On Wed, 30 Nov 2005 09:25:17 -0500, Brice Yokem <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>this news just showed up. Maybe George W. was in it as well.
>Of course, with him not reading and just listening to advisers, that could
>be the main reason.
>
>--------------------
>
>Considering how well people like George Tenet were managing the
>intellegence services maybe he should not have been listening either.

Maybe he should have stayed in bed for the last 10yrs or so.
Then again, maybe he was asleep when the decisions were made.
Hopefully Colin Powell speaks openly one of these days.


Ex-Powell aide: Bush 'too aloof' on post-war Iraq plans
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-Qaeda 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. 

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