[D66] Ex-Bush Official Col. Lawrence Wilkerson: "I am Willing to Testify" If Dick Cheney is Put on Trial

[Henk Elegeert]

Zie ook:

*Ray McGovern Confronts Rumsfeld *
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1FTmuhynaw
of, vol scherm:
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=v1FTmuhynaw&vq=large

en

*CIA vet Ray McGovern confronts Rumsfeld*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=JNyg_ntjjn0

Henk Elegeert



2011/9/4 Henk Elegeert <h.elegeert at gmail.com>

>
>
>
>   Display full version<http://www.democracynow.org/2011/8/30/ex_bush_official_col_lawrence_wilkerson#>
>  [image: Democracy Now!]
>
>   August 30, 2011 <http://www.democracynow.org/shows/2011/8/30>
>  Ex-Bush Official Col. Lawrence Wilkerson: "I am Willing to Testify" If
> Dick Cheney is Put on Trial
>
> As former Vice President Dick Cheney publishes his long-awaited memoir, we
> speak to Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of
> State Colin Powell. "This is a book written out of fear, fear that one day
> someone will 'Pinochet' Dick Cheney," says Wilkerson, alluding to the former
> Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who was arrested for war crimes.
> Wilkerson also calls for George W. Bush and Cheney to be held accountable
> for their crimes in office. "I’d be willing to testify, and I’d be willing
> to take any punishment I’m due," Wilkerson said. We also speak to Salon.com
> political and legal blogger Glenn Greenwald about his recent article on
> Cheney, "The Fruits of Elite Immunity." "Dick Cheney goes around the country
> profiting off of this sleazy, sensationalistic, self-serving book, basically
> profiting from his crimes, and at the same time normalizing the idea that
> these kind of policies…are perfectly legitimate choices to make. And I think
> that’s the really damaging legacy from all of this," says Greenwald.
> [includes rush transcript]
>   Filed under War on Terror<http://www.democracynow.org/tags/war_on_terror>
> , Iraq <http://www.democracynow.org/tags/iraq>, Afghanistan<http://www.democracynow.org/tags/afghanistan>
> , Dick Cheney <http://www.democracynow.org/tags/dick_cheney>, Iraq War<http://www.democracynow.org/tags/iraq_war>
> , War <http://www.democracynow.org/tags/war>, Bush<http://www.democracynow.org/tags/bush>
> , Syria <http://www.democracynow.org/tags/syria>
>
> Guests:
> *Lawrence Wilkerson<http://www.democracynow.org/appearances/lawrence_wilkerson>
> *, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2002 to
> 2005.
>  *Glenn Greenwald<http://www.democracynow.org/appearances/glenn_greenwald>
> *, constitutional law attorney and political and legal blogger for
> Salon.com.
>  Related stories
>
>    - U.S. Wasting Billions While Tripling No-Bid Contracts After Decade of
>    War in Iraq, Afghanistan<http://www.democracynow.org/2011/9/2/us_wasting_billions_while_tripling_no>
>    - A Debate on Human Rights Watch’s Call for Bush Administration
>    Officials to be Tried for Torture<http://www.democracynow.org/2011/7/12/a_debate_on_human_rights_watchs>
>    - Former CIA Agent Glenn Carle Reveals Bush Admin Effort to Smear War
>    Critic Juan Cole<http://www.democracynow.org/2011/6/22/former_cia_agent_glenn_carle_reveals>
>    - Army Ranger Widow Confronts Rumsfeld over His Lies that Convinced Her
>    Husband to Join the Military<http://www.democracynow.org/2011/8/30/army_ranger_widow_confronts_rumsfeld_over>
>    - U.S. Navy Vet Sues Donald Rumsfeld for Torture in Iraq, Court Allows
>    Case to Move Forward<http://www.democracynow.org/2011/8/11/us_navy_vet_sues_donald_rumsfeld>
>
>  RUSH TRANSCRIPTThis transcript is available free of charge. However,
> donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing
> on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
> *Donate <http://www.democracynow.org/contribute/donate_money> *- $25<http://www.democracynow.org/cart/add_donation?donation[type]=amt&donation[amt_selected]=25>
> , $50<http://www.democracynow.org/cart/add_donation?donation[type]=amt&donation[amt_selected]=50>
> , $100<http://www.democracynow.org/cart/add_donation?donation[type]=amt&donation[amt_selected]=100>
> , More... <http://www.democracynow.org/get_involved/donate>
> ------------------------------
>  RELATED LINKS
>
>    - Democracy Now!’s news archive of our reports on the Iraq War<http://www.democracynow.org/tags/iraq>
>
> *AMY GOODMAN:* Today marks the official launch of one of most anticipated
> memoirs of any top Bush administration official. I’m talking about former
> Vice President Dick Cheney’s 576-page memoir, *In My Time: A Personal and
> Political Memoir*. Cheney has begun a publicity blitz to promote his new
> book, with a string of TV appearances scheduled on Fox News Channel, as well
> as C-SPAN and the major networks. He appeared on *The Today Show* this
> morning. This is an excerpt of his pre-taped interview with Jamie Gangel
> that aired last night on NBC News*Dateline*.
>
> *JAMIE GANGEL:* In your view, we should still be using enhanced
> interrogation?
>
> *DICK CHENEY:* Yes.
>
> *JAMIE GANGEL:* Should we still be waterboarding terror suspects?
>
> *DICK CHENEY:* I would strongly support using it again if we had a
> high-value detainee and that was the only way we can get him to talk.
>
> *JAMIE GANGEL:* People call it torture. You think it should still be a
> tool?
>
> *DICK CHENEY:* Yes.
>
> *JAMIE GANGEL:* Secret prisons?
>
> *DICK CHENEY:* Yes.
>
> *JAMIE GANGEL:* Wiretapping?
>
> *DICK CHENEY:* Well, with the right approval.
>
> *JAMIE GANGEL:* You say it is one of the things you are proudest of, and
> you would do it again in a heartbeat.
>
> *DICK CHENEY:* It was controversial at the time. It was the right thing to
> do.
>
> *JAMIE GANGEL:* No apologies?
>
> *DICK CHENEY:* No apologies.
>
> *AMY GOODMAN:* That was Dick Cheney speaking to Jamie Gangel on NBC*
> Dateline*. Cheney says his memoir is loaded with revelations. He told
> Gangel, quote, "There are going to be heads exploding all over Washington."
>
> In addition to unequivocally defending what he calls "tough interrogations"
> on captured terrorism suspects, Cheney writes he argued against softening
> the president’s speeches on Iraq. He says he sees no need for the
> administration to apologize for erroneously claiming Iraq hunted for uranium
> in Niger. Cheney also reveals he tried to have former Secretary of State
> Colin Powell removed from the cabinet for expressing doubts about the Iraq
> war. And Cheney notes he unsuccessfully urged President George W. Bush to
> bomb Syria in June 2007.
>
> One of those to come under the most scrutiny in the book is Bush’s former
> Secretary of State, Colin Powell. This is an excerpt of Cheney’s interview
> with Jamie Gangel, again from *Dateline*.
>
> *JAMIE GANGEL:* The portrait you paint of Colin Powell makes it sound as
> if he was disloyal and undermining the administration.
>
> *DICK CHENEY:* Well, those are your words. I don’t think I say it as
> harshly as you have presented it. I did feel that the State Department did
> not serve the president well. I would hear discussions, for example, that
> General Powell had objected to or opposed our operations in Iraq. But that
> never happened sitting around the table in the National Security Council. It
> was the kind of thing that seemed to be said outside to others.
>
> *AMY GOODMAN:* To discuss former Vice President Dick Cheney’s version of
> history as outlined in his book *In My Time*, we’re joined from
> Washington, D.C., by Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, served as chief of staff to
> Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005.
>
> Welcome to *Democracy Now!*, Lieutenant Wilkerson. Can you respond to what
> Cheney just said on NBC, Colonel Wilkerson?
>
> *COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON:* Amy, listening to your recitation—yeah,
> listening to your recitation of events at the head of the show and then your
> in-depth interview with the gentleman from Vermont, particularly the deaths
> in Afghanistan of American and allied troops and the devastation of
> Hurricane Irene, I think I could characterize Cheney’s book as singularly
> insignificant. That said, I think his use of phrases like those that were
> quoted — "exploding heads all over Washington" — as my former boss and
> former Secretary of State Colin Powell said on *Face the Nation* on
> Sunday, is more of a grocery store tabloid, and certainly not the kind of
> language that a former vice president of the United States of America should
> be using. Again, like Brent Scowcroft, I think in 2003 or 2004 in an
> interview with *The New Yorker* magazine, I simply don’t recognize Dick
> Cheney anymore.
>
> *AMY GOODMAN:* Talk about what he had to say about your boss, about
> General Colin Powell and his views on the Iraq war.
>
> *COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON:* The most inciteful thing—with a C, not an
> S—that the Vice President apparently has put in his book, due to excerpts
> I’ve seen and so forth—I have not read the book, I have to say that; I do
> not have a copy of it, not sure I’m going to buy a copy of it—was that he
> had something to do with Colin Powell leaving in January 2005. That’s utter
> nonsense. Colin Powell had told the president of the United States, the
> president-elect of the United States, that he’d be a one-term secretary. He
> had told all of us that, "us" being his inner team and also the team that he
> used most confidentially and most often within the State Department. In
> fact, when he asked me to be his secretary—to be his chief of staff in
> August of 2002, he was very kind to me. He said, "Look, you can stay on
> beyond the turn of the year and so forth when I leave, because you’ll be
> working for Ambassador Haass, which I know you enjoy, in policy planning,
> and you could stay on for eight years, if the president is reelected, or as
> long as you wish. But if you come to work for me as my chief of staff, you
> will have to leave. You will have to leave very soon, and no later than
> December-January, '04-'05." So this contention by Cheney is utterly
> preposterous.
>
> *AMY GOODMAN:* In his memoir, Cheney accuses Colin Powell of trying to
> undermine President Bush during the run-up to the Iraq war and tacitly
> allowing his deputy to leak the name of a covert CIA agent. Speaking on
> CBS’s *Face the Nation* on Sunday, Powell defended his approach to the
> Iraq war.
>
> *COLIN POWELL:* Mr. Cheney may forget that I’m the one who said to
> President Bush, if you break it, you own it. And you have got to understand
> that if we have to go to war in Iraq, we have to be prepared for the whole
> war, not just the first phase. And Mr. Cheney and many of his colleagues did
> not prepare for what happened after the fall of Baghdad.
>
> *AMY GOODMAN:* And let me turn to, again, Vice President Cheney’s
> interview onNBC News *Dateline* with Jamie Gangel last night. In this
> clip, Gangel talks to Cheney about discovering there were no WMDs in Iraq.
>
> *JAMIE GANGEL:* In his book, President Bush wrote he had, quote,
> "sickening feeling." But you don’t seem to express the same reaction or
> regrets.
>
> *DICK CHENEY:* Well, I didn’t have a sickening feeling. I think we did the
> right thing.
>
> *AMY GOODMAN:* Your response, Colonel Wilkerson?
>
> *COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON:* I, unfortunately—and I’ve admitted to this a
> number of times, publicly and privately—was the person who put together
> Colin Powell’s presentation at the United Nations Security Council on 5
> February, 2003. It was probably the biggest mistake of my life. I regret it
> to this day. I regret not having resigned over it. So I fully support his
> contention that he was hardly undermining the positions of the president of
> the United States, particularly with regard to Iraq. He put his reputation
> on the line. And he has said publicly that he will be always remembered as
> the man who gave that presentation at the U.N. in 2003. So, again, the Vice
> President’s contentions are preposterous.
>
> Furthermore, the Vice President seems to find fault with Condi, Condi Rice,
> the secretary after Powell, with Powell, with Armitage, with the President
> himself. The only person Cheney does not seem to find fault with is Cheney.
> I think we have a word for that kind of person. I won’t use it here on
> television. But I think Mr. Cheney’s view is totally, utterly, completely
> Mr. Cheney’s view. I doubt there are very many people in America, other than
> the cheerleading squad for people like Cheney, who love torture and the
> like, who will even read his book. Or if they do read it, they’ll read it in
> order to increase their revulsion of him, rather than their respect for him.
> And that’s a pity, because he is a former vice president.
>
> *AMY GOODMAN:* Let me ask you, Colonel Wilkerson, talking about your
> having written that speech for Colin Powell, how you put it together. And at
> that time, because there was so much skepticism, did you have doubts about
> what you were writing?
>
> *COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON:* Absolutely, Amy. My whole team had doubts. In
> fact, we asked the question early on, why wasn’t this our ambassador at the
> United Nations, John Negroponte, as Adlai Stevenson had done for Kennedy
> during a far more serious crisis in October 1962, the so-called Cuban
> Missile Crisis? And we all laughed and answered our own question
> immediately. It was because no one in the Bush administration had high poll
> ratings, amongst the American people or the international community. Colin
> Powell’s ratings were up there with Mother Teresa at the time, in the low
> seventies, sometimes even going up into the high seventies, low eighties. So
> this is the reason they put him in New York.
>
> And I didn’t write the speech. That belongs to his speechwriters. I
> actually orchestrated the entire team—the White House team, the CIA team
> and so forth—out at Langley at CIA headquarters. And the way we did that
> was under the leadership and under the respect for and really the umbrella
> of George Tenet, the director of Central Intelligence/head of the CIA. And
> George was constantly asked by me, by Colin Powell, by Rich Armitage, by
> Condoleezza Rice and others—she was national security adviser at the time—in
> front of everyone on that team, "You stand by this, George? You corroborate
> to the Secretary of State that you have multiple sources independently
> determining each one of these facts that we’re giving?" And we threw lots of
> the facts out. We threw literally a third of the presentation out. The
> unfortunate thing is that we left in what George was most convincing on, and
> that was the mobile biological laboratories, the existing stocks of chemical
> weapons, and worst of all, an active nuclear program. And as I said, I will
> regret that to my grave.
>
> *AMY GOODMAN:* How did the intelligence get so contaminated, manipulated?
> How was it so wrong?
>
> *COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON:* In my view, you have to look at each one of the
> so-called pillars of the presentation, the three that I just named being the
> most prominent. "Curveball," we didn’t even know that term when George Tenet
> was presenting us the information about the mobile biological labs.
> Curveball, as we all know now, was an agent being run by the BND, the
> CIA’s equivalent in Germany. And the Germans, as well as the CIA station
> chief in Germany—or in Europe, actually, Tyler Drumheller, had expressed
> their dismay with and lack of reliability of Curveball. And yet, we went
> ahead and used that information. George Tenet or John McLaughlin, his
> deputy, never said a word about Curveball to us. They simply gave us four
> independently corroborable sources for the existence of the labs. They even
> gave us drawings, and so forth, of those labs, that had supposedly come from
> an Iraqi engineer who was injured in an accident that occurred in one of the
> labs that actually kill people, testifying to the lethality of the
> ingredients being used in the labs. So, we had all of this *prima facie*,
> circumstantial, if you will, evidence that George Tenet and his team
> presented to us, indeed representing the entire 16—at that time, 16-entity
> U.S. intelligence community.
>
> The same on the chemical stocks, the same on the active nuclear program,
> aluminum tubes of which was a big aspect of. Colin Powell doubted them so
> much that John McLaughlin actually brought one of them in and rolled it
> around on the DCI’s conference table and explained to the Secretary of State
> how the metal in that tube was so expensive that it was impossible to
> believe that Saddam Hussein would be spending that much money on tubes that
> were simply for rocket shielding, which was the other explanation of what
> the tubes were for. So, theDCI and the deputy DCI spent a lot of time and
> effort trying to convince the Secretary of State not to throw things out of
> the presentation. Unfortunately, we left enough in that made us really sort
> of the laughing stock of the world afterward.
>
> *AMY GOODMAN:* You said in 2009—I think this is what you’re getting to
> now—in the *Washington Note*, an online political journal, you talked
> about how finding a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qaeda became the main
> purpose for the abusive interrogation program that the Bush administration
> authorized in 2002.
>
> *COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON:* In summer of 2002, my FBI colleagues, my CIAcolleagues,
> who will speak the truth to me, have told me that. I’ve also gleaned it from
> other methods that I can’t talk about here on the television. Someday they
> will come to light, and historians will record them. But let me explain to
> you how Colin Powell dealt with that in his presentation, to return to that
> infamous moment again. We were throwing out—he had pulled me aside in the
> National Intelligence Council spaces in the CIA, put me in a room, he and
> I alone, and he told me he was going to throw all the presentation material
> about the connection between Baghdad and al-Qaeda out, completely out. I
> welcomed that, because I thought it was all bogus.
>
> Within about an hour, George Tenet, having scented that something was wrong
> with the Secretary vis-à-vis this part of his presentation, suddenly
> unleashes on all in his conference room that they have just gotten the
> results of an interrogation of a high-level al-Qaeda operative, and those
> results not only confirm substantial contacts between an al-Qaeda and
> Baghdad, the Mukhabarat and Baghdad, the secret police, if you will, but
> also the fact that they were training, they were actually training al-Qaeda
> operatives in the use of chemical and biological weapons. Well, this was
> devastating. Here’s the DCI telling us that a high-level al-Qaeda
> operative had confirmed all of this. So Powell put at least part of that
> back into his presentation.
>
> We later learned that that was through interrogation methods that used
> waterboarding, that no U.S. personnel were present at the time—it was done
> in Cairo, Egypt, and it was done by the Egyptians—and that later, within a
> week or two period, the high-level al-Qaeda operative recanted everything he
> had said. We further learned that the Defense Intelligence Agency had issued
> immediately a warning on that, saying that they didn’t trust the reliability
> of it due to the interrogation methods. We were never shown that DIA dissent,
> and we were never told about the circumstances under which the high-level
> al-Qaeda operative was interrogated. Tenet simply used it as a bombshell to
> convince the secretary not to throw that part, which was a very effective
> part, if you will recall, out of his presentation.
>
> *AMY GOODMAN:* Colonel Wilkerson, we also have Glenn Greenwald on the line
> with us from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He is a constitutional law attorney,
> political and legal blogger for Salon.com<http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/index.html>.
> His recent article<http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/08/25/cheney/index.html> on
> Cheney’s book is called "The Fruits of Elite Immunity." Glenn, explain.
>
> *GLENN GREENWALD:* One of the most significant aspects of the rollout of
> Dick Cheney’s book is that he’s basically being treated as though he’s just
> an elder statesman who has some controversial, partisan political views. And
> yet, the evidence is overwhelming, including most of what Colonel Wilkerson
> just said and has been saying for quite some time, and lots of other people,
> as well, including, for example, General Antonio Taguba, that Dick Cheney is
> not just a political figure with controversial views, but is an actual
> criminal, that he was centrally involved in a whole variety not just of war
> crimes in Iraq, but of domestic crimes, as well, including the authorization
> of warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens in violation of FISA,
> which says that you go to jail for five years for each offense, as well as
> the authorization and implementation of a worldwide torture regime that,
> according to General Barry McCaffrey, resulted in the murder—his word—of
> dozens of detainees, far beyond just the three or four cases of
> waterboarding that media figures typically ask Cheney about.
>
> And yet, what we have is a government, a successor administration, the
> Obama administration, that announced that there will be no criminal
> investigations, no, let alone, prosecutions of any Bush officials for any of
> these multiple crimes. And that has taken these actions outside of the
> criminal realm and turned them into just garden-variety political disputes.
> And it’s normalized the behavior. And as a result, Dick Cheney goes around
> the country profiting off of this, you know, sleazy, sensationalistic,
> self-serving book, basically profiting from his crimes, and at the same time
> normalizing the idea that these kind of policies, though maybe in the view
> of some wrongheaded, are perfectly legitimate political choices to make. And
> I think that’s the really damaging legacy from all of this.
>
> *AMY GOODMAN:* Colonel Wilkerson, do you think the Bush administration
> officials should be held accountable in the way that Glenn Greenwald is
> talking about?
>
> *COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON:* I certainly do. And I’d be willing to testify,
> and I’d be willing to take any punishment I’m due. And I have to say, I
> agree with almost everything he just said. And I think that explains the
> aggressiveness, to a large extent, of the Cheney attack and of the words
> like "exploding heads all over Washington." This is a book written out of
> fear, fear that one day someone will "Pinochet" Dick Cheney.
>
> *AMY GOODMAN:* Well, I thank you very much for being with us, both,
> Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson served as chief of staff to Secretary of State
> Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005, and Glenn Greenwald, speaking to us on that
> crackly phone line from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, constitutional law attorney
> and political and legal blogger for Salon.com<http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/index.html>.
> We’ll link to your article<http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/08/25/cheney/index.html>
>  there.
>
> This is *Democracy Now!* When we come back, there’s another Bush
> administration official on a book tour. He’s Donald Rumsfeld. And he got
> quite a surprise as he was traveling through Washington State. The widow of
> a soldier who committed suicide questioned Donald Rumsfeld. He had heard
> taken out. Stay with us.
> ------------------------------
>
> [image: Creative Commons License]<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/> The
> original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons
> Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/>.
> Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of
> the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately
> licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us<http://www.democracynow.org/about/contact?to=9#sendmessage>
> .
> "
> Zie link en video ...
>
> Tijd dus om Dick Cheney aan te klagen !!
>
> Henk Elegeert
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.tuxtown.net/pipermail/d66/attachments/20110904/4f0c156a/attachment-0001.html>