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On NPR yesterday, the former chief of staff to the secretary of state said that he had uncovered a "visible audit trail" tracing the practice of prisoner abuse by U.S. soldiers directly back to Vice President Cheney's office.
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Mr. WILKERSON: I'm privy to the paperwork, both classified and unclassified, that the secretary of State asked me to assemble on how this all got started, what the audit trail was, and when I began to assemble this paperwork, which I no longer have access to, it was clear to me that there was a visible audit trail from the vice president's office through the secretary of Defense down to the commanders in the field that in carefully couched terms -- I'll give you that -- that to a soldier in the field meant two things: We're not getting enough good intelligence and you need to get that evidence, and, oh, by the way, here's some ways you probably can get it. And even some of the ways that they detailed were not in accordance with the spirit of the Geneva Conventions and the law of war.
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I talked about this months ago. This wasn't a few bad apples. These were the acts of an administration desperate for anything they could use in their propaganda operation on the American people.
...So how long are we gonna call these abuses the 'acts of a few bad apples' before we realize this is a leadership problem. This is the culture that comes from occupation. And this is an indicator, when morale is low and the troops begin to look at the locals as a lower form of life, the policy is bankrupt...
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