Office of the Vice President

I actually heard this story on NPR yesterday, and was mildly shocked by it, but, being without a Blackberry or a Treo while I was shaving, I never blogged it. Then Dan Froomkin refreshed my memory when he reported on it in the Washington Post. It is quite remarkable:

On NPR yesterday, the former chief of staff to the secretary of state (Lawrence Wilkerson) said that he had uncovered a "visible audit trail" tracing the practice of prisoner abuse by U.S. soldiers directly back to Vice President Cheney's office[...]

Mr. WILKERSON: What happened was that the secretary of Defense, under the cover of the vice president's office, began to create an environment -- and this started from the very beginning when David Addington, the vice president's lawyer, was a staunch advocate of allowing the president in his capacity as commander in chief to deviate from the Geneva Conventions. Regardless of the president having put out this memo, they began to authorize procedures within the armed forces that led to, in my view, what we've seen.

INSKEEP: We have to get more detail about that because the military will say, the Pentagon will say they've investigated this repeatedly and that all the investigations have found that the abuses were committed by a relatively small number of people at relatively low levels. What hard evidence takes those abuses up the chain of command and lands them in the vice president's office, which is where you're placing 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 harshest critics of this policy of torture (which now is alleged to be emanating not from the Pentagon, but from the civilian office of the Vice President) are military men: John McCain, Lindsay Graham (former JAG lawyer), Wesley Clark, and now Wilkerson. They understand how the military operates, how the blowback to our own troops makes it not at all worth the risk, and most important, why such a policy will not yield positive intelligence results:

If you're a military man, you know that you just don't do these sorts of things because once you give just the slightest bit of leeway, there are those in the armed forces who will take advantage of that. There are those in the leadership who will feel so pressured that they have to produce intelligence that it doesn't matter whether it's actionable or not as long as they can get the volume in. They have to do what they have to do to get it, and so you've just given in essence, though you may not know it, carte blanche for a lot of problems to occur.

By the way, the chief architect of this policy, if we are to believe Wilkerson, is David Addington, who he mentions as the Vice President's lawyer. Guess who replaced Scooter Libby as Cheney's new Chief of Staff?

Plus ca change, plus ca la meme chose. (I knew he hated Amurica, he speaks French!)

It's time for the White House to drop the fiction that "a few bad apples" committed the torture that is now revealed to be systematic, globally reaching, and remarkably similar everywhere the United States holds prisoners. It was policy, and I've gone on at length about why I believe it was as harmful as any policy this Adminstration has enacted in their short and brutal history. And now there's credible evidence that it came out of Dick Cheney's office.

Well, he's got to answer that question. And this will not end until he does. The American people deserve nothing less.