Goose the Blog 2.0

Yes, Larry Wilkerson, former chief of staff to former Sec. of State Colin Powell, is trying to sell a book. But when you make direct claims like this, you should be able to back them up.

Vice President Dick Cheney's office was responsible for directives that led to U.S. soldiers' abusing prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, a former top State Department official said Thursday.

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell, then the secretary of state, told National Public Radio he had traced a trail of memos and directives authorizing questionable detention practices up through Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's office directly to Cheney's staff.

"The secretary of defense under cover of the vice president's office," Wilkerson said, "regardless of the president having put out this memo" - "they began to authorize procedures within the armed forces that led to what we've seen."

He said the directives contradicted a 2002 order by President George W. Bush for the U.S. military to abide by the Geneva conventions against torture.

"There was a visible audit trail from the vice president's office through the secretary of defense, down to the commanders in the field," authorizing practices that led to the abuse of detainees, Wilkerson said.

The directives were "in carefully couched terms," Wilkerson conceded, but said they had the effect of loosening the reins on U.S. troops, leading to many cases of prisoner abuse, including at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, that were contrary to the Geneva Conventions.

Let's see the documents, the whole audit trail. Pretty please.

(Frontline did an excellent report on US torture practices as part of the "War on Terror" as few weeks ago. You can watch it online. There really is no question that the responsibility goes right to Rumsfeld, at least, but I'm fairly sure legally damning documents do not exist.)

Update: More here (including partial transcript).