Former US Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson discussed in detail, as a guest Sunday on Background Briefing with Ian Masters, a “major cover-up” in progress, with the US Central Intelligence Agency altering a still unreleased Senate Intelligence Committee report on torture.
The alterations, Wilkerson explains, are intended to protect people, including high level CIA and State Department officials Cofer Black, John Brennan, and George Tenet, who Wilkerson thinks participated in war crimes “unlike some stalwarts and courageous people at CIA [who] refused to participate” in the torture program.
Given that the CIA has its hands on the report, Wilkerson, an RPI Academic Board member, predicts the report will have significantly reduced value when it is finally made public, saying:
Ultimately, we’ll have to wait and see. But, my considered estimate is that it won’t be that valuable because they will have taken their very fine-tuned skills at redacting and changing and altering, and we won’t know, one page to the next, precisely what we’re reading.
Wilkerson suggests that the CIA’s torture cover-up should not come as a surprise given the agency’s history of cover-ups of its involvement in activities from a coup that deposed Iran Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh to the Bay of Pigs invasion to “59 covert operations in Ronald Reagan’s eight years alone none of which we really know the outcome of other than Iran-Contra.”
Wilkerson also details a broad practice of “incompetence” and “law breaking” at the CIA. Wilkerson concludes:
I think it’s time we completely reviewed whether we even need the CIA or not, particularly its clandestine operations portion.
Listen here to Wilkerson’s complete interview in which he discusses these matters and others, including his firsthand, behind-the-scenes account of the use of “lies,” “fabrications,” and “cherry-picked intelligence” to justify the US government’s 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Read here RPI Chairman and Founder Ron Paul’s column from this week regarding the CIA and torture.
