me with 31 years in the Army — to know that what started with John Yoo, David Addington, Alberto Gonzales, William Haynes at the Pentagon, and several others, all under the watchful and willing eye of the Vice President, went down through the Secretary of Defense to the commanders in the field, and created two separate pressures that resulted in the violation of longstanding practice and law.
These two pressures were, on the one hand, the understandable pressure to produce intelligence as rapidly as possible, and on the other hand, the creation of an environment best described as “the gloves coming off” — or better, the gloves ARE off. The Bybee memorandum’s description of torture as organ failure or beyond gave officials an out when answering questions about “Did we do torture?”
When an official said “no”, he or she meant that we did not do organ failure. Of course, with 136 deaths in detention and counting–and with 25 or more now confirmed as homicides–even that admission by that standard is now false.
