A Dangerous Cabal

On Wednesday of this week Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who was Colin Powell's chief of staff at the State Department for four years and a military man with three decades of experience, delivered a speech about the Bush administration that has gotten SOME but not a lot of coverage in the press I've been reading. I found a raw transcript of same here and recommend it as a kind of Halloween adjunct (we KNOW what scares you!). Here are some sample excerpts:

"I kind of believe that I have an obligation to say some of these things, and I believe furthermore that the people's representatives over on the Hill in that other branch of government have truly abandoned their oversight responsibilities in this regard and have let things atrophy to the point that if we don't do something about it, it's going to get -- it's going to get even more dangerous than it already is."

"Decisions that send men and women to die, decisions that have the potential to send men and women to die, decisions that confront situations like natural disasters and cause needless death or cause people to suffer misery that they shouldn't have to suffer ... domestic and international decisions should not be made in a secret way. That's a very, very provocative statement, I think. All my life I've been taught to guard the nation's secrets. All my life I have followed the rules. I've gone through my special background investigations and all the other things that you need to do, and I understand that the nation's secrets need guarding, but fundamental decisions about foreign policy should not be made in secret."

"And I would say that we have courted disaster in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran. Generally with regard to domestic crises like Katrina, Rita -- and I could go on back -- we haven't done very well on anything like that in a long time. And if something comes along that is truly serious, truly serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city, or something like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence .... what the founders say .... about the necessity of the people to throw off tyranny or to throw off ineptitude or to throw off that which is not doing what the people want it to do."

"...the case that I saw for four-plus years was a case that I have never seen in my studies of aberrations, bastardizations, perturbations, changes to the national security decision-making process. What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made. And then when the bureaucracy was presented with the decision to carry them out, it was presented in a such a disjointed, incredible way that the bureaucracy often didn't know what it was doing as it moved to carry them out."

"So you've got this collegiality there between the secretary of Defense and the vice president, and you've got a president who is not versed in international relations and not too much interested in them either. And so it's not too difficult to make decisions in this what I call 'Oval Office cabal,' and decisions often that are the opposite of what you'd thought were made in the formal process."

"...this administration ... for four years .... made decisions in secret, and now I think it is paying the consequences of having made those decisions in secret. But far more telling to me is America is paying the consequences. You and I and every other citizen like us is paying the consequences, whether it is a response to Katrina that was less than adequate certainly, or whether it is the situation in Iraq, which still goes unexplained."

"...the detainee abuse issue is just such a concrete example of what I've just described to you, that 10 years from now or so when it's really, really put to the acid test, ironed out and people have looked at it from every angle, we are going to be ashamed of what we allowed to happen."

The hairs on MY nape are standing up ... especially at what Col. Wilkerson says about the policy of torture, what it's done and continues to do to the morale of the military.