Former Powell Chief of Staff: Cheney Is a ‘Sith Lord’

There was a great interview with Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, at a website called The Public Record yesterday. I’d never heard of the website before, but it seems pretty sound. The whole interview is worth reading and covers lots of interesting ground, but here are just a few of the key excerpts:

Andrew Sullivan Provides a Perfect Example of the ‘Cheney Behind Torture’ Narrative

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post saying that a whole bunch of people seemed to think former Vice President Dick Cheney was the driving force behind the Bush administration’s torture programme. I summarised the mindset of these people like this:

Vice President Dick Cheney was both shocked by 9/11 and saw it as an opportunity to implement radical elements of his own agenda. Therefore, he got the CIA and other elements of the government to step up its already active rendition programme, add a detention and torture programme of its own and, we now find, go around the world assassinating people. He also arranged legal cover for all this by getting mid-level people at the Justice Department like John Yoo to sign off on it, under pressure from Cheney’s counsel David Addington.

Atlantic blogger Andrew Sullivan was one of the people I had in mind when I wrote this and, in response to the recent publication of the CIA inspector general’s report he wrote the following:

What we now know is that immediately after 9/11, Dick Cheney decided that torture was going to be his principal weapon in waging the intelligence war on al Qaeda.

He knew this was illegal but believed he was saving the country and also believed that the constitution empowers the president to assume total, dictatorial powers in war-time. So he sabotaged the usual institutional checks, told the president everything was legal and “not torture”, took the US out of the Geneva Conventions, hired freelance goons to devise torture techniques, and began torturing the prisoners as they came in. He realized all along that this was illegal by the lights of every sane legal professional, and so then directed pliable fanatics, like John Yoo, to create legal memos to grant retroactive immunity – a golden shield – for all those involved in the torture. He then used the crudest politicking to brow-beat all defenses of American honor, decency and real interrogation as abetters of the enemy.

An Alternate Look at the Torture Narrative

Over the past few years, as the revelations about the torturing of detainees have built up, a narrative of what happens seems to have emerged. It goes something like this:

Vice President Dick Cheney was both shocked by 9/11 and saw it as an opportunity to implement radical elements of his own agenda. Therefore, he got the CIA and other elements of the government to step up its already active rendition programme, add a detention and torture programme of its own and, we now find, go around the world assassinating people. He also arranged legal cover for all this by getting mid-level people at the Justice Department like John Yoo to sign off on it, under pressure from Cheney’s counsel David Addington.

The Origins of the CIA’s Assassination Program: Who Proposed It, What Its Code Name Was

The CIA assassination programme that was recently in the media was actually first partially revealed by the Washington Post in 2005, when details enabling his originator to be identified were published. The programme made news in the last few days as CIA Director Leon Panetta admitted that the agency withheld information about it from Congress, although the CIA never actually used it to assassinate anybody. Nevertheless, the programme’s “duties” seem to have been taken over by something journalist Seymour Hersh called an “executive assassination wing” that was run out of the Office of Vice President Dick Cheney, and this grouping did go on missions and kill people.

Books for 2009

Here’s some of the books I’m reading, and will post about, in the early weeks of 1999:

U.S. Vs. Them by J. Peter Scoblic (already being processed and included, largely in the US International Relations project);

Angler by Barton Gellman (another Cheney bio, probably will add to the two Iraq projects, the 9/11 project, the Propaganda project, and the International Relations project);

Torture Team by Phillipe Sands (mostly info for the Prisoner Abuse and Civil Liberties projects).

One of these days, I’d like to work on John Dean’s Watergate biography, Blind Ambition, but updating and extending the Watergate project isn’t one of my main priorities right now.

What are you reading this year?