Former aide to Powell opens fire on US administration: 12-24-05

Former aide to Powell opens fire on US administration:
Sat Dec 24,12:34 PM ET

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The former top aide to then-secretary of state Colin Powell has reportedly emerged as an increasingly high-profile and vocal critic of US administration policy at home and abroad.

Lawrence Wilkerson, who was Powell's chief-of-staff, "says his decision to speak in the open about the policy wars of the first Bush term was slow in coming, but a major factor was the revelations about Abu Ghraib, which he said he realized ... had resulted from decisions on prisoner treatment and intelligence set shortly after September 11, 2001," the New York Times reported.

"What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made," the paper recalled Wilkerson saying in a speech at the New America Foundation in October.

"And you've got a president who is not versed in international relations and not too much interested in them either," he added, according to the Times.

The report said Wilkerson has been "assailing the president as amateurish, especially compared to the first President Bush, and describing the administration as secretive, inept and courting disaster at home and abroad. Nor has he spared his former boss, who he says was overly preoccupied with 'damage control' for policies set by others."

A retired Army colonel, Wilkerson "has also attacked the Bush administration for allegedly condoning torture and setting lax policies on treatment of detainees that led, he charges, to the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the black eye they gave to the United States Army," the report said.

Though Powell has kept mum about his former aide, "he has let it be known through friends that he objects to the charges, especially the suggestion that he was overly loyal to President Bush," the report said.

"It's very painful for me," Wilkerson told the daily. "I've lost a friend of 16 years. I won't say I've lost him, but the estrangement is palpable." One e-mail message the Times said he says he received from Powell grumbled: "Don't characterize my loyalty."

Wilkerson argues that Powell won key policy battles in making sure that the issue of Iraq was taken to the United Nations and in battling Rumsfeld and Cheney for the cause of improving relations with Europe, encouraging negotiations with North Korea and Iraq, and avoiding confrontations with Russia and China, the report said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20051224/pl_afp/usiraqcritic
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“Its insular and secret workings were efficient and swift — not unlike the decision-making one would associate more with a dictatorship than a democracy. This furtive process was camouflaged neatly by the dysfunction and inefficiency of the formal decision-making process, where decisions, if they were reached at all, had to wend their way through the bureaucracy, with its dissenters, obstructionists and “guardians of the turf.”

But the secret process was ultimately a failure. It produced a series of disastrous decisions and virtually ensured that the agencies charged with implementing them would not or could not execute them well.”
~~~ Lawrence Wilkerson, The White House Cabal,
The Los Angeles Times, October 25, 2005
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-wilkerson25oct25,0,7455395.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions Websource: http://www.radioopensource.org/lawrence-wilkerson/
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Biography: Lawrence B. Wilkerson ~ Chief of Staff
Term of Appointment: 08/01/2002 to 01/26/2005

Colonel, U.S. Army (Retired) Larry Wilkerson joined General Colin L. Powell in March 1989 at the U.S. Army’s Forces Command in Atlanta, Georgia as his Deputy Executive Officer. He followed the General to his next position as Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, serving as his special assistant. Upon Powell's retirement from active service in 1993, Colonel Wilkerson served as the Deputy Director and Director of the U.S. Marine Corps War College at Quantico, Virginia. Upon Wilkerson’s retirement from active service in 1997, he began working for General Powell in a private capacity as a consultant and advisor.

In December 2000, Secretary of State-designate Powell asked Wilkerson to join him in the Transition Office at the U.S. State Department and, later, upon his confirmation as Secretary of State, Secretary Powell moved Wilkerson to his Policy Planning Staff with responsibilities for East Asia and the Pacific, and legislative and political-military affairs. In June of 2002, the Director for Policy Planning, Ambassador Richard Haass, made Wilkerson the associate director. In August of 2002, Secretary Powell moved Wilkerson to the position of Chief of Staff of the Department.

Wilkerson is a veteran of the Vietnam war as well as a U.S. Army “Pacific hand,” having served in Korea, Japan, and Hawaii and participated in military exercises throughout the Pacific. Moreover, Wilkerson was Executive Assistant to US Navy Admiral Stewart A. Ring, Director for Strategy and Policy (J5) USCINCPAC, from 1984-87. Wilkerson also served on the faculty of the U.S. Naval War College at Newport, RI and holds two advanced degrees, one in International Relations and the other in National Security Studies. He has written extensively on military and national security affairs–especially for college-level curricula--and been published in a number of professional journals, including the Naval Institute’s Proceedings, The Naval War College Review, Military Review, and Joint Force Quarterly (JFQ).

Released on November 28, 2003

Websource:
http://www.state.gov/outofdate/bios/w/26731.htm
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Further Study:
The Nazi Hydra in America
http://www.spiritone.com/~gdy52150/noon.html
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Comment: Amerikan Fascism is sly, subtle and scientific. Fuhrer Bush and the Bushwack Gang are mere puppets for the corporate Puppet Masters of the Amerikan Corporate Empire who work on top behind the scenes. A lot of the ‘recent’ revelations about illegal wiretapping, the NSA and all that noise is stuff that many of us have been aware of for years, especially the willingness of fascism to utilize any high-tech devices within its powers. Our common enemies are the ultimate control-freaks! Don’t worry, it is not as bad as you think, in fact, it is worse than you know. ~~Peta de Aztlan
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