OT: Hey Gary, who's Lawrence Wilkerson?

Ex-Powell Aide Faults Bush on Iraq
Says President 'Too Aloof' on Post-War Plans
By ANNE GEARAN, AP

WASHINGTON (Nov. 29) - Former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief
of staff says President Bush was "too aloof, too distant from the
details" of post-war planning, allowing underlings to exploit Bush's
detachment and make bad decisions.

In an Associated Press interview Monday, former Powell chief of staff
Lawrence Wilkerson also said that wrongheaded ideas for the handling of
foreign detainees after Sept. 11 arose from a coterie of White House
and Pentagon aides who argued that "the president of the United States
is all-powerful," and that the Geneva Conventions were irrelevant.

Wilkerson blamed Vice President *** Cheney, Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld and like-minded aides. Wilkerson said that Cheney must
have sincerely believed that Iraq could be a spawning ground for new
terror assaults, because "otherwise I have to declare him a moron, an
idiot or a nefarious ***."

Wilkerson suggested his former boss may agree with him that Bush was
too hands-off about Iraq.

"What he seems to be saying to me now is the president failed to
discipline the process the way he should have and that the president is
ultimately responsible for this whole mess," Wilkerson said.

He said Powell now generally believes it was a good idea to remove
Saddam Hussein from power, but may not agree with either the timing or
execution of the war. Wilkerson said Powell may have had doubts about
the extent of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein but was convinced by
then-CIA Director George Tenet and others that the intelligence girding
the push toward war was sound.

Powell was widely regarded as a dove to Cheney's and Rumsfeld's hawks,
but he made a forceful case for war before the United Nations Security
Council in February, 2003, a month before the invasion. At one point,
he said Saddam possessed mobile labs to make weapons of mass
destruction that were never found.

Wilkerson criticized the CIA and other agencies for allowing mishandled
and bogus information to underpin that speech and the whole
administration case for war.

He said he has almost, but not quite, concluded that Cheney and others
in the administration deliberately ignored evidence of bad intelligence
and looked only at what supported their case for war.

A newly declassified Defense Intelligence Agency document from February
2002 said that an al-Qaida military instructor was probably misleading
his interrogators about training that the terror group's members
received from Iraq on chemical, biological and radiological weapons.
Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi reportedly recanted his statements in January
2004.

A presidential intelligence commission also dissected how spy agencies
handled an Iraqi refugee who was a German intelligence source.
Codenamed Curveball, this man who was a leading source on Iraq's
purported mobile biological weapons labs was found to be a fabricator
and alcoholic.

On the question of detainees picked up in Afghanistan and other fronts
on the war on terror, Wilkerson said Bush heard two sides of an
impassioned argument within his administration. Abuse of prisoners, and
even the deaths of some who had been interrogated in Afghanistan and
elsewhere, have bruised the U.S. image abroad and undermined fragile
support for the Iraq war that followed.

Cheney's office, Rumsfeld aides and others argued "that the president
of the United States is all-powerful, that as commander in chief the
president of the United States can do anything he damn well pleases,"
Wilkerson said.

On the other side were Powell, others at the State Department and top
military brass, and occasionally then-national security adviser
Condoleezza Rice, Wilkerson said.

Powell raised frequent and loud objections, his former aide said, once
yelling into a telephone at Rumsfeld: "Donald, don't you understand
what you are doing to our image?"

Wilkerson also said he did not disclose to Bob Woodward that
administration critic Joseph Wilson's wife worked for the CIA, joining
the growing list of past and current Bush administration officials who
have denied being the Washington Post reporter's source.

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