Ex-Powell Aide Criticizes Detainee Effort
By ANNE GEARAN, AP Diplomatic Writer

Monday, November 28, 2005


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(11-28) 20:01 PST WASHINGTON, (AP) --


A top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell said Monday that
wrongheaded ideas for the handling of foreign detainees arose from
White House and Pentagon officials who argued that "the president of
the United States is all-powerful" and the Geneva Conventions
irrelevant.


In an Associated Press interview, former Powell chief of staff Lawrence
Wilkerson also said President Bush was "too aloof, too distant from the
details" of postwar planning. Underlings exploited Bush's detachment
and made poor decisions, Wilkerson said.


Wilkerson blamed Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld and like-minded aides. He said 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 *******."


On the question of detainees picked up in Afghanistan and other fronts
in 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 support
for the Iraq war.


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 Condoleezza Rice, who was then
national security adviser, 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 said Bush tried to work out a compromise in 2001 and 2002
that recognized that the war on terrorism was different from past wars
and required greater flexibility in handling prisoners who don't belong
to an enemy state or follow the rules themselves.


Bush's stated policy, which was heatedly criticized by civil liberties
and legal groups at the time, was defensible, Wilkerson said. But it
was undermined almost immediately in practice, he said.


In the field, the United States followed the policies of hard-liners
who wanted essentially unchecked ability to detain and harshly
interrogate prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere, Wilkerson said.


Wilkerson, who left government with Powell in January, said he is now
somewhat estranged from his former boss. He worked for Powell for 16
years. Wilkerson became a surprise critic of the Iraq war-planning
effort and other administration decisions this fall, and he has said
his Powell did not put him up to it.


On Iraq, 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 behind the push
toward war was sound.


He said Powell now generally believes it was a good idea to remove
Saddam from power but may not agree with either the timing or execution
of the war.


"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.


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,
but they have not been found.


Wilkerson said the CIA and other agencies allowed mishandled and bogus
information to underpin that speech and the 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-Qaida 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 has dissected how spy
agencies handled an Iraqi refugee who was a German intelligence source.
Code-named Curveball, this man, a leading source on Iraq's purported
mobile biological weapons labs, was found to be a fabricator and
alcoholic.


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