|
Ex - Powell Aide Criticizes Bush on Iraq
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
11/29/05 "New
York Times" -- -- WASHINGTON (AP) -- 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 Dick 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 bastard.''
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.
Copyright 2005 The Associated Press
Translate
this page
(In accordance with Title 17
U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to
those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information for research and educational purposes.
Information Clearing House has no affiliation whatsoever with the
originator of this article nor is Information Clearing House
endorsed or sponsored by the originator.) |
