http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/GJ21Aa02.htmlBy Jim Lobe
US policy and the 'Oval Office cabal'
> Oct 21, 2005
> WASHINGTON - As top officials in the White House and Vice President Dick Cheney's office await possible criminal indictments for their efforts to discredit a whistle-blower, a top aide to former secretary of state, Colin Powell, on Wednesday accused a "cabal" led by Cheney and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld of hijacking US foreign policy by circumventing or ignoring formal decision-making channels.
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> "In some cases, there was real dysfunctionality," said Wilkerson, who spoke at the New America Foundation (NAF), a prominent Washington think tank. "But in most cases ... she made a decision that she would side with the president to build her intimacy with the president."
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> "The case that I saw for four-plus years was a case that I have never seen in my studies of aberrations, bastardizations and perturbations in the national-security
process," he said.
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> "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."
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> Wilkerson also stressed the "extremely powerful" influence of what he called the "Oval Office cabal" of Cheney and Rumsfeld, both former secretaries of defense with a long-standing personal and professional relationship.
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