Ex-Powell Aide Moves From Insider to Apostate

Ex-Powell Aide Moves From Insider to Apostate
by Steven R. Weisman

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1224-03.htm


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.

"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," Mr. Wilkerson said in a well-publicized speech at the New America Foundation in October. "And you've got a president who is not versed in international relations and not too much interested in them either," he added in the speech.

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.


Though Mr. Powell has kept his silence about his former aide, he has let it be known through friends that he objects to the charges, especially the suggestion that he was overly loyal to President Bush. "It's very painful for me," Mr. Wilkerson says. "I've lost a friend of 16 years. I won't say I've lost him, but the estrangement is palpable." One e-mail message he says he got from Mr. Powell complained tersely, "Don't characterize my loyalty."

On the other hand, Mr. Wilkerson says that Mr. Powell won crucial policy battles in making sure that the issue of Iraq was taken to the United Nations and in battling Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Cheney for the cause of improving relations with Europe, encouraging negotiations with North Korea and Iraq, and avoiding confrontations with Russia and China.

blood solid nothing will.

Saw this in yesterday's NYT and have been thinking about it since.

Loyalty goes only so far when one is in government service. Top loyalty should be to your country, imho. I have no doubts that Powell was the only sane person in the Administration-too bad his priorities are mixed up.

Remember that Powell began the cover-up of the My Lai massacre when he was a major.

If Powell is the only "sane" person in the Bush regime, it still does not excuse his behaviour.

loyalty. I appreciate that he has come forward now, but I resent him for his stance during his tenure. Another traitor as far as I'm concerned.