I mean, this began as an initiative of Vice President Cheney's. And we know going back to 2002, early in the year, he was making the round of the talk shows and talking about the need to use the “dark arts.” He was clearly advocating torture, and he was advocating it within the C.I.A. and later the Defense Department.
Now he has come back and said we have to give the President authority to authorize the use of these highly coercive techniques by the C.I.A. He is saying, ‘Alright, the uniformed military we'll exclude from this.’ But, of course, that was the principle issue that was debated in the Senate when Senator McCain put forward his amendment and was quite decisively rejected. I mean, there were 91 senators who opposed it. We only had 90 votes recorded, because Jon Corzine, of course, was campaigning for governor in New Jersey and couldn’t have his vote recorded. But it was an overwhelming victory.
So it shows just an amazing degree of stubbornness on the part of Cheney that he is continuing to push this. And also, the fact that in the midst of this crisis, in which he really sits in the center, that he is devoting so much of his time to the torture issue demonstrates how deeply involved Vice President Cheney is in that issue. ... Scott Horton... here...
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...But when he was turned over to my control, we were told specifically to not -- by memorandum, by order from Secretary Rumsfeld, to not enter his name on any database. He was to be referred to only --
AMY GOODMAN: Rumsfeld told you this?
JANIS KARPINSKI: Yes. He sent a memorandum specifically about this individual. He was to be referred to as “Triple X.” He was to be held in a separate location apart from any other detainees or any other contact. So, the instructions were very clear, and I -- when I saw the memorandum, I was not in Baghdad when it came in. They were in compliance with that. They kept him at a facility separate and apart from any other contact with anybody. Specific M.P.s were giving him his meals. He had -- he was for all practical purposes isolated or in solitary confinement without being in a confinement cell. So, when I returned to Baghdad and saw these instructions, I went right to Colonel Warren, who was the legal adviser, and I said, “This is a violation.” And he said, “Well, we'll try to get clarification, but this is from Rumsfeld's office.” And I said, “It's a violation. You have to put people on the database. And how much longer are we going to be held responsible for him? You take control of him. If you want to violate a Geneva Convention, that's up to you, but I don't want to keep him in one of our camps this way.”
...Janis Karpinski ... here* * *
What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made. And then when the bureaucracy was presented with the decision to carry them out, it was presented in a such a disjointed, incredible way that the bureaucracy often didn’t know what it was doing as it moved to carry them out.... Col.Lawrence Wilkerson, USA (ret.) in a speech at the New America Foundation...
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Vice President Cheney and his chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, overruling advice from some White House political staffers and lawyers, decided to withhold crucial documents from the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004 when the panel was investigating the use of pre-war intelligence that erroneously concluded Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, according to Bush administration and congressional sources... Murray Waas at the National Journal.
