Wilkerson Revelations Open Up Cheney for Criminal Prosecution

The interview by former Colin Powell Chief of Staff at the State Department, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, on more detailed review, opens up former Vice President Dick Cheney to criminal prosecution for his cover-up of the Saudi role in 9/11, and for explicitly soliciting lies to justify the attack on Iraq in March 2003. As Wilkerson made clear in his recent interview with 28pages.org, Vice President Cheney, on ten separate occasions, tried to force Secretary of State Colin Powell to insert claims that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and was providing material support to Al Qaeda during the period leading up to the attacks. Each time Cheney tried to insert the lies into Powell’s prepared testimony before the United Nations Security Council in Feb. 2003, Powell pushed back. But, according to Wilkerson, on the very eve of the scheduled Powell testimony, CIA Director George Tenet and his Deputy Director, John McLoughlin, showed up with “new eyewitness evidence” that Saddam was behind 9/11. Powell relented and allowed the claims of Saddam 9/11 links to be included in his testimony. It later came out that the “new” intelligence was actually a year-old discredited “confession” by tortured Al Qaeda figure Ibn-Sheikh al-Libi and was entirely false.

Wilkerson also recounted that Dick Cheney deployed top national security aides Scooter Libby and John Hannah to make sure that there was no mention of Saudi Arabia’s links to the 9/11 hijackers and that no real investigation was ever launched into the Saudi sponsorship. The cover-up of the 28 pages was part of a larger Cheney-led fraud, to secure both the U.S.-Saudi “special relationship” despite the Saudi complicity in 9/11, and to assure that the U.S. went to war to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

Wilkerson was blunt about the Saudi claims that there was no evidence of any Saudi links to the 9/11 hijackers: “It’s utter hogwash with regard to the entire set of circumstances surrounding 9/11 in my view. As far as I know, there never was an official investigation of so many of the things that are intimated in these [in the 28 pages], not least of which is a really hard look by the intelligence community at the ultimate question of [saudi] government knowledge, government direction, even government strategy associated with the Salafist movement in general, but, more specifically, organizations like al Qaeda.”

Wilkerson added that the 9/11 Commission’s work was doomed from the moment that Philip Zelikow was named as staff director.

“It was clear to me from the very beginning that he was there as a control agent. I didn’t know how definitively he would control the process until later. He was tuned into the administration. He was tuned into what the administration wanted.”