Interview with Ex-Powell Aide Wilkerson: "A Leaderless, Directionless Superpower"

Lawrence Wilkerson, 60, was for 16 years one of former Secretary of State Colin Powell's closest aides and was Powell's chief of staff from 2002 to 2005. The retired US Army colonel served in the Vietnam War and later was the head of the Marine War College in Quantico, Virginia. He retired with Colin Powell in January 2005.

From Der Spiegel:

SPIEGEL: Colonel Wilkerson, hardly an insider of the Bush Administration has ever criticized it as sharply as you are now. Why?

Wilkerson: The straw that broke the camel's back, what made me finally decide to go public, was the issue of departure from the Geneva Conventions. It was the departure from international law and treaty with regard to what I perceive to be a policy that permeated the leadership from the Vice President through the Defense Department and out to the military forces in the field. In my view, it was not only damaging to the armed forces -- and I was a member of the Army for 31 years -- but also damaging ultimately to America's image and credibility in the world and damaging to our capability to win this conflict against Osama Bin Laden and Abu Musab al Zarqawi and others like them. You can't win what essentially is a war of ideas by departing from your own ideas.

SPIEGEL: How has it come to this?

Wilkerson: What I saw from my perspective at the State Department was essentially involvement in what I prefer to refer to as the statutory process. The President gets advice from every side and ultimately goes away and makes his decision. What I saw was the President making a decision that appeared to be a compromise. He said it was indeed a new enemy and perhaps Geneva did not pertain. But at the same time he said very clearly in the same memorandum, which I saw, that all detainees should be treated in accordance with American values and the spirit of Geneva.

SPIEGEL: So what went wrong?

Wilkerson: In execution of that decision the other side won, the side who thought that terrorists are the new beast, and they had to be dealt with differently. That happened because this is the most powerful vice president in the history of the United States, and he wanted it to happen. It was a secretive little known cabal, led by Cheney and Defense Secretary (Donald) Rumsfeld who short-cut the statutory process. In the case of Geneva they thought there were no holds barred, that the demand for intelligence was so great that there was enormous flexibility in how you interrogated prisoners. And I saw that go all the way down to the lowest level of the armed forces. And when you put those two pressures together, the demand for intelligence and the implicit fact that this isn't the old ball game, then you have opened Pandora's Box. You contaminate the armed forces and you can expect to have things like Abu Ghraib and deaths.

The full interview can be found here:
Interview with Ex-Powell Aide Wilkerson