CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons

Posted on November 2, 2005 by Team VCS

CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons – Debate Is Growing Within Agency About Legality and Morality of Overseas System Set Up After 9/11

By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 2, 2005; A01

The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.

The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.

The hidden global internment network is a central element in the CIA’s unconventional war on terrorism. It depends on the cooperation of foreign intelligence services, and on keeping even basic information about the system secret from the public, foreign officials and nearly all members of Congress charged with overseeing the CIA’s covert actions.

The existence and locations of the facilities — referred to as “black sites” in classified White House, CIA, Justice Department and congressional documents — are known to only a handful of officials in the United States and, usually, only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host country.

The CIA and the White House, citing national security concerns and the value of the program, have dissuaded Congress from demanding that the agency answer questions in open testimony about the conditions under which captives are held. Virtually nothing is known about who is kept in the facilities, what interrogation methods are employed with them, or how decisions are made about whether they should be detained or for how long.

While the Defense Department has produced volumes of public reports and testimony about its detention practices and rules after the abuse scandals at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison and at Guantanamo Bay, the CIA has not even acknowledged the existence of its black sites. To do so, say officials familiar with the program, could open the U.S. government to legal challenges, particularly in foreign courts, and increase the risk of political condemnation at home and abroad.

But the revelations of widespread prisoner abuse in Afghanistan and Iraq by the U.S. military — which operates under published rules and transparent oversight of Congress — have increased concern among lawmakers, foreign governments and human rights groups about the opaque CIA system. Those concerns escalated last month, when Vice President Cheney and CIA Director Porter J. Goss asked Congress to exempt CIA employees from legislation already endorsed by 90 senators that would bar cruel and degrading treatment of any prisoner in U.S. custody.

Although the CIA will not acknowledge details of its system, intelligence officials defend the agency’s approach, arguing that the successful defense of the country requires that the agency be empowered to hold and interrogate suspected terrorists for as long as necessary and without restrictions imposed by the U.S. legal system or even by the military tribunals established for prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay.

The Washington Post is not publishing the names of the Eastern European countries involved in the covert program, at the request of senior U.S. officials. They argued that the disclosure might disrupt counterterrorism efforts in those countries and elsewhere and could make them targets of possible terrorist retaliation.

The secret detention system was conceived in the chaotic and anxious first months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when the working assumption was that a second strike was imminent.

Since then, the arrangement has been increasingly debated within the CIA, where considerable concern lingers about the legality, morality and practicality of holding even unrepentant terrorists in such isolation and secrecy, perhaps for the duration of their lives. Mid-level and senior CIA officers began arguing two years ago that the system was unsustainable and diverted the agency from its unique espionage mission.

“We never sat down, as far as I know, and came up with a grand strategy,” said one former senior intelligence officer who is familiar with the program but not the location of the prisons. “Everything was very reactive. That’s how you get to a situation where you pick people up, send them into a netherworld and don’t say, ‘What are we going to do with them afterwards?’ “

It is illegal for the government to hold prisoners in such isolation in secret prisons in the United States, which is why the CIA placed them overseas, according to several former and current intelligence officials and other U.S. government officials. Legal experts and intelligence officials said that the CIA’s internment practices also would be considered illegal under the laws of several host countries, where detainees have rights to have a lawyer or to mount a defense against allegations of wrongdoing.

Host countries have signed the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, as has the United States. Yet CIA interrogators in the overseas sites are permitted to use the CIA’s approved “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques,” some of which are prohibited by the U.N. convention and by U.S. military law. They include tactics such as “waterboarding,” in which a prisoner is made to believe he or she is drowning.

Some detainees apprehended by the CIA and transferred to foreign intelligence agencies have alleged after their release that they were tortured, although it is unclear whether CIA personnel played a role in the alleged abuse. Given the secrecy surrounding CIA detentions, such accusations have heightened concerns among foreign governments and human rights groups about CIA detention and interrogation practices.

The contours of the CIA’s detention program have emerged in bits and pieces over the past two years. Parliaments in Canada, Italy, France, Sweden and the Netherlands have opened inquiries into alleged CIA operations that secretly captured their citizens or legal residents and transferred them to the agency’s prisons.

More than 100 suspected terrorists have been sent by the CIA into the covert system, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials and foreign sources. This figure, a rough estimate based on information from sources who said their knowledge of the numbers was incomplete, does not include prisoners picked up in Iraq.

The detainees break down roughly into two classes, the sources said.

About 30 are considered major terrorism suspects and have been held under the highest level of secrecy at black sites financed by the CIA and managed by agency personnel, including those in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, according to current and former intelligence officers and two other U.S. government officials. Two locations in this category — in Thailand and on the grounds of the military prison at Guantanamo Bay — were closed in 2003 and 2004, respectively.

A second tier — which these sources believe includes more than 70 detainees — is a group considered less important, with less direct involvement in terrorism and having limited intelligence value. These prisoners, some of whom were originally taken to black sites, are delivered to intelligence services in Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Afghanistan and other countries, a process sometimes known as “rendition.” While the first-tier black sites are run by CIA officers, the jails in these countries are operated by the host nations, with CIA financial assistance and, sometimes, direction.

Morocco, Egypt and Jordan have said that they do not torture detainees, although years of State Department human rights reports accuse all three of chronic prisoner abuse.

The top 30 al Qaeda prisoners exist in complete isolation from the outside world. Kept in dark, sometimes underground cells, they have no recognized legal rights, and no one outside the CIA is allowed to talk with or even see them, or to otherwise verify their well-being, said current and former and U.S. and foreign government and intelligence officials.

Most of the facilities were built and are maintained with congressionally appropriated funds, but the White House has refused to allow the CIA to brief anyone except the House and Senate intelligence committees’ chairmen and vice chairmen on the program’s generalities.

The Eastern European countries that the CIA has persuaded to hide al Qaeda captives are democracies that have embraced the rule of law and individual rights after decades of Soviet domination. Each has been trying to cleanse its intelligence services of operatives who have worked on behalf of others — mainly Russia and organized crime.

Origins of the Black Sites

The idea of holding terrorists outside the U.S. legal system was not under consideration before Sept. 11, 2001, not even for Osama bin Laden, according to former government officials. The plan was to bring bin Laden and his top associates into the U.S. justice system for trial or to send them to foreign countries where they would be tried.

“The issue of detaining and interrogating people was never, ever discussed,” said a former senior intelligence officer who worked in the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, or CTC, during that period. “It was against the culture and they believed information was best gleaned by other means.”

On the day of the attacks, the CIA already had a list of what it called High-Value Targets from the al Qaeda structure, and as the World Trade Center and Pentagon attack plots were unraveled, more names were added to the list. The question of what to do with these people surfaced quickly.

The CTC’s chief of operations argued for creating hit teams of case officers and CIA paramilitaries that would covertly infiltrate countries in the Middle East, Africa and even Europe to assassinate people on the list, one by one.

But many CIA officers believed that the al Qaeda leaders would be worth keeping alive to interrogate about their network and other plots. Some officers worried that the CIA would not be very adept at assassination.

“We’d probably shoot ourselves,” another former senior CIA official said.

The agency set up prisons under its covert action authority. Under U.S. law, only the president can authorize a covert action, by signing a document called a presidential finding. Findings must not break U.S. law and are reviewed and approved by CIA, Justice Department and White House legal advisers.

Six days after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush signed a sweeping finding that gave the CIA broad authorization to disrupt terrorist activity, including permission to kill, capture and detain members of al Qaeda anywhere in the world.

It could not be determined whether Bush approved a separate finding for the black-sites program, but the consensus among current and former intelligence and other government officials interviewed for this article is that he did not have to.

Rather, they believe that the CIA general counsel’s office acted within the parameters of the Sept. 17 finding. The black-site program was approved by a small circle of White House and Justice Department lawyers and officials, according to several former and current U.S. government and intelligence officials.

Deals With 2 Countries

Among the first steps was to figure out where the CIA could secretly hold the captives. One early idea was to keep them on ships in international waters, but that was discarded for security and logistics reasons.

CIA officers also searched for a setting like Alcatraz Island. They considered the virtually unvisited islands in Lake Kariba in Zambia, which were edged with craggy cliffs and covered in woods. But poor sanitary conditions could easily lead to fatal diseases, they decided, and besides, they wondered, could the Zambians be trusted with such a secret?

Still without a long-term solution, the CIA began sending suspects it captured in the first month or so after Sept. 11 to its longtime partners, the intelligence services of Egypt and Jordan.

A month later, the CIA found itself with hundreds of prisoners who were captured on battlefields in Afghanistan. A short-term solution was improvised. The agency shoved its highest-value prisoners into metal shipping containers set up on a corner of the Bagram Air Base, which was surrounded with a triple perimeter of concertina-wire fencing. Most prisoners were left in the hands of the Northern Alliance, U.S.-supported opposition forces who were fighting the Taliban.

“I remember asking: What are we going to do with these people?” said a senior CIA officer. “I kept saying, where’s the help? We’ve got to bring in some help. We can’t be jailers — our job is to find Osama.”

Then came grisly reports, in the winter of 2001, that prisoners kept by allied Afghan generals in cargo containers had died of asphyxiation. The CIA asked Congress for, and was quickly granted, tens of millions of dollars to establish a larger, long-term system in Afghanistan, parts of which would be used for CIA prisoners.

The largest CIA prison in Afghanistan was code-named the Salt Pit. It was also the CIA’s substation and was first housed in an old brick factory outside Kabul. In November 2002, an inexperienced CIA case officer allegedly ordered guards to strip naked an uncooperative young detainee, chain him to the concrete floor and leave him there overnight without blankets. He froze to death, according to four U.S. government officials. The CIA officer has not been charged in the death.

The Salt Pit was protected by surveillance cameras and tough Afghan guards, but the road leading to it was not safe to travel and the jail was eventually moved inside Bagram Air Base. It has since been relocated off the base.

By mid-2002, the CIA had worked out secret black-site deals with two countries, including Thailand and one Eastern European nation, current and former officials said. An estimated $100 million was tucked inside the classified annex of the first supplemental Afghanistan appropriation.

Then the CIA captured its first big detainee, in March 28, 2002. Pakistani forces took Abu Zubaida, al Qaeda’s operations chief, into custody and the CIA whisked him to the new black site in Thailand, which included underground interrogation cells, said several former and current intelligence officials. Six months later, Sept. 11 planner Ramzi Binalshibh was also captured in Pakistan and flown to Thailand.

But after published reports revealed the existence of the site in June 2003, Thai officials insisted the CIA shut it down, and the two terrorists were moved elsewhere, according to former government officials involved in the matter. Work between the two countries on counterterrorism has been lukewarm ever since.

In late 2002 or early 2003, the CIA brokered deals with other countries to establish black-site prisons. One of these sites — which sources said they believed to be the CIA’s biggest facility now — became particularly important when the agency realized it would have a growing number of prisoners and a shrinking number of prisons.

Thailand was closed, and sometime in 2004 the CIA decided it had to give up its small site at Guantanamo Bay. The CIA had planned to convert that into a state-of-the-art facility, operated independently of the military. The CIA pulled out when U.S. courts began to exercise greater control over the military detainees, and agency officials feared judges would soon extend the same type of supervision over their detainees.

In hindsight, say some former and current intelligence officials, the CIA’s problems were exacerbated by another decision made within the Counterterrorist Center at Langley.

The CIA program’s original scope was to hide and interrogate the two dozen or so al Qaeda leaders believed to be directly responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks, or who posed an imminent threat, or had knowledge of the larger al Qaeda network. But as the volume of leads pouring into the CTC from abroad increased, and the capacity of its paramilitary group to seize suspects grew, the CIA began apprehending more people whose intelligence value and links to terrorism were less certain, according to four current and former officials.

The original standard for consigning suspects to the invisible universe was lowered or ignored, they said. “They’ve got many, many more who don’t reach any threshold,” one intelligence official said.

Several former and current intelligence officials, as well as several other U.S. government officials with knowledge of the program, express frustration that the White House and the leaders of the intelligence community have not made it a priority to decide whether the secret internment program should continue in its current form, or be replaced by some other approach.

Meanwhile, the debate over the wisdom of the program continues among CIA officers, some of whom also argue that the secrecy surrounding the program is not sustainable.

“It’s just a horrible burden,” said the intelligence official.

Researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

 

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Remember That Mushroom Cloud?

Posted on November 2, 2005 by Team VCS

November 2, 2005, New York Times Editorial Board

Remember That Mushroom Cloud?

The indictment of Lewis Libby on charges of lying to a grand jury about the outing of Valerie Wilson has focused attention on the lengths to which the Bush administration went in 2003 to try to distract the public from this central fact: American soldiers found a lot of things in Iraq, including a well-armed insurgency their bosses never anticipated, but they did not find weapons of mass destruction.

It’s clear from the indictment that Vice President Dick Cheney and his staff formed the command bunker for this misdirection campaign. But there is a much larger issue than the question of what administration officials said about Iraq after the invasion – it’s what they said about Iraq before the invasion. Senator Harry Reid, the minority leader, may have been grandstanding yesterday when he forced the Senate to hold a closed session on the Iraqi intelligence, but at least he gave the issue a much-needed push.

President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell and George Tenet, to name a few leading figures, built support for the war by telling the world that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling chemical weapons, feverishly developing germ warfare devices and racing to build a nuclear bomb. Some of them, notably Mr. Cheney, the administration’s doomsayer in chief, said Iraq had conspired with Al Qaeda and implied that Saddam Hussein was connected to 9/11.

Last year, the Senate Intelligence Committee did a good bipartisan job of explaining that the intelligence in general was dubious, old and even faked by foreign sources. The panel said the analysts had suffered from groupthink. At the time, the highest-ranking officials in Washington were demanding evidence against Iraq.

But that left this question: If the intelligence was so bad and so moldy, why was it presented to the world as what Mr. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, famously called “a slam-dunk” case?

Were officials fooled by bad intelligence, or knowingly hyping it? Certainly, the administration erased caveats, dissents and doubts from the intelligence reports before showing them to the public. And there was never credible intelligence about a working relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

Under a political deal that Democrats should not have approved, the Intelligence Committee promised to address these questions after the 2004 election. But a year later, there is no sign that this promise is being kept, other than unconvincing assurances from Senator Pat Roberts, the Republican who is chairman of the intelligence panel, that people are working on it.

So far, however, there has been only one uncirculated draft report by one committee staff member on the narrow question of why the analysts didn’t predict the ferocity of the insurgency. The Republicans have not even agreed to do a final report on the conflict between the intelligence and the administration’s public statements.

Mr. Reid wrested a commitment from the Senate to have a bipartisan committee report by Nov. 14 on when the investigation will be done. We hope Mr. Roberts now gives this half of the investigation the same urgency he gave the first half and meets his commitment to examine all aspects of this mess, including how the information was used by the administration. Americans are long overdue for an answer to why they were told there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

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428 Civilian Contractors Killed in Iraq

Posted on November 2, 2005 by Team VCS

Civilian contractors in Iraq dying at faster rate as insurgency grows

By Seth Borenstein, Knight Ridder Newspapers, November 1, 2005

WASHINGTON – As the nation focused last week on the 2,000th U.S. soldier who died in Iraq, Gloria Dagit of Jefferson, Iowa, got a box filled with the belongings of her son, Keven, who was killed when his convoy of trucks was ambushed in northern Iraq.

Keven Dagit’s death Sept. 20 – along with two other truckers – didn’t register on the tally of Iraq deaths broadcast daily. That’s because they were civilians working for U.S. defense contractors.

As the violence of the protracted war continues and some 75,000 civilian employees struggle to rebuild the war-torn nation and support the military, contractor casualties mount. Their deaths have more than tripled in the past 13 months.

As of Monday, 428 civilian contractors had been killed in Iraq and another 3,963 were injured, according to Department of Labor insurance-claims statistics obtained by Knight Ridder.

Those statistics, which experts said were the most comprehensive listing available on the toll of the war, are far from complete: Two of the biggest contractors in Iraq said their casualties were higher than the figures the Labor Department had for them.

The dead and injured come from many walks of life, drawn by money and patriotism. Some are American citizens. Most are not. They are truckers, police officers and translators. They’re counted only if they were paid by companies hired by the Pentagon. Their deaths and injuries were compensated by insurance policies required by federal law.

The Labor Department lists 156 dead for an L-3 Communications subsidiary in Virginia. The company, which provides translators who work with the military, puts the death toll at 167, of whom 15 were Americans. The Labor Department’s accounting reports that Halliburton, the largest contractor in Iraq, has had 30 employees killed in Iraq and 2,471 injured. A Halliburton spokeswoman, Melissa Norcross, said Tuesday that the company had lost a total of 77 workers in Iraq, Afghanistan and its base in Kuwait. One worker is unaccounted for. Halliburton couldn’t give a breakdown by country.

The government’s listing shows the contractors’ casualty rate is increasing. In the first 21 months of the war, 11 contractors were killed and 74 injured each month on average. This year, the monthly average death toll is nearly 20 and the average monthly number of injured is 243.

“You’ve got a greater number of contractors on the ground carrying out a greater number of roles putting them in danger,” said Peter W. Singer, a contracting expert at the Brookings Institution, a Washington research center. “And issue No. 3, you’ve got a much more dangerous environment.”

Keven Dagit, a truck driver for Halliburton, knew it. The day before he was killed he told his mother, “Now, it’s really getting dangerous,” she recalled.

He left two daughters, ages 9 and 11.

“I want more people to realize that these guys are out there defenseless,” Gloria Dagit said. “It was an ambush. … They are not allowed to carry weapons.”

So far this year, 196 contractors in Iraq have been killed and 2,427 have been injured, according to Labor Department statistics.

In August, Mike Dawes of Stillwell, Okla., a longtime police officer who’d been hired to train Iraqi police, was killed by a suicide bomber in downtown Baqoubah, 36 miles northeast of Baghdad. He’d worked for DynCorp International and had survived as a private contractor in Kosovo, where he also taught police from Poland, India and Pakistan. He described that experience as “really an honor.”

Dawes “was an excellent officer,” said Stephen Farmer, the police chief at the Tahlequah Police Department in Oklahoma. “If he wasn’t the first one there on the call, he was usually the one right behind.”

The invisible nature of the contractors’ deaths irks their friends and families.

“We get hurt right next to them in many cases,” said Erick Fern, a Houston trucker for Halliburton who injured his back in Iraq and is fighting to get compensation. “It seems to be that we don’t exist since we’re getting paid.”

Private companies aren’t obligated to report deaths to the news media, as the military does. But they’re required to carry federal insurance for all their workers in Iraq and to report claims to the Labor Department under the Defense Base Act. That doesn’t include contractors who work for agencies outside of the Pentagon, however.

“Most of what you see on TV is strictly about the military,” said Steve Powell of Azle, Texas, who worked for Halliburton in the Iraqi city of Mosul and watched friends get killed. “There’s very little said about the contractors. … I felt like I was over there doing something to help the military in a way.”

Rick Kiernan, a spokesman for L-3 Communications, said his firm had had so many losses because its translators were “with the combatants; they’re with the special forces; they’re with the infantry units. That probably puts them out in the most dangerous places.”

Kiernan noted that L-3’s employees aren’t killed in combat, they’re being assassinated. Of the company’s 152 dead Iraqi employees, 105 were murdered because they collaborated with Americans, he said.

“They’ve been targeted,” Kiernan said. “A lot of these local nationals are really doing their part as well in a very courageous way.”

The workers’ families also make sacrifices.

Yvette English, a pregnant Colorado woman with a 19-month-old daughter, helps run an Internet message board to assist families with loved ones in Iraq. Her husband is a Halliburton truck driver.

“While he’s gone, it’s very lonely,” she said. “You didn’t bargain in a marriage to be alone and be a single mom. Then again, you support your husbands and what they’re doing. For them, it’s a sense of duty.”

Todd Drobnick of Everett, Wash., was one of the first American employees of L-3 to be killed, dying with two military personnel in a suicide bomb attack two years ago this month.

For his father, John Drobnick, his son’s loss is still painful. “I was just crying today,” he said.

“There are days I get angry, but that’s not the way you honor someone; you go and do something decent,” he said. So he and his wife, Sharon, plan to mark the second anniversary of their son’s death by fixing up houses that Hurricane Katrina damaged in Louisiana.

“That’s the kind of thing he would have done,” John Drobnick said, weeping. “That’s the reason he worked in the (Persian) Gulf. He was there five times. He went back because he loved the people, because he thought they needed help and he could help.”

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Powell aide describes foreign policy cabal

Posted on November 1, 2005 by Team VCS

In President Bush’s first term, some of the most important decisions about U.S. national security — including vital decisions about postwar Iraq — were made by a secretive, little-known cabal. It was made up of a very small group of people led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

When I first discussed this group in a speech recently at the New America Foundation in Washington, my comments caused a significant stir because I had been chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell between 2002 and 2005.

But it’s absolutely true. I believe that the decisions of this cabal were sometimes made with the full and witting support of the president and sometimes with something less. More often than not, then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice was simply steamrolled by this cabal.

Dysfunction and inefficiency

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 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.

I watched these dual decision-making processes operate for four years at the State Department. As chief of staff for 27 months, I had a door adjoining the secretary of State’s office. I read virtually every document he read. I read the intelligence briefings and spoke daily with people from all across government.

Crucial decisions

I knew that what I was observing was not what Congress intended when it passed the 1947 National Security Act. The law created the National Security Council — consisting of the president, vice president and the secretaries of State and Defense — to make sure the nation’s vital national security decisions were thoroughly vetted. The NSC has often been expanded, depending on the president in office, to include the CIA director, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the treasury secretary and others, and it has accumulated a staff of sometimes more than 100 people.

But many of the most crucial decisions from 2001 to 2005 were not made within the traditional NSC process. Scholars and knowledgeable critics of the U.S. decision-making process may rightly say, so what? Haven’t all of our presidents in the last half-century failed to conform to the usual process at one time or another? Isn’t it the president’s prerogative to make decisions with whomever he pleases? Moreover, can he not ignore whomever he pleases? Why should we care that President Bush gave over much of the critical decision-making to his vice president and his secretary of Defense?

Both as a former academic and as a person who has been in the ring with the bull, I believe that there are two reasons we should care.

• First, such departures from the process have in the past led us into a host of disasters, including the last years of the Vietnam War, the national embarrassment of Watergate (and the first resignation of a president in our history), the Iran-Contra scandal and now the ruinous foreign policy of George W. Bush.

• But a second and far more important reason is that the nature of both governance and crisis has changed in the modern age. From managing the environment to securing sufficient energy resources, from dealing with trafficking in human beings to performing peacekeeping missions abroad, governing is vastly more complicated than ever before in human history.

Don’t discount experience

Further, the crises the U.S. government confronts today are so multifaceted, so complex, so fast-breaking — and almost always with such incredible potential for regional and global ripple effects — that to depart from the systematic decision-making process laid out in the 1947 statute invites disaster.

Discounting the professional experience available within the federal bureaucracy — and ignoring entirely the inevitable but often frustrating dissent that often arises therein — makes for quick and painless decisions. But when government agencies are confronted with decisions in which they did not participate and with which they frequently disagree, their implementation of those decisions is fractured, uncoordinated and inefficient. This is particularly the case if the bureaucracies called upon to execute the decisions are in strong competition with one another over scarce money, talented people, ”turf” or power.

It takes firm leadership to preside over the bureaucracy. But it also takes a willingness to listen to dissenting opinions. It requires leaders who can analyze, synthesize, ponder and decide.

The administration’s performance during its first four years would have been even worse without Powell’s damage control. At least once a week, it seemed, Powell trooped over to the Oval Office and cleaned all the dog poop off the carpet. He held a youthful, inexperienced president’s hand. He told him everything would be all right because he, the secretary of state, would fix it. And he did — everything from a serious crisis with China when a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft was struck by a Chinese F-8 fighter jet in April 2001, to the secretary’s constant reassurances to European leaders following the bitter breach in relations over the Iraq war. It wasn’t enough, of course, but it helped.

Ignoring dissenters

Today, we have a president whose approval rating is 38 percent and a vice president who speaks only to Rush Limbaugh and assembled military forces. We have a secretary of defense presiding over the death-by-a-thousand-cuts of our overstretched armed forces (no surprise to ignored dissenters such as former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki or former Army Secretary Thomas White).

It’s a disaster. Given the choice, I’d choose a frustrating bureaucracy over an efficient cabal every time.

Lawrence B. Wilkerson served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell from 2002 to 2005.

©2005 The Los Angeles Times

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Top Cheney Adviser Indicted on Five Felonies in CIA Leak Probe

Posted on October 29, 2005 by Team VCS

A federal grand jury today indicted Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, after a two-year investigation into the leak of a CIA agent’s identity but spared — at least for now –President Bush’s top political strategist, Karl Rove.

Libby was indicted on charges of perjury, obstruction of justice and making false statements. The five-count indictment charged that he gave misleading information to the grand jury, allegedly lying about information he discussed with three news reporters. It alleged that he committed perjury before the grand jury in March 2004 and that he also lied to FBI agents investigating the case.

Shortly after the indictment was announced, Libby resigned his White House positions.

Cheney said in a statement that he accepted Libby’s resignation “with deep regret.” He called his aide “one of the most capable and talented individuals I have ever known” and said he “has given many years of his life to public service and has served our nation tirelessly and with great distinction.” Cheney added that Libby is presumed innocent until proven guilty and that “it would be inappropriate for me to comment on the charges or on any facts relating to the proceeding.”

The indictment of Libby, 55, was presented in court today by the special counsel in the case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, as the grand jury’s term expired. Although no indictment was announced for Rove, 54, the White House deputy chief of staff, today’s proceedings did not remove him from legal jeopardy. Sources close to the case said the investigation of Rove is continuing.

“When citizens testify before grand juries, they are required to tell the truth,” Fitzgerald said in a statement. “Without the truth, our criminal justice system cannot serve our nation or its citizens. The requirement to tell the truth applies equally to all citizens, including persons who hold high positions in government.”

The indictment contained one count of obstruction of justice, two counts of perjury and two counts of making false statements. The charges involve testimony that Libby gave to the grand jury and other statements he made regarding his conversations with three journalists: Judith Miller of the New York Times, Matthew Cooper of Time magazine and Tim Russert of NBC. The indictment alleges that Libby lied about how and when in 2003 he learned and subsequently disclosed to reporters information about the covert CIA operative, Valerie Plame. It says he lied to FBI agents on Oct. 14 and Nov. 26, 2003.

Libby is to be arraigned at a later date. The case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton, an appointee of former president George H.W. Bush.

A press release issued by the special counsel’s office said that before Plame’s name appeared in the press in July 2003, her CIA employment was classified and that her affiliation with the agency “was not common knowledge outside the intelligence community.” It said that disclosing such information “has the potential to damage the national security” by preventing the person from operating covertly in the future, compromising intelligence-gathering and endangering CIA employees and those who deal with them.

However, the indictment does not charge Libby with the original alleged offense that the grand jury set out to investigate: illegally revealing the identity of a covert agent in violation of a 1982 federal law.

An attorney for Rove, Robert Luskin, said in a statement this morning, “The Special Counsel has advised Mr. Rove that he has made no decision about whether or not to bring charges and that Mr. Rove’s status has not changed. Mr. Rove will continue to cooperate fully with the Special Counsel’s efforts to complete the investigation. We are confident that when the Special Counsel finishes his work, he will conclude that Mr. Rove has done nothing wrong.”

Rove provided new information to Fitzgerald during eleventh-hour negotiations that “gave Fitzgerald pause” about charging Bush’s senior strategist, said a source close to Rove. “The prosecutor has to resolve those issues before he decides what to do.”

This raised the prospect that a new grand jury or another existing one would continue the probe, given the expiration today of the current grand jury’s term.

As tension mounted ahead of the indictment, the White House adopted a business-as-usual approach. Bush traveled to Norfolk, Va., today to deliver a speech on the war on terrorism, and Cheney was in Georgia to attend three political events.

The investigation by the federal grand jury in Washington was originally launched to determine whether anyone illegally leaked the name of Plame, a covert CIA agent, in an effort to discredit her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, in retaliation for his criticism of the war in Iraq. Wilson began criticizing the war and the Bush administration after a 2002 trip he took at the behest of the CIA to the African country of Niger to look into reports that Iraq was seeking materials to build nuclear weapons.

The indictment charges that Libby began acquiring information about Wilson’s trip in May 2003 after a New York Times column disputed the accuracy of a Bush statement in his State of the Union address. The column said a former ambassador, who was not named, found the statement to be false.

According to the indictment, Libby learned Plame’s identity from a senior State Department official in June 2003 and was told by Cheney that she worked in the CIA’s Counterproliferation Division.

The two key subjects of the inquiry — Rove and Libby — have acknowledged talking about Plame to reporters, but they have denied leaking her name or committing other wrongdoing.

Libby testified that he did not identify Plame by name to reporters or discuss her covert status with them. But Miller of the New York Times has testified that she believed she first learned of Plame’s CIA job from Libby, when the two spoke on June 23, 2003. Miller said she and Libby discussed Plame again in a meeting on July 8, 2003, and in a phone conversation a few days later, on July 12. She has said she first learned Plame’s name from someone other than Libby but does not recall who it was.

A lawyer who formerly served in the State Department and Defense Department, Libby is the vice president’s assistant for national security affairs in addition to being his chief of staff.

The reported effort to discredit Wilson was rooted in a clash between the White House — notably Cheney — and the intelligence bureaucracy in the CIA and State Department over the war in Iraq. Grand jury testimony that has been disclosed suggests that Bush administration officials suspected the CIA of trying to shift blame for prewar intelligence failures to the White House.

The vice president played a central role in assembling the case for invading Iraq and repeatedly pressed for intelligence that would bolster his arguments. Ironically, it was a question from Cheney during an intelligence briefing that initiated the chain of events that led to the grand jury investigation. He had received a military intelligence report alleging that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger and asked what the CIA knew about it.

As a result, Wilson was dispatched in February 2002 to look into claims that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had attempted to buy uranium yellowcake from Niger for use in developing nuclear weapons. Wilson has said he found no evidence of any such effort and reported that the claims were false.

Nevertheless, President Bush said in his January 2003 State of the Union address that the British government had learned Hussein “recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

Two months later, Bush ordered U.S. troops into Iraq to depose Hussein and eliminate a purported threat to the United States from Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction.” No such weapons were found, nor was there evidence that the Hussein regime had reconstituted a nuclear weapons program.

In an opinion piece published in the July 6, 2003, New York Times, Wilson criticized Bush’s State of the Union statement. Wilson wrote that if his findings in Niger were ignored because they did not fit the administration’s “preconceptions about Iraq,” then a case could be made “that we went to war under false pretenses.” He said some intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear program was “twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.”

On July 14, conservative political commentator Robert D. Novak wrote a syndicated column that called Wilson’s African mission into question, suggesting the trip was instigated by Wilson’s wife and did not have high-level backing. Novak named Plame as “an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction” and said “two senior administration officials” had told him she had suggested sending her husband on the Niger trip.

Wilson subsequently complained that the Bush administration had compromised his wife’s CIA career in retribution against him.

The CIA then asked the Justice Department to investigate the leak. Fitzgerald, a hard-charging U.S. attorney in Chicago, was appointed special counsel for the probe in late December 2003. His charge was to determine whether anyone involved in the leak violated federal law, including the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982. The act makes it a felony, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, for a person with access to classified information to intentionally disclose the identity of a covert agent to anyone not authorized to receive classified information.

Indications later emerged, however, that Fitzgerald was looking into other possible crimes related to the leak, including conspiracy, perjury and obstruction of justice.

As Fitzgerald was preparing to seek the grand jury indictments, the FBI conducted last-minute interviews Monday night in Plame’s Washington, D.C., neighborhood. The agents were attempting to determine if Plame’s neighbors knew she worked for the CIA before she was unmasked. Two neighbors said they told the FBI they had been surprised to learn she was a CIA operative.

Plame, 42, formerly worked undercover as an “energy analyst” for a private company that was later identified as a CIA front. A graduate of Pennsylvania State University and the London School of Economics, she married Wilson, now 55, in 1998 while she was a covert agent. The couple has 5-year-old twins.

Although the focus has been on Rove and Libby, Cheney himself has been publicly implicated in recent days in the chain of events that led to the exposure of Plame. The New York Times reported Monday that Fitzgerald possesses notes taken by Libby showing that he learned about Plame from the vice president a month before she was identified by Novak. The White House did not dispute the report.

Two lawyers involved in the case said Fitzgerald apparently has been aware of Libby’s June 12, 2003, conversation with Cheney since the early days of his investigation.

Cheney told NBC’s Russert in September 2003 that he did not know Wilson or who sent him on the trip to Africa.

Around the same time, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said any suggestion that Rove was involved in the leak was “ridiculous.” McClellan said President Bush has set “the highest of standards” for his administration and that if any officials were involved in the leak, “they would no longer be in this administration.”

Asked in June 2004 whether he would fire anyone who leaked Plame’s name, Bush replied in the affirmative.

But in July this year, Bush appeared to add a qualifier, telling reporters he would dismiss anyone who “committed a crime” in the case. The White House refused to clarify whether an indictment would trigger termination, or if that would require a conviction.

During the investigation, Fitzgerald sought grand jury testimony from several journalists who had spoken with administration officials about Plame, and he came down hard on those who refused to cooperate.

The federal judge in the case, Thomas F. Hogan, ordered the New York Times’s Miller held for contempt for refusing to identify a confidential source, and she spent 85 days in jail in Alexandria, Va., before agreeing to testify about conversations with Libby. Although she did not write an article about the case, Miller interviewed Libby about the Plame matter and promised him anonymity. Miller said she agreed to testify when Libby specifically and personally released her from the confidentiality pledge.

Among those interviewed by Fitzgerald in the case have been Bush, Cheney and several of their top aides and advisers.

Washington Post staff writer Jim VandeHei contributed to this story

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Vice President for Torture

Posted on October 28, 2005 by Team VCS

VICE PRESIDENT Cheney is aggressively pursuing an initiative that may be unprecedented for an elected official of the executive branch: He is proposing that Congress legally authorize human rights abuses by Americans. “Cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment of prisoners is banned by an international treaty negotiated by the Reagan administration and ratified by the United States. The State Department annually issues a report criticizing other governments for violating it. Now Mr. Cheney is asking Congress to approve legal language that would allow the CIA to commit such abuses against foreign prisoners it is holding abroad. In other words, this vice president has become an open advocate of torture.

His position is not just some abstract defense of presidential power. The CIA is holding an unknown number of prisoners in secret detention centers abroad. In violation of the Geneva Conventions, it has refused to register those detainees with the International Red Cross or to allow visits by its inspectors. Its prisoners have “disappeared,” like the victims of some dictatorships. The Justice Department and the White House are known to have approved harsh interrogation techniques for some of these people, including “waterboarding,” or simulated drowning; mock execution; and the deliberate withholding of pain medication. CIA personnel have been implicated in the deaths during interrogation of at least four Afghan and Iraqi detainees. Official investigations have indicated that some aberrant practices by Army personnel in Iraq originated with the CIA. Yet no CIA personnel have been held accountable for this record, and there has never been a public report on the agency’s performance.

It’s not surprising that Mr. Cheney would be at the forefront of an attempt to ratify and legalize this shameful record. The vice president has been a prime mover behind the Bush administration’s decision to violate the Geneva Conventions and the U.N. Convention Against Torture and to break with decades of past practice by the U.S. military. These decisions at the top have led to hundreds of documented cases of abuse, torture and homicide in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mr. Cheney’s counsel, David S. Addington, was reportedly one of the principal authors of a legal memo justifying the torture of suspects. This summer Mr. Cheney told several Republican senators that President Bush would veto the annual defense spending bill if it contained language prohibiting the use of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by any U.S. personnel.

The senators ignored Mr. Cheney’s threats, and the amendment, sponsored by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), passed this month by a vote of 90 to 9. So now Mr. Cheney is trying to persuade members of a House-Senate conference committee to adopt language that would not just nullify the McCain amendment but would formally adopt cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment as a legal instrument of U.S. policy. The Senate’s earlier vote suggests that it will not allow such a betrayal of American values. As for Mr. Cheney: He will be remembered as the vice president who campaigned for torture.

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Dick’s War on Saddam

Posted on October 27, 2005 by Team VCS

Dick’s War on Saddam

In August 2002, Dick Cheney was doing his best to shock the nation into action

by Craig Gordon, Newsday, October 26, 2005

WASHINGTON — It was the last week of August 2002, and the Bush administration’s case for war against Iraq was running into serious headwinds – internal dissent, go-slow warnings from Republican elders, grumbling in Congress.

And one man, Vice President Dick Cheney, was doing his best to shock the nation into action.

Cheney ratcheted up the war rhetoric in speeches that week that highlighted a particularly frightening notion, one Cheney had tracked intently in his Pentagon days a decade earlier: charges that Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear weapons.

“Many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon,” Cheney said Aug. 26, warning of a “mortal threat” that would enable Hussein to blackmail the United States and seek domination of the Middle East.

So when former ambassador Joseph Wilson publicly charged in an op-ed article a year later that the White House had “twisted” intelligence to exaggerate Hussein’s nuclear threat, Wilson was taking direct aim at the case for war championed by the vice president himself.

It brought a sharp response from Cheney’s chief of staff and loyal confidant, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who took a significant role in trying to knock down Wilson’s charges. And he did so in part by telling reporters that Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA, which had sent Wilson to Niger to check out reports of Iraq’s nuclear efforts.

Wilson’s article “was a public shot across the bow, and they were bound to react,” said Gary Schmitt, a longtime friend of Libby who helped found the Project for a New American Century, a conservative group that supported war against Iraq.

The leak prompted a two-year grand jury investigation expected to produce indictments as early as today, with Libby, who had about a half-dozen conversations with reporters, viewed as the most likely target, along with the president’s top political adviser, Karl Rove.

Libby’s apparent involvement also has drawn attention to the role of Cheney in the case, and as one of the leading Iraq war hawks in the Bush administration, Cheney was doing all he could in the summer before the war to quiet the naysayers. Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell was pressing Bush to give weapons inspections more time, as were key figures from Bush’s father’s White House.

Cheney sought to raise the stakes in August 2002 by moving Hussein’s alleged nuclear pursuits front-and-center. Within two weeks, the White House had adopted that language as a potent talking point.

“We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said Sept. 8, 2002.

The nuclear rhetoric by Cheney, Rice and others in the White House was running far ahead of other key agencies, such as the Pentagon and State Department. “When she first said that, a lot of eyebrows went up. ‘Wow, that’s ahead of us’ – tougher, stronger, more provocative,” one former senior administration official said.

The nuclear drumbeat was powerful from the public-relations aspect of selling the war. Coming not a full year after the Sept. 11 attacks, it wasn’t hard for Americans to grasp the horror of a nuclear 9/11. For Cheney in particular, the question of Hussein’s nuclear efforts had long been vexing, dating back to his days as defense secretary for President George W. Bush’s father at the time of the 1991 Persian Gulf war. He had made clear in subsequent years that he felt the U.S. government had wildly misjudged the seriousness of Hussein’s nuclear program then, and he appeared determined not to repeat that mistake. Libby, too, worked in Cheney’s Pentagon.

Yet even as Cheney and others talked up the nuclear threat, that evidence was some of the most circumstantial in the administration’s war dossier. The administration later pointed to reported efforts by Iraq to obtain uranium ore, known as yellow-cake, from Niger, and the CIA sent Wilson to check them out in February 2002.

So when Wilson a year later slammed the White House for slanting the nuclear intelligence, “Scooter” Libby moved into action, seeking to discredit Wilson’s report and to insulate the man who first brought the nuclear charges into the spotlight, his boss, Dick Cheney.

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US Told to Give Data on Guantanamo Hunger Strikers

Posted on October 27, 2005 by Team VCS

A federal judge on Wednesday ordered the U.S. government to provide medical records on Guantanamo prisoners who are being force-fed while on a hunger strike and to notify their lawyers about forced feedings.

U.S. District Court Judge Gladys Kessler acted after lawyers representing about a dozen men held at the prison for foreign terrorism suspects at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, expressed urgent concern over their deteriorating health amid a hunger strike launched in early August.

Kessler stated in her opinion that the detainees’ lawyers had presented “deeply troubling” allegations of forced feedings in which U.S. personnel violently shoved tubes as thick as a finger through the men’s noses and into their stomachs without anesthesia or sedatives.

“If the allegations are true — and they are all explicitly, specifically and vigorously denied by the government — they describe conduct of which the United States can hardly be proud,” the judge wrote.

Julia Tarver, a lawyer for the detainees, had told the court she learned during a visit to the base several weeks ago of force-feedings that caused prisoners to vomit blood. Tarver wrote, “When they vomited up blood, the soldiers mocked and cursed at them, and taunted them with statements like ‘look what your religion has brought you.'”

Tarver told the court that prison guards took a feeding tube from one detainee, “and with no sanitization whatsoever, reinserted it into the nose of a different detainee.”

The judge noted that the prison’s commander stated the facility was operated “in a humane manner,” and the head of the hospital there said that only doctors and nurses inserted feeding tubes.

LACK OF LEGAL RIGHTS

Their lawyers say the detainees are staging the hunger strike to protest their conditions and lack of legal rights. The lawyers accused the government of keeping them in the dark about their clients’ medical condition.

The Pentagon said 26 of the roughly 505 prisoners currently were on hunger strike, with 23 of them hospitalized.

The New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights has estimated that about 210 were participating in the hunger strike. Detainee lawyers accused the government of deliberately under-stating the strike’s scope.

The judge ordered the government to provide notice to the prisoners’ lawyers within 24 hours of the beginning of force-feeding. Kessler also ordered the government to provide lawyers medical records for their clients spanning the week before a forced feeding, and provide these records at least weekly until force-feeding ends.

The judge denied the lawyers’ request for immediate telephone access to their clients.

“The order is being reviewed,” said Lt. Col. Mark Ballesteros, a Pentagon spokesman on detainee issues. He declined to comment on whether the government would appeal it.

Kessler’s order affected a group of prisoners from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Afghanistan. Lawyers for detainees expressed hope the government would provide the same notification and data to lawyers for other hunger strikers.

The hunger strike is the latest flash point between the government and human rights groups over the camp, which activists call a blight on the U.S. human rights record.

Many Guantanamo prisoners have been there for more than 3-1/2 years, and just four have been charged with crimes. Rights activists have denounced these indefinite detentions and treatment they say amounts to torture. Most detainees were picked up in Afghanistan after a U.S. invasion in 2001 to oust the Taliban government and dislodge al Qaeda bases.

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U.S.: License to Abuse Would Put CIA Above the Law

Posted on October 26, 2005 by Team VCS

The Bush administration is now the only government in the world to claim a legal justification for mistreating prisoners during interrogations, Human Rights Watch said today. The administration recently approached members of the U.S. Congress to seek a waiver that would allow the CIA to use cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment on detainees in U.S. custody outside the United States.

While many other governments practice torture and other forms of mistreatment and have records of abuse far worse than the United States, no other government currently claims that such abuse is legally permissible, Human Rights Watch said.

“The administration is setting a dangerous example for the world when it claims that spy agencies are above the law,” said Tom Malinowski, Washington director of Human Rights Watch. “Congress should reject this proposal outright. Otherwise, the United States will have no standing to demand humane treatment if an American falls into the hands of foreign intelligence services.”

Earlier this month, in a 90-9 vote, the U.S. Senate approved a measure sponsored by Republican Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham that would prohibit the military and CIA from using “cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment” in the case of any detainee, anywhere in the world.

But last week, Vice President Dick Cheney and CIA director Porter Goss met with Sen. McCain to propose a presidential waiver for the proposed legislation. The proposed waiver states that the measure “shall not apply with respect to clandestine counterterrorism operations conducted abroad, with respect to terrorists who are not citizens of the United States, that are carried out by an element of the United States government other than the Department of Defense.”

The waiver, which by its own terms applies to non-military counterterrorism operations against non-citizens overseas, states that such operations need to be “consistent with the Constitution and laws of the United States and treaties to which the United States is a party, if the president determines that such operations are vital to the protection of the United States or its citizens from terrorist attack.” But the Constitution does not robustly curtail the conduct of the CIA overseas, and relevant domestic laws contain numerous jurisdictional loopholes. Moreover, administration officials have previously told Congress that they do not consider CIA personnel operating outside the United States to be bound by legal prohibitions against “cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment” under treaties to which the United States is party.

“This exception contains code language that could give the CIA a green light to treat prisoners inhumanely,” said Malinowski. “If allowed to stand, it will render President Bush’s past pledges about humane treatment meaningless.”

Human Rights Watch said the waiver would also open the door for outright torture, as interrogators would find it impossible to draw lines between illegal and “allowable” mistreatment. Bush administration officials, under questioning from members of Congress in the past, have failed to clearly define differences between torture and lesser forms of mistreatment. They have also made inaccurate statements about the definition of torture; for instance, administration officials have claimed that “waterboarding” (suffocating a person until he believes he is about to drown) is not a form of torture.

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How Scary Is This?

Posted on October 25, 2005 by Team VCS

    The White House is sweating out the possibility that one or more top officials will soon be indicted on criminal charges. But the Bush administration is immune to prosecution for its greatest offense – its colossal and profoundly tragic incompetence.

    Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel who served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, addressed the administration’s arrogance and ineptitude in a talk last week that was astonishingly candid by Washington standards.

    “We have courted disaster in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran,” said Mr. Wilkerson. “Generally, with regard to domestic crises like Katrina, Rita … we haven’t done very well on anything like that in a long time. And if something comes along that is truly serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city, or something like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence.”

    The investigation of Karl Rove, Scooter Libby et al. is the most sensational story coming out of Washington at the moment. But the story with the gravest implications for the U.S. and the world is the overall dysfunction of the Bush regime. This is a bomb going “Tick, tick, tick . . .” What is the next disaster that this crowd will be unprepared to cope with? Or the next lunatic idea that will spring from its ideological bag of tricks?

    Mr. Wilkerson gave his talk before an audience at the New America Foundation, an independent public policy institute. On the all-important matter of national security, which many voters had seen as the strength of the administration, Mr. Wilkerson said:

    “The case that I saw for four-plus years was a case that I have never seen in my studies of aberrations, bastardizations, perturbations, changes to the national security decision-making process. 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.”

    When the time came to implement the decisions, said Mr. Wilkerson, they were “presented in such a disjointed, incredible way that the bureaucracy often didn’t know what it was doing as it moved to carry them out.”

    Where was the president? According to Mr. Wilkerson, “You’ve got this collegiality there between the secretary of defense and the vice president, and you’ve got a president who is not versed in international relations and not too much interested in them either.”

    One of the consequences of this dysfunction, as I have noted many times, is the unending parade of dead or badly wounded men and women returning to the U.S. from the war in Iraq – a war that the administration foolishly launched but now does not know how to win or end.

    Mr. Wilkerson was especially critical of the excessive secrecy that surrounded so many of the most important decisions by the Bush administration, and of what he felt was a general policy of concentrating too much power in the hands of a small group of insiders. As much as possible, government in the United States is supposed to be open and transparent, and a fundamental principle is that decision-making should be subjected to a robust process of checks and balances.

    While not “evaluating the decision to go to war,” Mr. Wilkerson told his audience that under the present circumstances “we can’t leave Iraq. We simply can’t.” In his view, if American forces were to pull out too quickly, the U.S. would end up returning to the Middle East with “five million men and women under arms” within a decade.

    Nevertheless, he is appalled at the way the war was launched and conducted, and outraged by “the detainee abuse issue.” In 10 years, he said, when this matter is “put to the acid test, ironed out, and people have looked at it from every angle, we are going to be ashamed of what we allowed to happen.”

    Mr. Wilkerson said he has taken some heat for speaking out, but feels that “as a citizen of this great republic,” he has an obligation to do so. If nothing is done about the current state of affairs, he said, “it’s going to get even more dangerous than it already is.”

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