AP: Wilkerson airs doubts about prewar intel

[Eugene]

Tuesday, November 29, 2005 · Last updated 4:55 a.m. PT

Wilkerson airs doubts about prewar intel

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

LONDON -- A former senior U.S. State Department official says he has
come to doubt whether President Bush's administration presented an
honest intelligence case for the war in Iraq.

"You begin to speculate, you begin to wonder - Was this intelligence
spun? Was it politicized? Was it cherry-picked? Did in fact the
American people get fooled? I'm beginning to have my concerns,"
Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff for former Secretary of State Colin
Powell, said in an interview broadcast Tuesday.

In the interview with the British Broadcasting Corp., Wilkerson
repeated his criticisms of Vice President Dick Cheney, holding him
responsible for abuses of prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq and for
shortcomings in post-war planning in Iraq.

<snip>

He did not explain in the interview why he believed Cheney advocated
terror, though he also said that Cheney was "very publicly lobbying
the Congress of the United States advocating the use of terror."

<snip>

Full article: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1103AP_Britain_BBC_Cheney.html

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. The AP reporter doesn't seem very bright - for Wilkerson, torture=terror

which is quite clear from the interview. He said there were 2 factions in the US government - one led by Cheney and Rumsfeld, saying the Geneva conventions should be thrown away, and one, led by Powell, saying they should be obeyed. He said Bush's decision was that the Geneva conventions applied except in the case of al Qaeda members, but Cheney then managed to get them thrown away for all kinds of people - which Wilkerson described as 'advocating terror'. That caused the Abu Ghraib torture.