[D66] Ex-Bush Official Col. Lawrence Wilkerson: "I am Willing to Testify" If Dick Cheney is Put on Trial

[Henk Elegeert]

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  August 30, 2011 <http://www.democracynow.org/shows/2011/8/30>
 Ex-Bush Official Col. Lawrence Wilkerson: "I am Willing to Testify" If Dick
Cheney is Put on Trial

As former Vice President Dick Cheney publishes his long-awaited memoir, we
speak to Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of
State Colin Powell. "This is a book written out of fear, fear that one day
someone will 'Pinochet' Dick Cheney," says Wilkerson, alluding to the former
Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who was arrested for war crimes.
Wilkerson also calls for George W. Bush and Cheney to be held accountable
for their crimes in office. "I’d be willing to testify, and I’d be willing
to take any punishment I’m due," Wilkerson said. We also speak to Salon.com
political and legal blogger Glenn Greenwald about his recent article on
Cheney, "The Fruits of Elite Immunity." "Dick Cheney goes around the country
profiting off of this sleazy, sensationalistic, self-serving book, basically
profiting from his crimes, and at the same time normalizing the idea that
these kind of policies…are perfectly legitimate choices to make. And I think
that’s the really damaging legacy from all of this," says Greenwald.
[includes rush transcript]
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Guests:
*Lawrence Wilkerson<http://www.democracynow.org/appearances/lawrence_wilkerson>
*, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2002 to
2005.
 *Glenn Greenwald <http://www.democracynow.org/appearances/glenn_greenwald>*,
constitutional law attorney and political and legal blogger for Salon.com.
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   - Democracy Now!’s news archive of our reports on the Iraq
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*AMY GOODMAN:* Today marks the official launch of one of most anticipated
memoirs of any top Bush administration official. I’m talking about former
Vice President Dick Cheney’s 576-page memoir, *In My Time: A Personal and
Political Memoir*. Cheney has begun a publicity blitz to promote his new
book, with a string of TV appearances scheduled on Fox News Channel, as well
as C-SPAN and the major networks. He appeared on *The Today Show* this
morning. This is an excerpt of his pre-taped interview with Jamie Gangel
that aired last night on NBC News*Dateline*.

*JAMIE GANGEL:* In your view, we should still be using enhanced
interrogation?

*DICK CHENEY:* Yes.

*JAMIE GANGEL:* Should we still be waterboarding terror suspects?

*DICK CHENEY:* I would strongly support using it again if we had a
high-value detainee and that was the only way we can get him to talk.

*JAMIE GANGEL:* People call it torture. You think it should still be a tool?

*DICK CHENEY:* Yes.

*JAMIE GANGEL:* Secret prisons?

*DICK CHENEY:* Yes.

*JAMIE GANGEL:* Wiretapping?

*DICK CHENEY:* Well, with the right approval.

*JAMIE GANGEL:* You say it is one of the things you are proudest of, and you
would do it again in a heartbeat.

*DICK CHENEY:* It was controversial at the time. It was the right thing to
do.

*JAMIE GANGEL:* No apologies?

*DICK CHENEY:* No apologies.

*AMY GOODMAN:* That was Dick Cheney speaking to Jamie Gangel on NBC*Dateline
*. Cheney says his memoir is loaded with revelations. He told Gangel, quote,
"There are going to be heads exploding all over Washington."

In addition to unequivocally defending what he calls "tough interrogations"
on captured terrorism suspects, Cheney writes he argued against softening
the president’s speeches on Iraq. He says he sees no need for the
administration to apologize for erroneously claiming Iraq hunted for uranium
in Niger. Cheney also reveals he tried to have former Secretary of State
Colin Powell removed from the cabinet for expressing doubts about the Iraq
war. And Cheney notes he unsuccessfully urged President George W. Bush to
bomb Syria in June 2007.

One of those to come under the most scrutiny in the book is Bush’s former
Secretary of State, Colin Powell. This is an excerpt of Cheney’s interview
with Jamie Gangel, again from *Dateline*.

*JAMIE GANGEL:* The portrait you paint of Colin Powell makes it sound as if
he was disloyal and undermining the administration.

*DICK CHENEY:* Well, those are your words. I don’t think I say it as harshly
as you have presented it. I did feel that the State Department did not serve
the president well. I would hear discussions, for example, that General
Powell had objected to or opposed our operations in Iraq. But that never
happened sitting around the table in the National Security Council. It was
the kind of thing that seemed to be said outside to others.

*AMY GOODMAN:* To discuss former Vice President Dick Cheney’s version of
history as outlined in his book *In My Time*, we’re joined from Washington,
D.C., by Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, served as chief of staff to Secretary
of State Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005.

Welcome to *Democracy Now!*, Lieutenant Wilkerson. Can you respond to what
Cheney just said on NBC, Colonel Wilkerson?

*COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON:* Amy, listening to your recitation—yeah, listening
to your recitation of events at the head of the show and then your in-depth
interview with the gentleman from Vermont, particularly the deaths in
Afghanistan of American and allied troops and the devastation of Hurricane
Irene, I think I could characterize Cheney’s book as singularly
insignificant. That said, I think his use of phrases like those that were
quoted — "exploding heads all over Washington" — as my former boss and
former Secretary of State Colin Powell said on *Face the Nation* on Sunday,
is more of a grocery store tabloid, and certainly not the kind of language
that a former vice president of the United States of America should be
using. Again, like Brent Scowcroft, I think in 2003 or 2004 in an interview
with *The New Yorker* magazine, I simply don’t recognize Dick Cheney
anymore.

*AMY GOODMAN:* Talk about what he had to say about your boss, about General
Colin Powell and his views on the Iraq war.

*COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON:* The most inciteful thing—with a C, not an S—that
the Vice President apparently has put in his book, due to excerpts I’ve seen
and so forth—I have not read the book, I have to say that; I do not have a
copy of it, not sure I’m going to buy a copy of it—was that he had something
to do with Colin Powell leaving in January 2005. That’s utter nonsense.
Colin Powell had told the president of the United States, the
president-elect of the United States, that he’d be a one-term secretary. He
had told all of us that, "us" being his inner team and also the team that he
used most confidentially and most often within the State Department. In
fact, when he asked me to be his secretary—to be his chief of staff in
August of 2002, he was very kind to me. He said, "Look, you can stay on
beyond the turn of the year and so forth when I leave, because you’ll be
working for Ambassador Haass, which I know you enjoy, in policy planning,
and you could stay on for eight years, if the president is reelected, or as
long as you wish. But if you come to work for me as my chief of staff, you
will have to leave. You will have to leave very soon, and no later than
December-January, '04-'05." So this contention by Cheney is utterly
preposterous.

*AMY GOODMAN:* In his memoir, Cheney accuses Colin Powell of trying to
undermine President Bush during the run-up to the Iraq war and tacitly
allowing his deputy to leak the name of a covert CIA agent. Speaking on
CBS’s *Face the Nation* on Sunday, Powell defended his approach to the Iraq
war.

*COLIN POWELL:* Mr. Cheney may forget that I’m the one who said to President
Bush, if you break it, you own it. And you have got to understand that if we
have to go to war in Iraq, we have to be prepared for the whole war, not
just the first phase. And Mr. Cheney and many of his colleagues did not
prepare for what happened after the fall of Baghdad.

*AMY GOODMAN:* And let me turn to, again, Vice President Cheney’s interview
onNBC News *Dateline* with Jamie Gangel last night. In this clip, Gangel
talks to Cheney about discovering there were no WMDs in Iraq.

*JAMIE GANGEL:* In his book, President Bush wrote he had, quote, "sickening
feeling." But you don’t seem to express the same reaction or regrets.

*DICK CHENEY:* Well, I didn’t have a sickening feeling. I think we did the
right thing.

*AMY GOODMAN:* Your response, Colonel Wilkerson?

*COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON:* I, unfortunately—and I’ve admitted to this a
number of times, publicly and privately—was the person who put together
Colin Powell’s presentation at the United Nations Security Council on 5
February, 2003. It was probably the biggest mistake of my life. I regret it
to this day. I regret not having resigned over it. So I fully support his
contention that he was hardly undermining the positions of the president of
the United States, particularly with regard to Iraq. He put his reputation
on the line. And he has said publicly that he will be always remembered as
the man who gave that presentation at the U.N. in 2003. So, again, the Vice
President’s contentions are preposterous.

Furthermore, the Vice President seems to find fault with Condi, Condi Rice,
the secretary after Powell, with Powell, with Armitage, with the President
himself. The only person Cheney does not seem to find fault with is Cheney.
I think we have a word for that kind of person. I won’t use it here on
television. But I think Mr. Cheney’s view is totally, utterly, completely
Mr. Cheney’s view. I doubt there are very many people in America, other than
the cheerleading squad for people like Cheney, who love torture and the
like, who will even read his book. Or if they do read it, they’ll read it in
order to increase their revulsion of him, rather than their respect for him.
And that’s a pity, because he is a former vice president.

*AMY GOODMAN:* Let me ask you, Colonel Wilkerson, talking about your having
written that speech for Colin Powell, how you put it together. And at that
time, because there was so much skepticism, did you have doubts about what
you were writing?

*COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON:* Absolutely, Amy. My whole team had doubts. In
fact, we asked the question early on, why wasn’t this our ambassador at the
United Nations, John Negroponte, as Adlai Stevenson had done for Kennedy
during a far more serious crisis in October 1962, the so-called Cuban
Missile Crisis? And we all laughed and answered our own question
immediately. It was because no one in the Bush administration had high poll
ratings, amongst the American people or the international community. Colin
Powell’s ratings were up there with Mother Teresa at the time, in the low
seventies, sometimes even going up into the high seventies, low eighties. So
this is the reason they put him in New York.

And I didn’t write the speech. That belongs to his speechwriters. I actually
orchestrated the entire team—the White House team, the CIA team and so
forth—out at Langley at CIA headquarters. And the way we did that was under
the leadership and under the respect for and really the umbrella of George
Tenet, the director of Central Intelligence/head of the CIA. And George was
constantly asked by me, by Colin Powell, by Rich Armitage, by Condoleezza
Rice and others—she was national security adviser at the time—in front of
everyone on that team, "You stand by this, George? You corroborate to the
Secretary of State that you have multiple sources independently determining
each one of these facts that we’re giving?" And we threw lots of the facts
out. We threw literally a third of the presentation out. The unfortunate
thing is that we left in what George was most convincing on, and that was
the mobile biological laboratories, the existing stocks of chemical weapons,
and worst of all, an active nuclear program. And as I said, I will regret
that to my grave.

*AMY GOODMAN:* How did the intelligence get so contaminated, manipulated?
How was it so wrong?

*COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON:* In my view, you have to look at each one of the
so-called pillars of the presentation, the three that I just named being the
most prominent. "Curveball," we didn’t even know that term when George Tenet
was presenting us the information about the mobile biological labs.
Curveball, as we all know now, was an agent being run by the BND, the CIA’s
equivalent in Germany. And the Germans, as well as the CIA station chief in
Germany—or in Europe, actually, Tyler Drumheller, had expressed their dismay
with and lack of reliability of Curveball. And yet, we went ahead and used
that information. George Tenet or John McLaughlin, his deputy, never said a
word about Curveball to us. They simply gave us four independently
corroborable sources for the existence of the labs. They even gave us
drawings, and so forth, of those labs, that had supposedly come from an
Iraqi engineer who was injured in an accident that occurred in one of the
labs that actually kill people, testifying to the lethality of the
ingredients being used in the labs. So, we had all of this *prima facie*,
circumstantial, if you will, evidence that George Tenet and his team
presented to us, indeed representing the entire 16—at that time, 16-entity
U.S. intelligence community.

The same on the chemical stocks, the same on the active nuclear program,
aluminum tubes of which was a big aspect of. Colin Powell doubted them so
much that John McLaughlin actually brought one of them in and rolled it
around on the DCI’s conference table and explained to the Secretary of State
how the metal in that tube was so expensive that it was impossible to
believe that Saddam Hussein would be spending that much money on tubes that
were simply for rocket shielding, which was the other explanation of what
the tubes were for. So, theDCI and the deputy DCI spent a lot of time and
effort trying to convince the Secretary of State not to throw things out of
the presentation. Unfortunately, we left enough in that made us really sort
of the laughing stock of the world afterward.

*AMY GOODMAN:* You said in 2009—I think this is what you’re getting to
now—in the *Washington Note*, an online political journal, you talked about
how finding a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qaeda became the main purpose
for the abusive interrogation program that the Bush administration
authorized in 2002.

*COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON:* In summer of 2002, my FBI colleagues, my
CIAcolleagues,
who will speak the truth to me, have told me that. I’ve also gleaned it from
other methods that I can’t talk about here on the television. Someday they
will come to light, and historians will record them. But let me explain to
you how Colin Powell dealt with that in his presentation, to return to that
infamous moment again. We were throwing out—he had pulled me aside in the
National Intelligence Council spaces in the CIA, put me in a room, he and I
alone, and he told me he was going to throw all the presentation material
about the connection between Baghdad and al-Qaeda out, completely out. I
welcomed that, because I thought it was all bogus.

Within about an hour, George Tenet, having scented that something was wrong
with the Secretary vis-à-vis this part of his presentation, suddenly
unleashes on all in his conference room that they have just gotten the
results of an interrogation of a high-level al-Qaeda operative, and those
results not only confirm substantial contacts between an al-Qaeda and
Baghdad, the Mukhabarat and Baghdad, the secret police, if you will, but
also the fact that they were training, they were actually training al-Qaeda
operatives in the use of chemical and biological weapons. Well, this was
devastating. Here’s the DCI telling us that a high-level al-Qaeda operative
had confirmed all of this. So Powell put at least part of that back into his
presentation.

We later learned that that was through interrogation methods that used
waterboarding, that no U.S. personnel were present at the time—it was done
in Cairo, Egypt, and it was done by the Egyptians—and that later, within a
week or two period, the high-level al-Qaeda operative recanted everything he
had said. We further learned that the Defense Intelligence Agency had issued
immediately a warning on that, saying that they didn’t trust the reliability
of it due to the interrogation methods. We were never shown that DIA dissent,
and we were never told about the circumstances under which the high-level
al-Qaeda operative was interrogated. Tenet simply used it as a bombshell to
convince the secretary not to throw that part, which was a very effective
part, if you will recall, out of his presentation.

*AMY GOODMAN:* Colonel Wilkerson, we also have Glenn Greenwald on the line
with us from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He is a constitutional law attorney,
political and legal blogger for
Salon.com<http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/index.html>.
His recent article<http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/08/25/cheney/index.html>
on
Cheney’s book is called "The Fruits of Elite Immunity." Glenn, explain.

*GLENN GREENWALD:* One of the most significant aspects of the rollout of
Dick Cheney’s book is that he’s basically being treated as though he’s just
an elder statesman who has some controversial, partisan political views. And
yet, the evidence is overwhelming, including most of what Colonel Wilkerson
just said and has been saying for quite some time, and lots of other people,
as well, including, for example, General Antonio Taguba, that Dick Cheney is
not just a political figure with controversial views, but is an actual
criminal, that he was centrally involved in a whole variety not just of war
crimes in Iraq, but of domestic crimes, as well, including the authorization
of warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens in violation of FISA,
which says that you go to jail for five years for each offense, as well as
the authorization and implementation of a worldwide torture regime that,
according to General Barry McCaffrey, resulted in the murder—his word—of
dozens of detainees, far beyond just the three or four cases of
waterboarding that media figures typically ask Cheney about.

And yet, what we have is a government, a successor administration, the Obama
administration, that announced that there will be no criminal
investigations, no, let alone, prosecutions of any Bush officials for any of
these multiple crimes. And that has taken these actions outside of the
criminal realm and turned them into just garden-variety political disputes.
And it’s normalized the behavior. And as a result, Dick Cheney goes around
the country profiting off of this, you know, sleazy, sensationalistic,
self-serving book, basically profiting from his crimes, and at the same time
normalizing the idea that these kind of policies, though maybe in the view
of some wrongheaded, are perfectly legitimate political choices to make. And
I think that’s the really damaging legacy from all of this.

*AMY GOODMAN:* Colonel Wilkerson, do you think the Bush administration
officials should be held accountable in the way that Glenn Greenwald is
talking about?

*COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON:* I certainly do. And I’d be willing to testify,
and I’d be willing to take any punishment I’m due. And I have to say, I
agree with almost everything he just said. And I think that explains the
aggressiveness, to a large extent, of the Cheney attack and of the words
like "exploding heads all over Washington." This is a book written out of
fear, fear that one day someone will "Pinochet" Dick Cheney.

*AMY GOODMAN:* Well, I thank you very much for being with us, both, Colonel
Lawrence Wilkerson served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin
Powell from 2002 to 2005, and Glenn Greenwald, speaking to us on that
crackly phone line from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, constitutional law attorney
and political and legal blogger for
Salon.com<http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/index.html>.
We’ll link to your
article<http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/08/25/cheney/index.html>
 there.

This is *Democracy Now!* When we come back, there’s another Bush
administration official on a book tour. He’s Donald Rumsfeld. And he got
quite a surprise as he was traveling through Washington State. The widow of
a soldier who committed suicide questioned Donald Rumsfeld. He had heard
taken out. Stay with us.
------------------------------

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Zie link en video ...

Tijd dus om Dick Cheney aan te klagen !!

Henk Elegeert
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