Former chief of staff to the Secretary of State, Lawrence Wilkerson, spoke on NPR last week saying that he'd found a "visible audit trail" which traced prisoner abuse by our G.I.'s to Dick Cheney's office. A partial transcript can be found up at the Washington Post's website. Here's a bit of it:
"Mr. WILKERSON: I'm privy to the paperwork, both classified and unclassified, that the secretary of State asked me to assemble on how this all got started, what the audit trail was, and when I began to assemble this paperwork, which I no longer have access to, it was clear to me that there was a visible audit trail from the vice president's office through the secretary of Defense down to the commanders in the field that in carefully couched terms -- I'll give you that -- that to a soldier in the field meant two things: We're not getting enough good intelligence and you need to get that evidence, and, oh, by the way, here's some ways you probably can get it. And even some of the ways that they detailed were not in accordance with the spirit of the Geneva Conventions and the law of war.
The full interview can be heard here.
For a bit more on this issue, check out the Frontline episode called "The Torture Question".
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