Torturemeister Cheney

The Bulldog Manifesto just did a post on this article from Le Monde that basically implicates Mr. Go Fuck Yourself in having a direct hand in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal.

Here's an excerpt from the Babelfish translation:

Colonel Laurence Wilkerson, who was a principal private secretary of the former Secretary of State Colin Powell declared, on the waves of the public radio (NPR) which it had found trace of a series of memos and directives authorizing torture, addressed to the Defence Department by the collaborators of Dick Cheney. These directives contradicted another directive of president George W. Bush, ordering with the American army to respect the convention of Geneva which prohibits such practices.

Poor Dubya. Not even his own right-hand man pays attention to what he says.

Aside from the NPR link, I found this Oct. 20 WaPo article in which Wilkerson describes why he had to speak out:

Wilkerson's beef with the administration was, for the most part, not ideological. He argues that U.S. forces must remain in Iraq, and he describes George H.W. Bush as "one of the finest presidents we've ever had."

Rather, the colonel objected to the administration's secrecy, which allowed Cheney, Rumsfeld and others to subvert the foreign policy apparatus that has been in place since 1947.

"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."

Tell me why you think our current president is "one of the finest" again?