[THS] Scott Horton Interviews Lawrence Wilkerson
The Harder Stuff in news and commentary
ths at psalience.org
Tue Jul 13 13:19:54 CEST 2010
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25923.htm
An unholy alliance, of strange characters.
Scott Horton Interviews Lawrence Wilkerson
"I think theres a very clear-cut case that Wurmser was not only working for Rumsfeld
and Feith and the Pentagon, but he was also working for Israel. I think Feith was
working for Israel too." -- Lawrence Wilkerson
Scott Horton, Anti War: July 04, 2010
Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, discusses
why Bush and Cheney must have known most Guantanamo prisoners were innocent,
the US militarys inability to do battlefield vetting of Afghan war prisoners, Cheneys
reversal of the Blackstone formulation on the wrongful imprisonment of innocents,
how Colin Powell and others were kept out of the loop about intelligence based on
tortured confessions, how the intelligence failures on Iraq WMD were in part due to
compensating for missing Saddams real program in 1990-91 and why Douglas Feith
and Richard Perle are essentially representatives of Israels Likud party.
MP3 here. (28:52)
Scott Horton interviews Col. Lawrence Wilkerson July 2, 2010
Scott Horton: All right, yall, welcome back to the show. Its Antiwar Radio, Im Scott
Horton, and our next guest on the show today is retired Col. Larry Wilkerson. He
helped lie us into war with Iraq and hes regretted it ever since. Now hes at the New
America Foundation. Was an aide to Secretary of State Colin Powell. Welcome to the
show. How are you doing, Larry?
Lawrence Wilkerson: Doing fine.
Horton: Appreciate your joining us here. Now, this is kind of old news, but whats so
old about it? Its all still going on. From April 9, of this year, 2010, George W. Bush
Knew Guantanamo Prisoners Were Innocent, in the Sunday Times, which normally
I would think if its in the Sunday Times, its not true, but here theyre quoting you,
and you seem like an honest guy, so why dont you tell us about it?
Wilkerson: I believe that as soon as we got the 740 or so prisoners out of Afghanistan
to Guantanamo, that we knew there had been improper battlefield vetting; that is to
say, there were too few troops in Afghanistan, U.S. troops, to do the kind of combat
status review tribunals, the other things under the Geneva Conventions that are
normally done, that indeed weve done in every war since World War I, even before
that, and so what happened was that no U.S. soldiers were involved really
significantly in their capture. There were Pakistanis, there were warlords, there were
Northern Alliance troops and so forth involved, but there really werent any U.S.
personnel involved. So this complement of prisoners came to Guantanamo having
been swept up on the battlefield by all manner of people other than the U.S. and
having had no battlefield vetting whatsoever.
So when we got them there, it was clear that there were people there who didnt
belong there. We had people who were over 90 years old. We had 12-year-olds, 13-
year-olds, 14-year-olds, 16-year-olds. We had British citizens. We had Australian
citizens and so forth. We had foreign ministers like Jack Straw from London, for
example, a good friend of Colins, asking us immediately to repatriate these people
because they were our allies the UK, arguably our special relationship ally and yet
we wouldnt do that.
So it became clear, I think, to the highest levels in the U.S. government quite swiftly
in 2002 that we had people at Guantanamo we didnt know much about at all. Some
of them might be hardcore terrorists, some of them might be nothing more than
soldiers, drivers and that sort of thing, and a whole bunch of them, maybe even the
majority of them, might be nothing more than people who had been swept up on a
battlefield that was quite chaotic, and incidentally swept up at times for bonuses that
we were paying. We paid $5000 to a Pakistani, for example, for capturing someone,
so whatd he do, he goes out and he captures his enemy and makes $5000 off of it.
If hes Taliban, thats great. If hes al Qaeda, thats even better. But normally they
werent. They were just people that the Pakistani made $5000 off because he didnt
like him very much.
Horton: Well now, on one hand, Secretary Powell, and the vice president, Dick
Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, and everyone must have
known this because I think quite a bit of this was in the media, at least, if youre
reading The Guardian or something, this wasnt, you know, it was pretty apparent
that they were sort of just sweeping up people and paying bounties and that kind of
thing early on. But, here you are, youre a former high-level official in the
government and youre saying you know for a fact that these men knew. How do you
know for a fact that these men knew? Did you all see the same papers and you know
they saw the same papers, or you were in the room when Colin Powell and Dick
Cheney discussed this, or what?
Wilkerson: No, a lot of this is my surmise with regard to the vice president and the
president. I mean its very difficult for me to see what I saw and know what I knew,
listening to deliberations that Secretary Powell went through with, for example, his
Ambassador for War Crimes, Pierre Prosper, and others and not believe that my
president and my vice president knew how screwed up they were at Guantanamo.
Furthermore, I know what the philosophy was, and the philosophy was that if youve
got one terrorist in jail, who cares if youve got 500 innocent people in jail? Its worth
it. Its worth it for two reasons: One, because you may be able, because the people
youve got who are innocent came from the same region, the same country, the
same area, often the same province as the terrorist, you may be able to get
information out of them that may be helpful. So thats the first reason. The second
reason is, who cares if you sweep innocent people up as long as you get the bad
guy? I mean, if you read Ron Suskinds book, you understand that that was pretty
much the philosophy that Vice President Cheney exercised all the time.
On the other side of the coin, I heard the discussions that took place every morning
at 8:30 in the conference room when we met with the assistant secretary and the
under secretaries and office heads and so forth, and people like Pierre who were
dealing with this issue of trying to repatriate people, trying to get people who werent
guilty of anything other than having been swept up on the battlefield, like the
teenagers and the 90-year-old man and so forth, out of Guantanamo and back to
their country. Or in the case of people we didnt know anything about, which I think
was the majority of them, back to a country where the same kind of process could be
pursued, perhaps even better pursued, as in the UK after all they had experience
with Northern Ireland and so forth and a lot more terrorist experience than we did
and getting them back to them so that they could do it. All this conversation went on
day after day after day, but nothing ever happened.
The Uighers were another case in point. I think everyone early on knew that the
Uighers were guilty of nothing but having been swept up on the battlefield. Now we
have U.S. courts having corroborated that fact. There were about 16 or 17 of these
Uighers. They were from the far province, the western province of China, Xinjiang
province of China. And yet we hadnt at the end of the Bush administration
repatriated them yet because we couldnt find anybody in the world that wanted to
take them. We didnt want to give them back to the Chinese. We were fearful that
the Chinese would take draconian, drastic action about them because the Chinese
had declared that that group of people were terrorists in their own right. So, I mean,
this went on daily, this discussion, and is today, and it was clear to me that the
highest-level people knew how screwed up the situation was in Guantanamo. Now,
the fact that I saw the Secretary of State aware of it, knew that he talked to Dr. Rice
every day, knew that he talked to Secretary Rumsfeld quite frequently, that leads me
to believe that the highest people over there in the White House knew about it too.
And if I conclude otherwise, then I have to conclude they were all idiots. And though
Ive said some disparaging things about the vice president and others, I dont think
Ive ever called them an idiot. I dont think they were idiots.
Horton: Well, did Scooter Libby sit in on these deputies meetings?
Wilkerson: No, these were meetings in the State Department where Secretary Powell
meets with his people.
Horton: Oh, I see. But they have the deputies meetings where the Deputy Secretary
of Defense and State and all the different departments come together and then the
vice president surely would have somebody representing him there, right?
Wilkerson: Oh, the vice president had people representing him everywhere. There
were people at the lowest level coordination meetings within the interagency group
from the vice presidents office. For example, when I sat in on discussions of the six-
party talks or issues in Asia in general with Jim Kelly, who was the Secretary of State
for East Asia and the Pacific, who was in the chair when I sat in those low-level
coordination meetings, the first level, if you will, of the interagency process, there
was always a person from the vice presidents office there.
Horton: Now, you know, pardon me, but, it seems to me like if you guys were having
these meetings where you talk about how theres all these innocent people there, on
such a regular basis, was everybody not agreeing that We know were liars but this
is part of our PR for the war on terrorism, is we got to pretend that theres more than
100 of these guys in the whole world?
Wilkerson: Well, look at the problem they had. Look at the challenge they had. And
when I say they, I mean the entire interagency, including my boss, Secretary Powell.
The challenge had a number of dimensions to it. The first dimension was, Wow, we
dont know about these people. They were not vetted properly on the battlefield.
They were not taken by U.S. soldiers. We dont know. All we have in some cases is a
card with an expected name, maybe the time and date of capture, and maybe who
captured. Thats the extent of the trail of evidence that we have. Wow. We dont
want to release these guys because they might really be terrorists. Better to keep
them in jail and be wrong about their guilt or innocence than to release them and let
them resume the war. Thats the first dimension. Second dimension
Horton: All right, well, well have to hold it right there. Well get back to the second
dimension of it after this break. Its Larry Wilkerson from the New America
Foundation. Antiwar Radio.
Horton: All right, yall, welcome back to the show. Its Antiwar Radio. Im Scott
Horton, and Im talking with retired Col. Larry Wilkerson, former aide to Secretary of
State Colin Powell, now at the New America Foundation, and were talking about how
the government, the Bush government, knew that the men at Guantanamo Bay were
innocent. And you were saying, sir, about the second dimension, or maybe you want
to recap the first, the two points about what yall knew, and I guess I was suggesting
that it seems like it must have been a cynical conversation, that we have this PR stunt
to try to prove that there are lots of terrorists out to get us, you know, 700-something
innocent people at Guantanamo originally, while there were never more than a
couple hundred al Qaeda in the whole world in the first place.
Wilkerson: Well, the first dimension that I mentioned was of course that we didnt
want to let a terrorist go. And thats a legitimate dimension, in my view. The second
one was, how on earth could you possibly admit to the American people how
screwed up Guantanamo was? If youre Secretary Rumsfeld and you admit that,
youve just admitted that you dont know what youre doing. And you certainly open
yourself up to firing by the President of the United States, and youve made yourself
look like a total fool. So youve got this very understandably human dimension to it
that no one wants to admit that theyve made such a colossal error. Youve got
another dimension to it, too, and you hinted at it there. Its what I call the Karl Rove
dimension. You want to exploit this as much as you possibly can, so you put them in
shackles, you put hoods on them, you put them in orange jumpsuits, and you show a
little TV footage every now and then. You want the American people to believe that
these are heinous, despicable, deadly criminals.
Horton: Yeah, goes good with an orange alert in the run-up to the Iraq war.
Wilkerson: Yeah. And it doesnt hurt that youre doing that. And youre also, if youre
the vice president, whos been saying from one end of the country to the other that
there are contacts between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein and Baghdad, which the
intelligence community was saying, No there arent, no there arent, no there arent
repeatedly, then you want these people to be, shall we say, subjected to the most
extreme interrogation methods possible in order to get out of them corroborating
proof that there are contacts between al Qaeda and Baghdad.
Horton: Now, now, let me stop you right there, because any journalist in fact, lets
go ahead and point at McClatchy Newspapers they went through and they said,
Look, all the torture coincides with Iraq lies, Iraq al Qaeda lies, Iraq weapons of
mass destruction lies, but you were there. Were there discussions that you
overheard, Col. Wilkerson, where they were deliberately talking about We need to
torture these guys into lying about Saddam Husseins connections to Osama bin
Laden?
Wilkerson: No, I was not. And I would not have been privy to those kinds of
conversations anyway.
Horton: You ever talk with Colin Powell about that, in the elevator or when you were
walking to the car?
Wilkerson: I dont even believe, in my study of past national security decision-making
situations, I dont even corroborate this, I dont even believe Colin Powell knew about
it. I think this was a very, very closely held, vice president, perhaps the president
Im not even sure the president was fully versed on it George Tenet group that
worked the problem aside from everyone else. And thats not historically thats not
unusual. When the president issues a finding to do something like this, whether its
Eisenhower issuing a finding to overfly the Soviet Union with U-2s, or whether its
Eisenhower, for example, issuing a finding to overthrow the first democratically
elected prime minister in Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953, the community that
knows about that finding, that decision, is very small. It usually doesnt include
anyone without a need to know, and that means people who are actually going to
have to execute the decision. So, I have no problem understanding that my boss
didnt even know about some of this stuff.
Horton: Well, but when you guys were the recipients of the information, such as, we
have this guy, I dont know if they told you the name, al-Libi, but he says that
Saddam taught the al Qaeda guys how to make chemical weapons and so forth, did
you believe that, or did you know that had anything to do with people being, you
know, crucified from the ceiling until they admitted it, or worse?
Wilkerson: I didnt know that until much later. I found it out through my own
research, and in the case of Shaykh al-Libi, I found it out because this intelligence
individual revealed to me that he had had been tortured in Egypt.
Horton: But I mean the CIA brought you his lies and said, Use this, right?
Wilkerson: But the CIA did not bring us any identification of sources, and thats their
normal modus operandi. We did not know, for example, that Curveball existed until
well after his UN presentation. We did not know that. What the term of art that the
CIA used with the Secretary of State and with me and others was a high-level al
Qaeda operative has revealed so and so and so and so. We didnt know names. We
didnt know places. We didnt know interrogation methods and so forth until well
after the presentation.
Horton: Well, formalities aside, did you know that they were BS-ing?
Wilkerson: Ill be very honest with you and tell you that I suspected at the time that
we werent getting the full truth.
Horton: Well, now theres so much ground to cover on Guantanamo, but there are so
many other things I want to ask you about as well. Is there anything important about
Guantanamo I might have missed to give you a chance to address here?
Wilkerson: Well I think, you see, one other thing, when President Bush makes a
decision to send, if I remember right, it was 14, the 14 high-value detainees that
were fairly we were fairly certain about were very instrumental either in 9/11 or in
other activities that al Qaeda was planning or had accomplished, when he decided to
pull them out of the secret prisons, which as you know were distributed across the
globe, and put them in Guantanamo, there were statements at that time, and some
of us made with some derision in our voice, that, Hey, for the first time since
Guantanamo was opened, we really have some hardcore al Qaeda there.
Horton: Right, yeah, it puts the lie to the whole Guantanamo situation when anybody
who was actually, you know, Ramzi bin al-Shibh or Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, were
in a former Soviet torture dungeon in Eastern Europe or in Morocco or in an
underground dungeon in Thailand or something like that.
Wilkerson: And frankly I think that was one of the presidents reasons for putting
them at Guantanamo. Because we knew the situation at Guantanamo was untenable
in the long term and we needed to get some people down there who really counted.
Horton: All right, now, I have a bunch of questions. I dont know how many I can fit
before the next break do you think theres any chance I can keep you one more
segment after the bottom of the hour?
Wilkerson: Um, yeah. I can stay for another 15 minutes or so.
Horton: Okay, great, I know youre busy, and I appreciate it. So I want to talk about
the aluminum tubes. I want to ask you about the aluminum tubes. Because so much
hinged on the idea, as you know, anybody who knew anything about nuclear
anything would have been able to just laugh at it, but, you know, the idea that
Hussein had some sort of advanced uranium enrichment program or something was
laughable to anybody who knew anything about it or to the IAEA, for example
but the case for war hinged on these tubes. And it was not just the neocons. I
believe the story was, it was somebody at the CIA insisted on it. And yet you were
working with Colin Powell over at the State Department, and I know that it was the
Bureau of Intelligence and Research, which I guess is sort of the State Departments
own little CIA there, that they and the Energy Department said, This is nonsense.
And that was leaked to, or not leaked but discussed at least off the record with
Knight Ridder Newspapers, and even with the Washington Post in September of
2002 the Post ran a story saying, The lower people dont believe this. And yet they
kept using it all the way up until the invasion in 2003, including, of course, in Colin
Powells famous speech and now Im sorry because the bumper musics playing,
well have to go out to break, but Ill try to get your answer on the other side of it.
Everybody, its Col. Larry Wilkerson, who used to work for Colin Powell when he was
Secretary of State in the first Bush administration. Well be right back.
Horton: All right, yall, welcome back to the show. Its Antiwar Radio on the Liberty
Radio Network, LRN.fm, and KAOSRadioAustin.org, talking with retired Col. Larry
Wilkerson. Hes now at the New America Foundation. And the question before the
break was about the aluminum tubes and who believed this nonsense about the
aluminum tubes other than the American people?
Wilkerson: Well, you have to look at the entire panoply of intelligence that was
brought to bear on Iraq. There are 16 intelligence entities in the United States, 17 if
you count the Foreign Intelligence board. Fourteen of the 16 agreed on the nuclear
program. I&R at State and DoEs intelligence outfit were the only two that dissented,
and their dissent was duly noted in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate.
But, more important than that consensus in the intelligence community that was
wrong, obviously, was the fact that it wasnt just aluminum tubes. There were seven
items that the other 14 entities brought out to demonstrate that they thought he had
a program. They ranged from everything from the tubes and magnets and rotors
and all the things necessary for a centrifuge complex, to scientists that Saddam was
trying to recruit who were nuclear scientists, to software that he was purchasing
around the world through his what we called spider front of companies that
purchased in Germany and Russia and elsewhere for him, and so there were other
reasons to believe, not the least of which, and I didnt even include it in the seven,
was the fact that we had been very wrong in 1990 and 1991 about his nuclear
program. He was much further along than the intelligence community had estimated
at the time. So you might say they were trying to make up for their failure in 90 and
91 by assessing that he was further along then. So it wasnt just the aluminum
tubes, though admittedly they were a part of it. And Im not one to defend this at all,
because it was dead wrong, but there were other aspects to it than just the two
dissenters and the aluminum tubes.
Horton: Yeah. Well, the guys at the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, they
bought everything but the tubes, or they were
Wilkerson: Yeah, they bought the chemical and they bought the biological. And then
one of the things Tom does in his book now
Horton: Well, I meant in terms of the other pieces of the nuclear story there. Because
you know, Mohamed ElBaradei said, Come on, this is not right. Ive been there.
Wilkerson: Well, you have to remember that ElBaradei had motives of his own, and
even if he didnt have motives of his own, the president, the vice president, even the
Secretary of State and others thought he did. So, you know, youre dealing with
politics here and youre dealing with international politics.
Horton: Right.
Wilkerson: Thats sometimes hard to deal with.
Horton: But at the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research, how much
of the nuclear story were they buying? You said there were the 14 different
pieces
Wilkerson: They didnt buy any of it. To Tom Fingars credit, to Carl Fords credit and
other analysts in INR, they stood up against the rest of the intelligence community,
except for the small element in the Department of Energy, and they said, We
dissent. We do not believe he has an active nuclear program. We do think he wants
nuclear weapons, we do think that he will eventually try, but we dont think hes got
an active program right now. And they were right.
Horton: All right, now, I guess we can keep going down that path, but theres so
many other things. Let me ask you about the role of David Wurmser and John Bolton
in the State Department in the first Bush Jr. administration. It sort of seemed from
the outside there was a piece in Salon.com by Anonymous called The State
Departments Extreme Makeover, that came out, I think in 2002, maybe early 2003,
saying Boy, these guys that work for Cheney came in, turned the place upside
down, marginalized or fired all the old CFR member types and you know if we put
aside Iraq for the moment theres the story of how America broke the agreed
framework with the North Koreans, put new sanctions on them, and now its the
Proliferation Security Initiative which said were going to seize your ships at sea and
all this, in what seemed like deliberate plan to provoke the North Koreans into
withdrawing from the Nonproliferation Treaty, as John Bolton has been caught on
tape saying, whats his plan with Iran as well, to so frustrate them that they would
just go ahead and quit their international agreement. And I wonder if you can kind of
tell me about your view from inside the State Department of these two men and how
the Cheney network operated under Colin Powell and Dick Armitage and you over
there at the State Department?
Wilkerson: Theres no question that John Bolton was operating off a different sheet of
music than the rest of us on more than one occasion. I would go in to see the
Deputy Secretary of State and we would both lament the fact that we didnt seem to
be able to control him because he was covered by the vice presidents office. Very
difficult to control an under secretary who ultimately has access to the vice president
and, in this case, ultimately to what I believe was the real power in the first Bush
administration. We tried. Obviously, we didnt do that good a job. He made some
very egregious speeches about North Korea, about Syria, about Cuba having an
active biological weapons program, of all things, tried to intimidate one of our I&R
analysts, a young man, Christian Westermann. The secretary had to bring the young
man in and tell him no one in the State Department would intimidate him and give
him access to his own office were it to happen again. So, yeah, it was a contest.
Now to go to those two specific individuals in your statement earlier, I think theres a
very clear-cut case that Wurmser was not only working for Rumsfeld and Feith and
the Pentagon, but he was also working for Israel. I think Feith was working for Israel
too. Cheney, on the other hand, I think was working for Cheney. And so you had this
confluence of motivations and confluence of unholy alliance, if you will, of strange
characters. You had Feith and Wurmser, who as far as I was concerned, were card-
carrying members of the Likud Party. And they had different motivations from people
like Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld. And they had different motivations than people like
Cheney and Libby and Addington and the vice presidents office. So you had this
alliance of these people who were all after one thing, the overthrow of Saddam
Hussein, but in many cases, for very different reasons.
Horton: Wow, so, please elaborate about what exactly you mean there. I guess
people sort of differentiate between whos an actual spy or whos an agent of
influence, and I guess the Israelis have a thing called a sayanim whos like, Eh, a
friend of Israel who does things for us sometimes, that kind of thing. Just how much
agents of Israel, these guys, do you think they were? Wurmser and Feith,
particularly.
Wilkerson: Ill put it this way. I think Douglas Feith thought that Israels interests and
the U.S. interests were 100% complementary 100% of the time. So if he was looking
out for Israels interests, it was not any, by any way, stretch of the imagination, being
unfaithful or traitorous with regard to the United States because our interests were
the same, all the time, every day, day in and day out. Thats of course nonsense, but
I think thats really the way he believed.
I didnt know Wurmser that well so I cant tell you how he believed, but I do know
that there were people in the Pentagon and elsewhere in the government, as there
are right now this minute, and as there will be tomorrow, who were working as much
for Israel as they are for the United States, and I know that with AIPAC and the
Jewish Lobby, as John Mearsheimer has called it, in general operating the way it
normally operates in this country, this special relationship that we have with Israel
overlooks a lot of this a lot of the time. I mean you can throw out Jonathan Pollard
and you can throw out an occasional attempt to do something about the more
egregious spying, especially when it brings clear damage to us, but by and large it
happens all the time. Look at what happened with Franklin and Rosen and AIPAC
and that business. Its pretty much been swept under the rug now. We share
classified data with the Israelis all the time, both through official conduits and
through unofficial ones too, and people get away with it all the time.
Horton: Well, no doubt about that. So, I wonder what you have to say about Richard
Perle? Is that a general enough question for you?
Wilkerson: Richard Perle was so much on our minds and he would love to hear me
say that in 2001 and 2002 that the secretary actually asked me to build a dossier on
him and to see what he was saying, because he was going all over the world, Europe
principally but elsewhere too, and he was talking, and he was being perceived, as an
official member of the government. Of course he was a semiofficial member, he was
on the Defense Policy Board, and he was pushing the war with Iraq, and we at the
State Department in particular didnt like what he was doing.
Horton: I tell you what, Im starting to hate these hard breaks, but thats it. Thank
you very much for your time on the show. I hope we can do this again soon, because
Ive got more questions.
Wilkerson: Okay.
Horton: And you apparently have a lot of answers.
Wilkerson: Thanks so much for having me.
Horton: All right, everybody, thats Larry Wilkerson. Hes at the New America
Foundation.
Scott Horton Interviews Philip Weiss
Antiwar.com
Philip Weiss, author of the blog MondoWeiss, discusses the role of the Israeli
government and the neoconservative movement in lying the American people into
war in Iraq, the woeful dishonesty of the American media on all issues related to the
occupations of the West Bank and Gaza strip, the pathetic belly crawling of a$%-
kissing little chicken-sh*t Gen. David Petraeus before the feet of his neocon masters
as he accidentally revealed to an anti-neocon activist with a careless email forward,
signs of progress in Americans view of Israel issues as well as those of the elites.
MP3 here. (29:30)
Philip Weiss is an investigative journalist who has written for The Nation, New York
Times Magazine, The American Conservative, Jewish World Review and other
publications. He is the author of American Taboo: A Murder in the Peace Corps and
writes the blog Mondoweiss.
More information about the THS
mailing list