Stepping Up the Rhetoric Away From Home

Something happened yesterday (again) that you won't hear from the main$tream media.

Vice-president Dick Cheney's burden on the Bush administration grew heavier yesterday after a former senior US state department official said he could be guilty of a war crime over the abuse of prisoners.

Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to secretary of state Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005, singled out Mr Cheney in a wide-ranging political assault on the BBC's Today programme.

Mr Wilkerson said that in an internal administration debate over whether to abide by the Geneva conventions in the treatment of detainees, Mr Cheney led the argument "that essentially wanted to do away with all restrictions".

Asked whether the vice-president was guilty of a war crime, Mr Wilkerson replied: "Well, that's an interesting question - it was certainly a domestic crime to advocate terror and I would suspect that it is ... an international crime as well." In the context of other remarks it appeared he was using the word "terror" to apply to the systematic abuse of prisoners.

The Washington Post last month called Mr Cheney the "vice-president for torture" for his demand that the CIA be exempted from a ban on "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment of detainees.

Mr Wilkerson, a former army colonel, also said he had seen increasing evidence that the White House had manipulated pre-war intelligence on Iraq to make its case for the invasion. He said: "You begin to wonder was this intelligence spun? Was it politicised? Was it cherry-picked? Did, in fact, the American people get fooled? I am beginning to have my concerns."...

So the intra-Company war for control of the Empire continues to slowly heat up.

Laura Rozen points to the attempts to control Iraqi information by the Pentagon- which hotly contests this was a policy they knew about.

The weird thing is, the Generals who protest their ignorance really might not have known about it. Isn't that what caused Colonel Wilkerson to warn about the possibility of a reactionary Revolution in the military in the first place?

"What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld," he said. By cutting out the bureaucracy that had to carry out those decisions, "we have courted disaster in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran, and generally with regard to domestic crises like Katrina." If there is a nuclear terrorist attack or a major pandemic, Wilkerson continued, "you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that'll take you back to the Declaration of Independence."

Face it: the Iraqis are used to Saddamesque rosy pictures about how groovy everything is. It's what dictators do. And as they're dodging bullets on the way to the market to pick up the hummus, do you think they pay any attention to the Good News posters?

On the other hand, hearing about such Good News fits the world view of the Joementum and the DLC or Robertson and the PTL Club quite nicely.

I'm sure it's also quite pleasing and affirming to Dear Leader, who by now has forgotten about the order Big Time Dick told him to sign for in the first place.

After all, it's the kind of thing Black Spot's had so much success with at home.

More choco rations for everyone!