On April 27, former State Department chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson told the Huffington Post that several lawyers in the Bush administration should be "at a minimum, disbarred" and that the government should appoint "a special prosecutor such as Fitzgerald, armed to the teeth, and give him or her carte blanche" to investigate and prosecute officials such as Rumsfeld and Feith for allegedly sanctioning torture. I emailed Wilkerson to see if he also supported the investigation of congressional leaders. Based on this 2007 Washington Post story that reported Pelosi was briefed on waterboarding and Pelosi's own admission that she knew harsh techniques were approved but not that they were being used, I asked Wilkerson, should she resign or be impeached? Here's Wilkerson's response:
If I believed everything I read in the WP I would be terribly naive or a fool. And I believe almost nothing the CIA reports--nothing. I have after all been in the belly of that beast--I mean actually in the belly as we prepared Powell for the 5 Feb 03 UNSC presentation, as well as a sometimes user of its product for 35 years. I know personally the lies of which it is capable. And I have studied that organization closely from its birthing from its OSS roots through its formalization in the 1947 National Security Act. It's track record, to use Eisenhower's characterization, is a "legacy of ashes". During the GW Bush administrations, it added majorly to that legacy. All that said, I have no great difficulty imagining the feckless leadership of the current Congress being somehow involved in the "approval process" for what we are now seeing revealed to the American people about torture and harsh interrogation. After all, I watched people such as Chuck Schumer and Barney Frank pontificate about the current banking and financial institution crisis; indeed, they were two of the largest recipients of political monies from those sectors--gratitude no doubt for their very favorable attitudes toward changes to the bankruptcy laws and the loosening of regulatory mechanisms in general which helped bring about the crisis in the first place. And as for members of my party, the GOP--well, let's just say they don't even deserve comment they are so bad. But so far, with regard to the issue of torture and harsh interrogation, I've seen little to substantiate my imagination--and almost nothing outside the select committees on intelligence whose members are blood-sworn to secrecy. lw
Since he didn't answer my original questions, I sent a follow-up email asking again if Pelosi and other congressional leaders should be investigated and punished. He didn't reply.