{"id":3293,"date":"2008-05-01T09:08:12","date_gmt":"2008-05-01T08:08:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/war-terrorism\/cheney-accused-of-war-crimes\/3293\/"},"modified":"2008-05-01T09:08:12","modified_gmt":"2008-05-01T08:08:12","slug":"cheney-accused-of-war-crimes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/war-terrorism\/cheney-accused-of-war-crimes\/","title":{"rendered":"Cheney accused of war crimes"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"accused.jpg\"BBC<\/a> | A top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell has launched a stinging attack on US Vice-President Dick Cheney over abuse of prisoners by US troops. Col Lawrence Wilkerson accused Mr Cheney of ignoring a decision by President Bush on the treatment of prisoners in the war on terror.<\/p>\n

Asked by the BBC’s Today if Mr Cheney could be accused of war crimes, he said: “It’s an interesting question.”<\/p>\n

“Certainly it is a domestic crime to advocate terror,” he added. <\/p>\n

“And I would suspect, for whatever it’s worth, it’s an international crime as well.”<\/p>\n

This is an extraordinary attack by a man who until earlier in the year was Mr Cheney’s colleague in the senior reaches of the Bush team, the BBC’s Justin Webb in Washington says.<\/p>\n

Col Wilkerson has in the past accused the vice-president of responsibility for the conditions which led to the abuse of prisoners.<\/p>\n

But this time he has gone much further, appearing to suggest Mr Cheney should face war crimes charges, our correspondent adds.<\/p>\n

Intelligence questions<\/strong><\/p>\n

He said that there were two sides of the debate within the Bush administration over the treatment of prisoners.<\/p>\n

Mr Powell and more dovish members had argued for sticking to the Geneva conventions, which prohibit the torture of detainees.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n\n\n
\"US<\/p>\n

Dick Cheney has been accused of advocating the use of terror<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n

<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the other side “essentially wanted to do away with all restrictions”.<\/p>\n

Mr Bush agreed a compromise, that “Geneva would in fact govern all but al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda look-alike detainees”.<\/p>\n

“What I’m saying is that, under the vice-president’s protection, the secretary of defence [Donald Rumsfeld] moved out to do what they wanted in the first place, even though the president had made a decision that was clearly a compromise,” Col Wilkerson said.<\/p>\n

He said that he laid the blame on the issue of prisoner abuse and post-war planning for Iraq “pretty fairly and squarely” at Mr Cheney’s feet.<\/p>\n

“I look at the relationship between Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld as being one that produced these two failures in particular, and I see that the president is not holding either of them accountable… so I have to lay some blame at his feet too,” he went on.<\/p>\n

In the BBC interview, Col Wilkerson also developed his views on whether or not pre-war intelligence was deliberately misused by the White House.<\/p>\n

He said that he had previously thought only honest mistakes were made.<\/p>\n

But recent revelations about doubts in the intelligence community that appear to have been suppressed in the run-up to the war have made him question this view.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BBC | A top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell has launched a stinging attack on US Vice-President Dick Cheney over abuse of prisoners by US troops. Col Lawrence Wilkerson accused Mr Cheney of ignoring a decision by President Bush on the treatment of prisoners in the war on terror. Asked by the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1616,16],"tags":[49],"class_list":{"0":"post-3293","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-usa-news","7":"category-war-terrorism","8":"tag-usa-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3293"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3293\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}