12/11/14 – Lawrence Wilkerson – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm live noon to two here on the Liberty Radio Network on the weekdays.
You can find my full interview archive at ScottHorton.org.
More than 3,500 interviews now, going back to 2003.
And next up is retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson.
He's a professor teaching national security now at William and Mary.
And he was formerly the aide, right-hand man, to Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Welcome back to the show.
How's it going, Larry?
Going well.
I hope so with you, too.
Yeah, yeah.
Doing great.
It's been a long time since we've spoken.
I'm happy to have you back on the show.
And I guess this is usually the subject that we talk about, though not always.
Of course, the torture report.
But first of all, I'll ask you, if you could, to please introduce yourself to the audience a little bit better than I did, and especially along the lines of what your relationship was to Secretary of State Powell, who, of course, before that, was out of government.
But before that, was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the national security advisor to Ronald Reagan and all these other things.
Yeah.
Well, I joined him in 1989 after I left the U.S. Naval War College, where I'd been teaching somewhat reluctantly because I enjoyed it there.
And I told him that.
And he said later that was the reason he hired me, because I wasn't a Cassius with a lean and hungry look.
I worked for him from 1989 all the way through the end of his chairmanship, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, of course, in 1993.
And then I moved to the Marine Corps War College to finish my 31 years in the military and then joined him in a private capacity from 1998, roughly, to 2000, and then went with him to the State Department to first work on his policy planning staff under Ambassador Richard Haass and then later, for almost three years, to be his chief of staff.
And then I think it's fair to say, right, you helped him lie us all into war back in 2003.
And I know you've said you're sorry for it before.
So you want to tell us that story very briefly here?
Well, I think that's true.
It's too succinct, if I may say so, not to excuse myself, but it was a very complex situation where at the almost last minute, the National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, called and said that Powell would be giving a presentation at the United Nations before the Security Council, but would sort of sum up the U.S. position with regard to its intelligence on Iraq's, as we called it, and everyone seems to forget this, the title of the presentation was, A Failure to Disarm.
So this was a contention that Saddam Hussein had not abided by the UN Security Council resolutions that asked him, directed him, to disarm.
And we were going to show the evidence that we had that proved that.
And my first reaction to this demand of me to put this presentation together was, hey, boss, not enough time.
And he acknowledged that and called Condi, and Condi promised to see if she could get it extended, and then later said no, she couldn't, because the public announcement had already been made, and therefore the President was not going to change the date.
Well, my first reaction was not one of, I can't do this, because of moral reasons or because I didn't believe in the situation.
It was, I can't do this, period.
I can't possibly get this man ready for this kind of presentation at the United Nations on this complex situation in five days and five nights.
So I kind of wrote out my resignation, called my wife and said, hey, you're going to see me coming home, because he's just once again given me one of these tasks that he'll give to no one else that I simply can't carry out, and I'm not going to sit around and take it.
As I consulted with my wife and as I consulted with members of the team that he had garnered for me from the National Security Council staff, otherwise in the White House and elsewhere in the bureaucracy, I began to see that maybe it wasn't quite as technically impossible as I had first thought it was, because we did have quite a bit of data.
And so I reluctantly agreed to go ahead and do it, and you know what the result was.
We tortured ourselves for five days and nights at the CIA in George Tenet's conference room, and then we tortured ourselves a little bit more in New York at the U.N. mission in New York, where we did our final dress rehearsal.
And then we ultimately tortured ourselves before the U.N. Security Council on 5 February, where we delivered about an hour-20 presentation, in which there were many facts that were valid, but there were several that were invalid, and they were the most salient facts.
The mobile biological weapons labs, which he of course did not have.
The existing stockpiles of chemical weapons, which of course he did not have.
The connections with Al-Qaeda, which of course he did not have.
And the enormous program, active program, to create a nuclear weapon, which of course he did not have.
Those were all false components of that presentation, false components of the U.S. intelligence community, and for that matter, other intelligence communities too, who had been consulting with the U.S.
Israel, France, Britain, for example, Germany.
And that's the end of it.
We essentially presented a case for war that was, in its essentials, invalid.
All right, and now, so does that have much to do with why you're so outspoken about, for example, the torture regime now, or that's its own separate thing, or this is really kind of an attempt to make up for such a horrible mistake?
Although, well, and let me push back a little on the mistake.
I mean, there's so much that's been told of this story before all the pushback.
As you said, going through torture, dealing with the neocons, dealing with the CIA about what is to be included in the presentation and what is not.
I mean, you had to know that Scooter Libby, on behalf of Dick Cheney, was pushing to lie us into war.
I mean, if you guys were trying to cross out as much of the completely ridiculous, blatant lies as possible and leave only the very best ones in there, you still had to recognize that that was the process that you were working on here, was how to convince the American people to support this thing that is unsupported by the facts, right?
Yeah, that's not completely true.
In retrospect, I might find myself agreeing with you more or less, but at the time, it certainly was not the consensus view.
The consensus view of 16 different entities in the $80 billion U.S. intelligence community was that Sodom and Stone had weapons of mass destruction.
It was reflected in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, which incidentally is what we finally turned to.
Your argument about Scooter Libby's script, we threw that out within eight hours of my being at Langley.
I turned to Tennant and I said, this is impossible, we cannot use this, it's unsourced, throw it out.
And he agreed and threw it out and brought the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate forward, and from that point on, we proceeded on that consensus document of the entire U.S. intelligence community.
The only dissenting voice in that document was my own, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research.
Our department, under Carl Ford, the Assistant Secretary for Intelligence and Research, had in fact said, in a dissenting voice that was footnoted in the NIE, that Iraq did not have, by their estimate, an active nuclear weapons program.
So that was the only dissent in that document from, as I said, the $80 billion U.S. intelligence community, which includes the DIA, the NSA, all of the services intelligence assets, the CIA.
It was entirely an intelligence document.
It was presented by the DCI, the Director of Central Intelligence, George Tennant, representing all those entities to the Secretary and to me as the considered opinion of the professionals in the U.S. intelligence community.
Right.
Now, of course, in hindsight, you know that there were 150 million Americans who knew that it was a bunch of crap and who were all protesting in the streets and who could read Scott Ritter or any number of others, Ray McGovern, all these outside experts, the veteran intelligence professionals for sanity.
If you could get 150 million Americans, apathetic as they are, not interested in anything.
Yeah, no, I mean, seriously, the support for that war was about 50-50.
And the people who lean left or libertarian, they just didn't believe it because it was unbelievable.
Oh, well, the President has secret information we can't tell you.
Yeah, that's because it's a bunch of crap.
We can every every cab driver and bartender in Austin, Texas, knew that I could testify to that.
I debunked Colin Powell's speech live in real time as I was painting a house with a friend listening to the presentation on NPR and saying, no, that was debunked in The Washington Post.
That was debunked here, there and the other place live in real time.
And I was nobody, nobody.
I was a laid off cab driver at the time.
Well, I still knew better.
But hang on.
Hang on one second.
I'm sorry.
We got to take this break.
We've been talking so damn much.
I want to ask you about torture.
But hang on right there.
But it's Larry Wilkerson.
We'll be right back.
Hey, y'all.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
My guest is Larry Wilkerson.
And the hard breaks are almost as rude as I am.
So I will now let you go ahead and finish up and get the last word about the U.N. presentation, getting us into war and your role in all of that and whatever, because I didn't mean to just end that up with a bunch of accusations.
So go ahead.
No, I take what you say in stride.
A lot of it's true.
I will say that the New York Times op-ed page and the Washington Post op-ed page under Fred Hite were egging us on.
They weren't telling us we were wrong.
Oh, yeah.
No, that's definitely true.
I was, you know, what I was thinking of, and I'll never forget this, it was the top headline on antiwar.com was the aluminum tubes are for rockets, says all these experts.
And it even said back then, I don't know if the Post still does this, but back then the Washington Post website pages would tell you which page of the newspaper it ran on.
And so there it was, page A38 or something, is everyone who knows anything about centrifuges that works for the U.S. government, except this one liar named Joe at the CIA, all agree that these couldn't possibly be for centrifuges.
It's just not true.
And that was in September of 2002, which means every time anybody claimed that there was something to be feared from them damned aluminum tubes after that, to me, was just the most laughable and insulting and ridiculous thing.
I couldn't believe it.
That don't they know that the Washington freaking Post already explained that's just not true.
And they used it a thousand more times.
Well, the unfortunate thing that I learned later was that when the intelligence community came together to vote on the issue of the aluminum tubes as to what they represented, the member of the Department of Energy who was most adamantly opposed to Joe T's recommendations, to his appraisal, to his assessment, was absent.
And therefore the intelligence community achieved a consensus it probably shouldn't have achieved.
And I also learned that George Tenet had taken advantage of, through John McLaughlin, his deputy and scheduling, the absence of this guy from the Department of Energy.
So this is why I lied over into the torture issue and say I have no problem at all believing the congressional report, the Sissy report, that says the CIA lied to the Congress because they lied blatantly to me and to Secretary Powell.
And now you mentioned on TV, I think two days ago, about Sheikh Al-Libi and how they brought the CIA, not the neocons and the Pentagon, the CIA brought to you information, to you meaning Colin Powell, information from Ibn Sheikh Al-Libi who was tortured, I believe, by the Egyptians into pointing his finger at Saddam Hussein for training al-Qaeda how to make chemical weapons and how to hijack airliners.
And they brought you all that information.
Now I forget, was that included in the presentation?
Well, yeah, and the circumstances of that were quite stunning.
Powell had grabbed me, physically grabbed me, in the corridor outside the Tenet's conference room on the top floor of the CIA and pushed me into a room that we both knew was vacant and we both hoped was not bugged.
And he sat me down, and he had never in our entire relationship treated me this way before.
And so I knew something was up.
And he just unloaded on me, one-on-one, he unloaded on me saying, take this crap out, it stinks, I am not going to say this before the UN, this is junk, this is total junk.
And he was referring to the some 20 pages or so on Saddam's contacts with al-Qaeda and terrorists in general.
He was absolutely furious about it.
And I said, calm down, boss, I am of the same mind you are.
It stinks.
And I will take it out.
I will extract it.
He said, good.
And he got up and walked out of the room.
I got up and adjusted my coat, which was a little disheveled, and walked out behind him.
Within an hour, within an hour, George Tenet made an appearance in the conference room during our beginning of the rehearsal that night, and laid a bombshell on the table.
And he didn't name anybody.
He didn't render a single name.
He said, quote, a high-level al-Qaeda operative, unquote.
That's all he said.
Then he went on to say a high-level al-Qaeda operative had been interrogated, intimating it was recently, only later did I learn it was weeks before, months before.
And that under interrogation, he had revealed significant contacts between Baghdad's Muqamirat, the secret police, and al-Qaeda operatives.
And that had included training them in the use of biological chemical weapons and other things.
He went on in some detail to describe these contacts.
When he finished, there was a silence in the room for a few minutes, and then Powell turned to me and he said, put it back in.
And I knew what he meant.
I knew exactly what he meant.
He put the stuff that we'd just both decided was garbage and should be extracted back into his presentation.
And from that moment on, I did everything I could to possibly call what was in there on that subject.
It got so bad that at the Waldorf Astoria, at 2 a.m. in the morning, in the suite just below the Secretary of State's suite there, which is maintained there all the time, I had a room and I was doing some final adjustments to the script for his presentation that morning at 9 a.m.
And I was taking out, at that point even, at that late moment, I was taking out some of this garbage.
And Phil Mudd, who's now on TV every day exclaiming the sobriety and sanity and the quality of the CIA's torture program, he was standing behind me, protesting vigorously, and trying to get me to stick the things back in.
So vigorously, I finally turned around and said, Phil, I'm going to kick you out of this room if you don't go out voluntarily.
Get out of here.
And he then went to the other hotel where George Tenet was staying and woke him up and told him that I was making major changes to the script.
How did I know that?
Because the next morning, about 8 o'clock on the floor of the U.N. Security Council when we were setting up for the presentation, Tenet came up to me and said, I understand you were making changes to the presentation last night, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But I told him essentially what I was doing.
And to George's credit, he said, I'm not worried.
I'm sorry you woke me up.
And went back and sat down in his place.
But that's how Phil was trying to the very last moment, this guy who is now extolling the virtues of the CIA and asserting that it would never lie and all this kind of crap, he's the guy who's sitting in that hotel room early that morning trying to get me to put this garbage back into his presentation, this garbage which is essentially lies.
Well now, when George Tenet tells you, hey, I have information from a high-level CIA operative and we interrogated him and he admitted that he's best friends with Saddam Hussein, you didn't suspect that that was a lie or that maybe it had been beaten out of some poor guy or what?
You thought, well, jeez, if you say so, George Tenet, after all that already?
Hey, this is the Director of Central Intelligence of the United States of America speaking to the Secretary of State of the United States of America with the National Security Advisor sitting there, with the Deputy Secretary of State sitting there, with all manner of other lesser people sitting there in the bowels of the CIA.
I'm the Chief of Staff of the State Department and I'm going to stand up and tell the DCI that he's wrong?
Right, I understand.
Now, listen, let me keep you one more segment, please, can you?
Yeah.
Okay, great.
Hang tight right there.
Everybody, it's Lawrence Wilkerson, Colonel, retired, former right-hand man to Colin Powell.
We'll be right back.
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All right, y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Lawrence Wilkerson.
He was Colonel in the US Air Force, was right-hand man to Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, and back when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, too.
I teach his national security at William and Mary.
This is why I had you on, Larry, in the first place, is because I wanted to ask you to please tell me everything that you can about Dick Cheney's role in orchestrating the torture program.
He was on TV last night saying, I supported it.
You're damn right.
I supported it, supported it, supported it.
Oh, coming up with it?
Well, you know, that was the lawyers in them, but I think it was a good idea, which is apparently the only question about his participation.
Because after all, he's just the Vice President, and the Vice President, that office is worth a bucket of warm spit.
As everybody knows, he has no real authority.
So what does he have to do with anything other than agreeing that it was certainly the wise decision to make to keep the American people safe?
Not with Dick Cheney.
That office became an alter ego and even a superior ego for the presidency of the United States from 2001 to 2005 under Dick Cheney.
For national security and foreign policy, and for some domestic policy, which is revealed in Bart Gellman's book, Angler, Cheney was the decision maker.
There's no question about it, he was the decision maker.
And with regard to your specific question, Cheney was both the instigator of the legal review through his clever lawyer, whose opinions were so weird that when he was Cheney's assistant in the Pentagon, we called him Weird David.
Of course, I'm referring to David Addington.
And he was also the orchestrator of the actual procedural review and the procedural acceptance by the CIA and ultimately, through Donald Rumsfeld, the military.
So what do I mean by that?
Well, Cheney orchestrated the legal review that would produce ultimately the Bybee memo and other documents that, in the most strained legal fashion I've ever been associated with, said torture was not torture.
That's essentially what they did.
They said torture was not torture.
The famous paragraph, of course, is where Hughes compares torture in its essence as being organ failure or death.
Obviously John Hughes never experienced waterboarding or any of the other hypothermic chambers, isolation, no sleep, and so forth and so on, all of which, as Alberto Moro, JAG for the Navy, pointed out, in combination and over time constitute torture.
So that was the one side that Cheney orchestrated and had a heavy hand in, through Addington, was the kind of tortured, if I may, legal review.
And then on the other side, he set up the procedural aspects of the CIA, gave them permission to do what they did, and through Rumsfeld, actually involved the armed forces in it.
And then came the usual bureaucratic competition between the agency, the CIA, and the Defense Department, where Rumsfeld was trying to outdo the agency, and the agency was out trying to outdo the Defense Department.
And it came together at Guantanamo, of course, and at other places.
But it was an unhealthy competition in that regard, because Rumsfeld didn't trust the intelligence the agency was gaining through its program, and the agency, of course, didn't give a damn for Rumsfeld's intelligence.
So Rumsfeld set up his own separate effort that involved the armed forces in torture, which was the occasion for me to get involved in it, and it becomes outspoken, because I thought that was probably one of the most contaminative and insidious things anybody had ever done, authorizing the armed forces to torture people.
And when did you first become aware of that?
I became aware of it in the wake, or in the days before the actual presentation on television of some of the images from Abu Ghraib, the prison in Iraq.
Powell walked into my office...
So that's the spring of 2004, right?
Yeah.
He walked into my office, and he said, as I recall, it was April or May, and he said, there's going to be some photographs come out, and they're going to be terrible, and they're coming from a place called Abu Ghraib in Iraq, and they show our soldiers, essentially, treating prisoners really badly.
I want you to get to the bottom of it, he said.
I've got Will Taft, William Howard Taft IV, was Powell's legal counsel, his lawyer.
I've got him working the legal side of the house.
I want you to look at the TikTok.
I want you to figure out the chronology, how did we get here?
I want you to figure out who did it, and so forth and so on.
And over the next six or seven months, I built up a hell of a dossier on it, mostly open-source, some classified documents.
To give you some idea, the open-source documents fill my office in one corner from the floor to the ceiling in two columns, and the classified documents fill a drawer and a half in my safe.
These documents showed me, and I think showed Powell, ultimately, how we had gotten to the point we'd gotten to, and the thing that struck me as most dramatic.
I knew that these kinds of things had happened in the past.
They happened in the Philippines, they happened in Vietnam.
I knew that the armed forces had, from time to time, done some things that were illegal against international law, as well as the law of land warfare, the Geneva Conventions and so forth, the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, for example, the slaughter of Filipino insurgents in the Philippines at the turn of the century.
But I didn't think it had ever been authorized at the highest levels in the country.
That's what struck me as unique about this situation, that this kind of behavior had been authorized at the highest policy levels in the land, in terms of the White House by the Vice President, and in terms of the Pentagon, of course, by Rumsfeld, and in terms of the CIA by the National Security Advisor, the Vice President, and the Director of Central Intelligence.
This was stunning to me, to find out that this was not just as a result of some bad apples, as Rumsfeld tried to blame it on, out in the military, which had happened, as I said, in the past.
It was a result of the very highest policy levels in the United States deciding to torture people.
All right.
Now, a couple of things in a very short amount of time left here.
First of all, as far as Cheney's role, you say he ordered the review.
He basically got the ball rolling.
Anything more you can tell us about the influence?
For example, it's quite apparent that they were really seeking Saddam, al-Qaeda links.
Do you know, did Cheney say, get me some lies about Saddam and Osama?
Was it that blatant?
What I discovered, and what I reinforced in terms of my discovery after I left office, was the fact that we had shifted, or at least made an equal priority, in early spring of 2002, we had made almost an equal priority with stalling another attack, preventing another attack on the United States, another attack like 9-11.
We had made an equal priority of finding out from people contacts, you know, firm contacts between al-Qaeda, and hopefully even the attacks themselves, and Baghdad.
And that this was as much an impetus for the enhanced interrogation techniques as was trying to stop another attack.
And this was insanity to me, because this was an attempt to build a reason for war that had nothing to do with preventing another attack on the United States.
And you saw that, that that change began in the spring of 2002, right around the time Bush announced that he was not that concerned about Bin Laden?
Yes.
As a matter of fact, about the same time.
Yeah.
Isn't that something?
And then, I'm sorry, we're over time, or we're going to be, but can you please tell me briefly about your statements in the past about, you know that more than 100 men were, if not outright each, tortured to death, at least died in military custody under these same rules?
Because of course, we're only hearing about the CIA, and maybe one or two people that died at the salt pit, that kind of thing.
Yeah, well the Human Rights First put out a report in 2005 or 6, I've got a copy of it downstairs, and that report documented 139 people dying, and the phrase that I recall is while in custody.
Now that could have been contractor custody, CIA custody, military custody, whatever.
If you think about it for a moment, when you consider the number of prisoners we had, that's not an unusual figure, it's not an unusual percentage.
The circumstances under which they died became the unusual or unique thing.
And what Human Rights First found, as I recall, was that anywhere from 25 to 40 of those deaths were either judged by coroners, official coroners, in most cases military, as being homicides, or judged by someone outside the system, but called into the system for that judgment to be homicides.
So here you've got, in detention, these people dying, some of them from heart attacks, some of them from old age, you name it, that's just to be expected, but you've got a good portion of them dying from being murdered.
And of course, the most prominent case was Dillawar in Afghanistan, whom Alex Gibney made the documentary, Taxi to the Dark Side, about.
But I've seen nothing since then official, and I'm eager to look at this Senate report to see if there is anything in there to find out what these other homicides were judged to be.
Were they a product of contractor negligence, CIA negligence, military negligence, or whatever?
No one has really come up with a good answer to that, as far as I know.
Yeah.
And you know what, I'm sorry, I dropped the ball on a follow-up there a second ago, just if you could, real quick, about, was it Cheney, when you saw in Spring of 02 about the change from, you know, let's find out everything we can about Al-Qaeda as part of the motive of torturing, to really, let's find out what we can about Saddam and Al-Qaeda as the whole new thing, to try to build the case, as you said.
How would you trace that part back to Cheney?
See, I was unaware that you had written this entire review for Powell about how we'd gotten there and everything.
Any chance you'll ever leak that thing?
I want to read it.
I think you can assume, and with some strong credibility, that it was Cheney, because Cheney was the one whose Chief of Staff, Scooter Libby, and other staffer, John Hanna, who came with me to the CIA to protect his interests, protect the Vice President's interests.
They were the ones who were compiling this data for the script that would be, the 48-page script on Saddam Hussein, that would be handed to me for, initially, for Powell's presentation at the UN.
So if they were working on this script, if they were putting together the, quote, case for Iraq's possession of WMD, unquote, and that included Iraq's contacts with Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups, then I have to assume, I mean, it's a pretty strong, I think, and firm assumption that they were the ones who started this effort to find intelligence to feed that.
Now, there were other people involved in it.
Douglas Fyfe, the Undersecretary of Policy at the Defense Department, was heavily involved in it.
A lawyer himself.
They were all, there were six lawyers involved in the legal opinion, for example, Fyfe, Gonzalez, you, Bill Haines at the State Department, or at the Defense Department, General Counsel for Rumsfeld, and then, of course, David Addington at the Vice President's Office.
So these six lawyers, at a minimum, should be disbarred for what they did.
But they were integral to the effort to combine the legal opinion with the intelligence that was being gathered, and to put it all in that script that Scooter Libby was working on.
Right.
All right.
Well, with that, I'll let you go.
Thank you for your time, and especially for staying overtime with us today, Larry.
Surely.
Take care.
Appreciate it.
All right.
That's Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired colonel in the U.S. Air Force, and former right-hand man to Colin Powell.
Right now, he teaches national security at William and Mary.
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Live in North America?
If you want, you can hire me to come and give a speech to your group.
I'm good on the terror war and intervention, civil liberty stuff, blaming Woodrow Wilson for everything bad in the world, Iran, central banking, political realignment, and, well, you know, everything.
I can teach markets to liberals and peace to the right.
Just watch me.
Check out ScottHorton.org slash speeches for some examples.
And email me, Scott at ScottHorton.org for more information.
See you there.