The Young Turks: Lawrence Wilkerson Denounces Bush Administration:
Cent Uyger: Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to, of course, Secretary of State, Colin Powell. Colonel Wilkerson, welcome to The Young Turks.
Lawrence Wilkerson: Glad to be here.
CU: Really glad to have you here. I want to start at the beginning here, Colonel. You've been with Colin Powell for a long, long time in your career. When he asked you to become his Chief of Staff at the State Department, how did you feel about working for the Bush Administration and working for Colin Powell in that context?
LW: I'm a Republican so I didn't have any problems working for a Republican administration. By that time, August of 2002, I did have concerns about this particular Republican administration, because it looked extremely unilateral. It looked extremely arrogant. And it look as if it operating in a way antithetical to the way it had talked about during campaigning and during the first confirmation testimony series for the ministers and so forth. They talked about humility. They talked about achieving a balance of power in the world that favored freedom and phrases like that. So I didn't have any problem but my main allegiance, I'll admit right out, was to the man for whom I had worked for for so many years and who I kind of looked at as an African American version of Dwight Eisenhower, Colin Powell, that was the principle reason for working in the administration.
CU: Now, once you got inside the administration, what was the first warning sign, if you remember it, where you thought, "Woah, now this is really out of bounds here!"
LW: Well, you know, you may find this interesting, or not, I don't know. I'm a soldier of thirty-one years, and I found the incredible arrogance and lack of humility of the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, to be stunning almost right off the bat. I was charged by Ambassador Haass, Richard Haass who is now the president of the Council of Foreign Affairs but was my boss then, to start what George Kennan and George Marshall had done many years before--talks between the military Joint Staff and the State Department's policy planning staff--and I did that immediately. Within a month or two, the military had to back away from it, and I finally got the reason out of one colonel with whom we've been meeting. He said that Rumsfeld had essentially said, "[If] you meet with anybody from the State Department, you're dead." (Chuckle) Uh, so, I mean this was an incredibly arrogant man who took upon himself the power of the entire interagency group, with the Vice President's blessing of course, and did everything he could to cut the State Department, and for that matter, other members of the President's cabinet, out of any serious deliberation.
CU: Well, the obvious question becomes, how -- because as we see now in GQ's article about Don Rumsfeld, he would often just not carry out orders even given by the President whether it was about Hurricane Katrina or other matters, now, normally, of course, the Secretary of Defense would not be allowed to get away with this -- how was Rumsfeld allowed to carry on his own policies within the White House?
LW: I think that's an excellent question. I think that's a question historians will be asking for years to come. The finger has to point at the President of the United States, I think, and to a certain extent it is National Security Advisor, Dr. Rice, she for not disciplining the statutory decision-making system centered on the National Security Council, which is one of her chief responsibilities, and he for not helping her. Because it is really almost impossible for the National Security Advisor to do it if the President is not behind the National Security Advisor. Now I just don't believe that the President was; I believe he was just too detached, and in that detachment flowed the Vice President who was anything but detached. And I'd use Robert Dallek's phrase for Kissinger-Nixon, Cheney was co-president. I'd go further than that and say that for national security issues and other critical issues Cheney was the President.
CU: So Colonel Wilkerson, walk us through that because people say that a lot but we weren't there and so it's a little hard to imagine how that happens. How was he "co-president", or in charge? Would you guys have meetings and the Vice-President would simply just command the meetings and give the orders, or would he do it in a way where the President simply didn't even understand he wasn't making the decisions?
LW: A little of both. I think it's fair to say that Dick Cheney is one of the most adept, bureaucratic entrepreneurs I've ever seen and he was paired with another one who was pretty good but not as good as he, Donald Rumsfeld. And those two knew every way in the book to stymie what I call the statutory process, the legislative decision making process. Now to give you some examples. On North Korea, for example, every time Colin Powell and Jim Kelly, Secretary for East-Asian Pacific wanted to open meaningful talks with North Koreans, either through the six party process or through bi-lateral talks, Dick Cheney would step in and cut it off but he wouldn't cut it off as the Vice President, he would get the last bite at the apple in the Oval Office alone with the president and he would talk the President into cutting it off. On Iran he did it in an entirely different way. We never produced a national security decision document on Iran policy. That gave Dick Cheney by default what he wanted which was no talks at all with the regime in Tehran. So all he had to do there was to make sure, as you just pointed out, that the right people didn't come to the meetings, that they didn't come prepared, that they weren't well briefed, or they appear to be not well briefed--we call it the rope-a-dope policy. And that way he got the procedures in the statutory process to never produce a decision, which is exactly what he wanted: No decision, then there would be no talks. On the other issues, I think, Barton Gellman, in his book Angler has been very astute in pointing some of the ways that Cheney got domestic issues that he was in favor of. The one that Bart points out very vividly is that Bush wanted two or three things done with regard to domestic taxes, and Cheney wanted more than that done. Bush told him, "no" so Cheney goes over, strong arms the Congress, gets the Congress to give the President the couple of things that he wanted and the couple of things that Cheney wanted. The President couldn't veto the bill because he would be vetoing what he wanted; ergo Cheney got everything he wanted. So this was an incredible astute man operating with a guy who's never even been in a federal government before, and I must say he was pretty much detached from the details.
CU: Well, Colonel Wilkerson, as I hear you tell that story, I think you're being gentle. There comes a point where you have to say that guy just wasn't that bright, that he couldn't figure out any of this.
LW: Well, you know, I'll let you say that.
CU:(Chuckle) Alright. Now, one thing before we proceed, you mentioned rope-a-dope. Can you flesh that out a bit for us? What's rope-a-dope?
LW: Well, you come to the meetings of the National Security Council or the meetings directly below that, what we call Principals meetings or even the Deputy's meetings, which is the third level, and you don't come with the primary, that is to say that [at] the Principals meeting Rumsfeld doesn't show up. You've sent someone who is representing you but not in power to make decisions, not briefed in on the material necessary to make the decisions, so you've just stymied the process. Or you show up yourself and you throw tons of paper on the table and you say, "Oh God, I've been so busy I haven't had the chance to read anything. I need to read all of this. I can't make any decisions until I've read all of this." You've just stymied the process again. And when you're eight hundred pound gorillas doing that, like Colin Powell and Condi Rice and Donald Rumsfeld and the President doesn't step into the middle of it and say, "Stop this...or I'll fire you!" I mean it's pretty much that simple, it doesn't get said that way, but it's that simple, or the Chief of Staff, in this case, Andy Card doesn't step in and say the same thing and then back it up with the President if the principal doesn't believe him, then you're going to have that happen all the time, and unfortunately that's kind of what happened. Richard Haass covers it pretty well in his new book, which is just out called War of Necessity, War of Choice.
CU: Well it seems to come back to the same issue that you have a weak ineffectual, and not all together that bright a leader who is not putting an end to all of this nonsense, but you don't want to say that and I get that. So I want to move on to what broke the camel's back for you? We're talking to Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson who was Chief of Staff for Colin Powell. At what point did you say, "Well, alright, look we've had a lot of these things that I thought were out of bounds, but this really does it for me. I can't go on"?
LW: On April of 2004, I believe it was, Powell came through the door to our offices--we had adjoining offices--he just dropped the bombshell on me, and he said "We're going to have some photos come out from a place call Abu Ghraib in Iraq, and these photos are going to really be bad. They are going to show abuse of detainees and I want you to get to the bottom of this. I want you to develop a chronology. I want to know how we got there. I want my lawyer, my legal advisor, William H. Taft, VI on the legal aspects. I want you and Will to work together. And so I began compiling a dossier of classified and unclassified documents by begin looking into the Armed Forces involvement in this. I began looking into the CIA and contractor involvement. And by the time we got to the election in 2004, I had put together quite a stack of papers and I had began to put a chronology and an how did we get here analysis together. By the time I left in January 2005 and I saw that although Rumsfeld had offered to resign, hearings had been held and so forth, I saw that no real accountability was achieved. The accountability that was achieved was soldiers basically at the point of the spear: sergeants, enlisted men, and a few others. And so I began to go around to the war colleges and I was a military officer, I didn't want to speak out publicly. I went around to the war colleges and the intermediate colleges and such, and I talked with soldiers--marines, sailors, airmen--and I thought that when I would talk about these things, I would get a lot of push back. Instead of getting pushback, I got confirmation. I got people taking me into the hallways and into the corridors to tell me, "You don't know the half of it. Let me tell you about what's going on." And so all of this built up until October of 2005. I just had a come to Jesus with myself if you will. My wife pointed some things out about my loyalty to my country outweighing my loyalty to an administration or to any particular man or whatever. I just...It got to be too much for me so I started speaking out publicly.
CU: Colonel Wilkerson, if you believe it is torture, and what happened at Abu Ghraib is connected to the memos that were written at the White House, what should be done about it?
LW: That's an excellent question, too. I'd like to say that, we got two choices: we either release all of those people we put in jail, reprimanded, or injured their careers down at the lower end. Or we leave them where they are and we go after the people who directed them to do the kinds of things that they did. But that's the good citizen in me speaking. The realist in me, the cynic in me, looks at our process and our government and says we don't have the political will to do this, and even if we had the political will, we don't have the political skill to carry it out. And I think the president, President Obama is recognizing that to a certain extent in the stance that he's taken towards this. With so many other challenges on his plate and so many other things that are vastly more important to do than perhaps this. I'm not trying to denigrate its importance but I'm just saying that the financial economic crisis we confront, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and North Korea and so forth probably outweigh it in terms of energy devoted to challenges. I understand why he's saying what he's saying. I don't like it as a citizen, and it doesn't make me feel good about my democratic republic not being able to correct itself and to shine its light on the dirty places. But again, I just don't' believe we got the will and skill to do it.
CU: Let me go to the good citizen Colonel Wilkerson. If you had it your way and we were going to operate this democracy as we should. How far up would this go? Would it go to the Secretary of Defense? Would it go to Vice President Cheney? Would it go to President Bush? And what would you do about it?
LW: I don't think there's any question it goes to Cheney. I'm increasingly of a mind that a lot of it goes to Cheney and stops there. Not just because of the president's disinclination to do detail, but I also think that Cheney kept some things from the president. And what would I do about it? I think that the best way to deal with this probably would be to have a similar group to that we had for the 9-11 commission. By that I mean it would be not congressional mandated, it would not be presidentially mandated, it would be co-mandated by both the President and Congress. It would be comprised of people that almost everyone can recognize, have integrity, and high character. And those people would be given marching orders and they would take whatever time was necessary, have access to everything, and their deliberations would be more or less final. Of course they are not, just like the 9-11 commission, going to please everyone, but at least that will tamp it down. The President will be able to get on with the challenges that are more serious right now. And when this commission delivers its results, I think we'll have some catharsis. We'll have some epiphany. Everyone won't like it but at least we will have examined it thoroughly and the people who did the examination will be credible people.
CU: Is that enough if the commission says, "Yes, laws were broken and the person who ordered them was Dick Cheney."
LW: They should have what I would call reference authority. In other words, they should be able to turn it over to the appropriate authorities for prosecution, and a recommendation should be rendered with that if they believe laws were broken and they believe the proper authorities ought to take action.
CU: Dick Cheney seems to have an equivocal answer on Face the Nation when asked, "Did the president know about this abuse?" and he said, "Well I think he should have known" or something along those lines. Is there some chance that Dick Cheney just flat out gave the orders and didn't tell the president?
LW: Absolutely! In my mind I have no problem believing that. I have no problem at all believing that.
CU: Uhm. Alright, now, of all the different abuses, which one do you think was the worst whether it's torture, warrantless wiretapping, arresting US citizens like Padilla and stripping them of all their rights, the invasion of Iraq based on false evidence? We've got a litany to choose from. What would you say was the one that you thought was most egregious?
LW: Well, that's a difficult question to answer. I think the ones we ought to deal with are the ones where there is a possibility that US and international laws were broken. There others--the war of choice as Richard Haass so aptly called it--that's something that I think we all are to blame for. The Congress voted by wider margins to give the president the right to do that than they did for the First Gulf War. In fact, very, very wide margins the Congress voted by. So, if you ask me which one was the most egregious, I think I would have to point at Iraq, because after all we probably killed somewhere between the DOD admits 100,000, I'd say it's about a quarter of a million Iraqis. We clearly are approaching 5,000 American and coalition deaths. All of this for what? We have a complete mess. The surge working is almost laughable. The surge, first of all, took advantage of the conditions that were already exigent on the ground and expanded and deepened them -- conditions created largely by the Iraqis. In other words, they'd finished their ethnic cleansing, they had finished their plays for political power, Sadr for example. And Petraeus and his surge came in and simply took advantage of that, to their credit, deepened and expanded them, but the political problems that were supposed to be solved while this surge was establishing more stability had not been solved. They still don't have an oil revenue sharing law. They still have not tackled Kirkuk. The Kurds are ever more encroaching on Arab territory. Everyone is just waiting for the United States to get down to a level where it is no longer a viable referee, and then they are going to go at it again. Meanwhile Iran is sitting there in the south licking its chops pretty much having taken over the south of Iraq.
CU: Colonel Wilkerson, we would love to have you back on the program. We're running out of time today but we really appreciate you coming on The Young Turks to talk to us about this.
LW: Thank you.
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