Col. Lawrence Wilkerson is ‘damn sure the Bush administration cooked the books’ on Iraq.

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, said Monday on MSNBC that he’s “damn sure the Bush administration cooked the books” when it came to pushing for the invasion of Iraq.

Wilkerson was speaking to host Ed Schultz about the Republican filibuster of Defense Secretary nominee Chuck Hagel, but transitioned into a plug for MSNBC’s new documentary “Hubris: Selling the Iraq War,” which aired Monday night.

The documentary featured never-before-seen memos by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, composed in November, 2001, clearly showing he and aides workshopping ideas for selling the invasion of Iraq. “US discovers Saddam connection to Sept. 11 attack or to anthrax attacks?” one possibility reads. “Dispute over WMD inspections? Start now thinking about inspection demands.”

Another memo instructed administration officials to, “Focus on WMD,” then worked down the list going from “building momentum for regime change” to “Surprise, speed, shock and risk,” and ending with emphasizing the importance of “who would rule afterwards,” without a single mention of efforts to win the peace following the invasion.

In the film Wilkerson recalls how Powell, who gave a key speech to the United Nations presenting fabricated evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, seemed to acknowledge there were no weapons in the country. “He said, ‘I wonder what will happen when we put 500,000 troops into Iraq and comb the country from one end to the other and find nothing,’” Wilkerson explained.

“Do you believe the Bush administration cooked the books to sell the war in Iraq?” Schultz asked him.

“I didn’t know it at the time, and I fault myself for that,” he said. “I’ll go to my grave with that mass failing on my part. But yes, in retrospect, having done all the research and work that my students have done, plus myself, I’m damn sure that the Bush administration cooked the books.”
http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/02/19/watch-hubris-documentary/

No accountability for CIA after 9/11: Former CIA officer:  Former CIA officer Philip Giraldi said that there was almost no accountability in terms of what the CIA has been doing since the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Giraldi also said he was “not surprised” when he heard that at least 20 detainees once held in the secret torture cells are currently unaccounted for.
Long after U.S. President Barack Obama ordered to close CIA’s “black-site” prisons and just after his nominee to head the agency, John Brennan claimed that the CIA is “out of the detention business,” at least 20 CIA prisoners are still missing.
“It shows that after 9/11 there was almost no accountability in terms of what the CIA was doing and they were literally as we know in the case of Italy and some other places picking people off the street and putting them in prisons in other countries. Sometimes the prisons were run by the local people and sometimes by the CIA in cooperation with local people. So I’m not surprised to hear this that there have been a number of people who had disappeared as part of this process,” Giraldi told Press TV on Thursday.
Last week the Open Society Foundations’ Justice Initiative released a report pulling together the most current information available on the fates of the prisoners. A few emerged from foreign prisons after the turmoil of the Arab Spring, according to ProPublica.
The report counts 136 prisoners who were either held in a CIA black-site or subject to so-called extraordinary rendition, in which detainees were secretly shipped to other countries for interrogation.
Many of the prisoners were tortured, either under the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” program or by other countries after their transfer.
http://www.presstv.com/usdetail/288991.html