Ex-Powell Aide Moves From Insider to Apostate
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. And you’ve got a president who is not versed in international relations and not too much interested in them either
- COL Lawrence B. Wilkerson, US Army (Ret.)
What is a person to do in a situation such as the one Lawrence Wilkerson found himself in? You’ve sworn to support the President and his policies, yet your time on the inside of the process has revealed to you the evil and corruption inherent in those responsible for creating the policies. To his credit, I suppose, Wilkerson’s military background prevented him from trying to upset the apple cart from the inside. Nonetheless, Wilkerson saw firsthand what a corrupt and self-serving cabal can do when handed the reigns of power and the end result is an Imperial Presidency, whose existence is “justified” by repeating the neo-Conservative mantra, which, roughly translated, is either “the war against terrorism” or “9.11”.
Eventually, Wilkerson had seen enough, and decided that he could no longer in good conscience continue to serve an Administration that knows nothing of honor, service, and integrity. What’s an honorable man to do when he realizes that he is serving a dishonorable and corrupt cabal? One honest man on the inside would be eaten alive, and Wilkerson knew this. Were he to attempt to change the system from within, or even to become a whistleblower, this Administration would have buried him so deeply it would be as if he had never exisited.
Wilkerson in the end knew that he had no choice but to get out, but he had been on the inside long enough to realize that if he spoke out about what he knew and what he had seen, he would still be buried by an avalanche of propaganda and political assassination. To his credit, Wilkerson did not allow this reality to deter him, and the Bush Administration certainly hasn’t proved his fears to be inaccurate.
Wilkerson has seen combat, and he knows what an ugly and unprincipled mess it can be. He has seen things that no man should have to carry with him through life. Yet, service to his country is the life he chose for himself. Perhaps Wilkerson’s mistake was in assuming, or at least hoping, that other men would be guided by the same principles of honor and integrity that have illuminated his path. Sadly, “honor” and “politics” and not words commonly found being used in the same sentence.
IT was in early 2004, the beginning of President Bush’s re-election campaign, that Lawrence B. Wilkerson first printed out a letter saying he wanted to quit as chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin L. Powell.
“In essence it said, ‘Dear Mr. President, I find myself at variance with a majority of your foreign policies and even your domestic policies and therefore I respectfully submit my resignation,’ ” Mr. Wilkerson recalled recently. But the letter remained in a desk drawer for the rest of Mr. Bush’s first term.
Nearly two years later, Mr. Wilkerson, a 60-year-old retired United States Army colonel, has finally completed his journey from insider to apostate. Alone among those who surrounded Mr. Powell in the first term, he is speaking out critically, 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, whom he says was overly preoccupied with “damage control” for policies set by others.
Too many lies, too many ugly messes created by trying to cover up and explain away those lies. For someone dedicated to serving his country, that’s got to wear on you…and it certainly did on Wilkerson. When a man who has spent his career and entire adult life upholding a code of honor, it’s got to rankle being around people for whom “honor” is neither relevant nor a matter of priority. Lawrence Wilkerson saw a world in which power corrupts, and absolute power is the ultimate goal. Being a man of honor, it’s no wonder Wilkerson resigned. What good and decent person would want to be surrounded by those who so willingly and easily engage in such dishonor?
Mr. 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….
He 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, after studying the matter, had resulted from decisions on prisoner treatment and intelligence set shortly after Sept. 11, 2001.
Army discipline is something Mr. Wilkerson says he has understood since Vietnam, where he flew helicopters starting in 1969. “I’ve been there,” he said. “I’ve stood on the hot parade ground as a pilot. I’ve cursed generals.” He added, “I understood the bestiality that comes over men when they’re asked to use force for the state.”
He recalled that a battalion commander once declared an area a free-fire zone, “which means that anything that moves, you shoot it.” One of his gunners killed a 13-year-old girl, Mr. Wilkerson says, adding, “I will always live with that for the rest of my life.”
Wilkerson is clearly a man who understands the perils and pitfalls of power. Having seen it firsthand in combat, Wilkerson would seem to be singularly qualified to identify it and fight it in the civilian world. Of course, the civilian world knows nothing of military honor and discipline. The civilian political world is about power, money, and influence- not concepts that respond to military discipline.
“Larry has two qualities that Powell appreciated,” recalls another top aide to the former secretary. “First, he could always find the big picture in whatever was going on. Second, he always tore things apart. He never takes things at face value, and what he’s doing now is a kind of exaggeration of what he used to do internally.” Mr. Powell turned to Mr. Wilkerson to go with him to the C.I.A. to sort through the mounds of material prepared to buttress the case against Saddam Hussein on the eve of the Iraq war, for the lengthy presentation the secretary gave on Feb. 5, 2003, at the United Nations Security Council.
“He found that the draft didn’t have the sourcing and backing that we wanted and he tore the whole thing apart and put it back together,” the former State Department official recalled. “He was Powell’s internal iconoclast.” Mr. Wilkerson recalls the preparation of the Feb. 5 presentation, which Mr. Powell has acknowledged will be remembered as a blot on his career because of its mistakes on intelligence, as an exercise in frustration.
It was an embittering experience for everyone at the State Department, Mr. Wilkerson says, to be saddled with presenting what turned out to be false information at the United Nations, and also to have been sidelined in the running of postwar Iraq by the Pentagon. “When I rationalize for myself not resigning, I did it by saying, ‘This is the only sane member of this administration,’ ” Mr. Wilkerson said of Mr. Powell.
And how sad is that, when the only way a man can rationalize not resigning is to attempt to convince himself that he works for the only person in the Bush Administration who is not evil and corrupt? For a man who has devoted his life and his career to the service of his country, that’s got to be a tough pill to swallow.
Those who fear for our country and the direction in which it’s being led owe a debt of gratitude to Lawrence Wilkerson. Without good, decent, and conscientious public servants like Wilkerson, we risk being turned over completely to those concerned with nothing beyond money, power, and influence.
The truly sad aspect of this sorry saga is that the wrong person resigned. Lawrence Wilkerson, and those like him, should be the ones in power, for when government is without honor and integrity, evil has free reign.
WE DESERVE BETTER.
