Welcome back to Antiwar Radio, it's Chaos 92.7 in Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide on the internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org and at Antiwar.com slash radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our first guest today is Larry Wilkerson, Colonel Larry Wilkerson, formerly Colin Powell's Chief of Staff when he was Secretary of State.
Welcome to the show.
Good to be here, Scott.
Well, it's good to have you here and, boy, I have a whole bunch of questions for you on all kinds of different subjects.
First, I'd like to ask you about the neoconservatives and their role in pushing for the war.
There was a Dutch documentary about the Israel lobby in the United States and, interestingly to me, the question of, okay, well, we know that Pearl and Fyfe and Wolfowitz and these guys, Scooter Libby, these guys were the neoconservative faction.
They had their own interests in pushing for this war, which we can explore, but you, in fact, even, I believe, attributed Cheney's push for war with Iraq to his closeness to AIPAC.
Everybody's always wondered, well, you have all these neocons, pretty obvious why they want this war, but what was it that really drove the right-wing nationalist Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, why did they want this war so bad?
You say in that movie, same answer, AIPAC.
I'm not really that sure that AIPAC would be on my top three as influences with regard to going to war in Iraq.
I've done a lot of research in my capacity as a professor at two different campuses, and I teach this, and what I teach is that there are always a hierarchy of influences on whatever decision-making process eventually concludes to use the military instrument.
And I think in this case, I've discovered what perplexed me sometime before about this unholy alliance between the radicals � they're not conservatives, the neocons are misnamed, they're radicals � and ultra-nationalists, hyper-nationalists like Dick Cheney.
And I think the key is a three-letter word, it's oil.
I'm convinced that if we had our hands on the transcripts of the early on energy conversations that Dick Cheney had with petroleum company CEOs, with Halliburton, with energy people in general, I think we'd understand more of why this man who was Secretary of Defense when I worked for Colin Powell when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and knew quite well, and would have pronounced one of the best Secretaries of Defense we've had, why he took the very cold and ruthless strategic analysis that he does and suddenly converted it to wanting to go to war in Iraq under circumstances that seemed anything but conducive to success.
And the only answer I can come up with is that this geostrategist par excellence wanted to get his hands on the second largest known oil reserves in the world and felt like going to war in Iraq and getting rid of Saddam Hussein would be an avenue there, too.
Well, to be perfectly honest, I think I would have told you even before the war, maybe even before Bush took office, that this was going to happen.
You can't have a President Bush leave power and Saddam Hussein still there.
That was the big shame, supposedly, of his father and seemed pretty clear as well that the sanctions were going to have to be lifted at some point, that there was going to have to be some kind of change in the status quo in terms of the no-fly zones and the blockade from the 1990s.
And I guess it was pretty easy to see that, well, they're not going to just let the sanctions be lifted and let Saddam Hussein bring in Russians and French and whoever else to develop his oil.
They want it.
Well, there are a number of arguments that go towards that, and I don't disagree with what you said, but I do believe that to a certain point there's a market mechanism that works in non-renewable fossil fuels, oil, gas, and so forth, and that if you're going to sell it and you're going to make money, you have to sell it in the market.
And so to corner the market, as it were, would be extremely difficult, although not impossible, as we're seeing, I think, happen with Putin today, particularly vis-a-vis those people to whom he delivers it on a regular basis, the Europeans, and possibly even with other consortiums that might be gathering today, even other than OPEC, that might in the future use oil as a weapon and not be affected by this market dynamism.
And that in that itself is a real problem.
But I do think that there were a number of influences on a number of different decision makers.
There was WMD, there was oil, there was terrorism, and so forth, there was Israel.
But what I've come to find out, and what I've come to find out in spades, is what I only suspected early on, say, when I made my remarks at the New America Foundation in October of 2005, is so true in depths and to profundities that I didn't even imagine.
And that is that the real president of the United States was Dick Cheney, not George Bush, particularly for national security affairs.
If you read Bart Gelman's new book, Angler, a political scientist from Gettysburg is coming out with a book whose galleys I just read called The Co-Presidency of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, you will see just what kind of divisional labor existed in the White House.
And that divisional labor in its starkest terms was national security, domestic economy, finance.
You name all the serious issues that a president confronts belong to Dick Cheney for decision-making.
The issues that belong to George Bush were no child left behind in education, HIV-AIDS and beefing up the money therefore, and compassionate conservatism.
That's a hell of a division of labor.
Right.
Well, you know, what's interesting here is James Baker is the guy from Baker Botts, the law firm for pretty much every major oil company in the world.
And at least appearance sake, seems like he was against it.
The so-called realist faction, which predominantly represents big oil interests in this country and has for a long time, I believe, they seem to be against, at least in Woodward's book, he says that when George Bush announced Saddam Hussein, you have 48 hours to leave Iraq, we're invading one way or the other, that Baker turned to his friend on the couch and said, I told him not to do that.
And of course, Scowcroft wrote, don't attack Saddam in the Wall Street Journal.
I believe even Lawrence Eagleburger and Henry Kissinger came out saying at least, hey, be cautious.
Go to the UN first.
What are you doing here?
So, you know, a lot of people have concluded that the oil men really didn't want this.
Maybe they wanted a coup d'etat or to work out a deal with Saddam Hussein, but that all this regime change came not from the typical oil company back think tanks, but from AEI and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and that kind of thing.
I don't dispute the fact that for some of the influencers of the decision-making process that Israel stood at the top of the list, Douglas Feith, for example, the number three man in the Pentagon, I believe that was true for.
But I do think there were a number of influences on the decision makers to include Cheney.
And the after effects of 9-11, I would place probably in the top two or three, in addition with oil and perhaps other influences such as bringing democracy and freedom to the Middle East, which seems to have been the one that captured the more religious George W. Bush than others.
You have to consider, I think, all of these influences on the ultimate decision to go to war in Iraq.
And whether you put one ahead of the other depends on what group you're trying to look at at that particular time.
Who will ever say what actually caused the president to decide on war?
And by the way, none of us can figure out where he exactly did that.
In other words, there isn't a summary of conclusions of an NSC meeting.
There isn't a principles meeting.
There isn't any kind of documentation that I've ever seen or that others have seen that I've talked to that says, this is where the president made the decision to use force to unseat Saddam Hussein, and this is how it was recorded.
It was more or less a creeping decision.
And that sort of supports this idea that there were a number of influences that had different impact at different times.
And I'm certainly not discounting the fact that with some of the people who were exerting their influence on the president, Israel was at the top of the list.
Another issue, I think there was quite a debate amongst oil people in general, and most of the oil people with whom I've talked from major companies and people who've studied the Saudis, for example, and so forth, there were great problems associated with taking Saddam Hussein out by force.
And most of these people thought that that would probably precipitate a situation where, and it indeed seems to have, where there'd be less control over Iraq's oil rather than more, and that the market would not have the major influence that people were thinking it would have, and that what you might have at the end of it, since you had just taken out Iran's number one enemy, Saddam Hussein, and number two enemy, the Taliban in Afghanistan, it might have the adverse impact of giving Iran a little more influence on the Strait of Hormuz, the Persian Gulf, the flow of oil through the Strait, and so forth.
So this was fraught with as much possibility for problems in the oil business as it was for solving problems.
And now, you know, I don't mean to just acquit James Baker and whoever else.
I know according to Greg Palast, he says that the State Department types, the Baker Institute, Rice University guys, that they had their own plan, but it was much more the idea was the next Ba'athist in line rather than a full-scale invasion and occupation.
Yeah.
I wouldn't doubt that.
I've heard a number of different plans, whether they existed prior to the actual invasion or not.
It came into the minds of people after the invasion and after it seemed to have failed.
I don't know.
But there was a lot of discussion about...
Let's face it, I think those discussions, and I would dearly love to see the transcripts that Cheney had early on in the first administration, talked about such things as tipping points and were the Saudi fields running out?
Because the Saudis are the only major oil producer in the world who don't report to the IEA or anyone else, for that matter, the status of their fields.
So we don't know what the status of their fields is.
They could, in fact, be geologically incapable of producing much beyond a certain point.
I suspect they are running out.
When they'll run out, who knows?
Most of the major oil companies now, I think, have convinced themselves even that we are approaching, if not already at, some sort of tipping point where supply and demand and so forth and the lack of any new huge field discoveries will really impact world economies and, obviously, their bottom line.
So we're talking about people who, in these discussions, I believe, that Vice President Cheney had, probably told it like it is.
And you're sitting there and you're understanding the impact that $4 a gallon gas, that lack of adequate supplies and so forth will do to your economy, and you get worried.
Shell's latest alternative scenarios, for example, one of which is called Scramble, the other is called Blueprint, says in very telling terms that, in the future, what great powers and others who use oil to the extent that we do and China does and India is going to, what they'll be thinking about is access.
They won't care about price.
All they'll care about is access, which is why the Chinese, for example, are running around the world right now trying to sign long-term contracts for oil.
This is not a good scenario for the United States, being the biggest energy consumer in the world and being so profligate at that consumption, unless it has its hands on something that it can count on.
And I think that was a major motivation for looking, and still is a major motivation, clearly, for looking at the Middle East.
Well, and it's also about which companies get to do the pumping, because let's face it, if the French are pumping all the oil out of the ground in Iraq, it still goes to the world market.
The question is, who's getting to do all the skimming and cash all those dividend checks?
The other aspect of it is, and I'm sure they talked about this in this session, is that fewer and fewer resources, in fact, I forget the percentage, but it's below 10 percent of the world's oil, is now in the hands of private companies or companies that we would identify as being market-oriented companies.
It's in the hands of national entities, whether it's Mexico, whether it's Kuwait, whether it's Saudi Arabia or whatever.
And that's very disturbing to people who believe in the free market and believe in the free market dynamics with regard to petroleum and gas.
Right, yeah, it is definitely a state-run business all around the world.
Even here in America, it looks like.
Yeah, well, we could say that, too.
Alright, now, Colonel Wilkerson, I hope you don't mind, but I've got to pick a fight with you here, and I'm sure you're up to it.
Tahir Habush was inside the Iraqi government, said there are no weapons of mass destruction.
Najri Sabri was inside the Iraqi government, said there are no weapons of mass destruction.
Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, Hussein Kamal, had come forward back in 1995, said he had supervised the destruction of all of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction in 1991.
Madeline Albright, of course, was prepared to certify Iraq weapons of mass destruction free back in 1997 before they announced the policy that regardless, the sanctions would never be lifted until Saddam Hussein was gone from power.
In February of 2001, Colin Powell, your boss, said they have no weapons of mass destruction programs whatsoever.
They're in a box.
In July of 2001, Condoleezza Rice said the same thing on TV.
How could it possibly be that you guys were fooled into thinking that this guy was producing chemical and biological and perhaps even nuclear weapons for use against the United States?
Well, Scott, I've got to tell you that you're not going to pick a fight with me over that, because I kick myself in the butt every day and every night when I can't sleep when I think about what we did at the UN on 5 February 2003.
All I can offer is that the Jordanians, the Israelis, the Brits, the French, the Germans, every major intelligence service that we brought to bear on the problem at the CIA in the five to six days that we worked day and night to get Powell ready for that presentation, urged us to believe that Saddam Hussein had biological and chemical programs and weapons stockpiled, and probably, and this is where the big argument was amongst all these different entities, including within our own government, probably at least the software for, if not an active nuclear program.
Those arguments from those intelligence communities were, I won't say that they were overwhelmingly convincing, but they were in their consensus alone convincing enough to cause Secretary Powell to go to the UN and go ahead and give that presentation.
I will tell you quickly that I wrote out my resignation in the middle of this and will count as the greatest mistake in my professional life that I didn't go ahead and submit it immediately following the presentation, because I walked out in the cold February air of New York City after that presentation, and I paced the road for a few minutes, and I thought, what a failure that was.
And I thought it was a failure because it was just an array of circumstantial information, much of which could be interpreted in different ways than we were intending it to be interpreted.
And I thought it had been a very, very ineffective presentation, and I even thought, well, that won't do much.
That dog won't hunt in Texas terms.
And lo and behold, I shouldn't have been surprised at this.
The polls showed us that it hunted fairly well, and it hunted fairly well, I realized, because the number one credible authority in the United States government, Colin Powell, whose poll ratings were about right there with Mother Teresa, had given the presentation.
It wasn't because it was effective or it was dynamic or it was convincing.
It was because Colin Powell is all those things.
And so I felt even worse after it had been done, realizing that my boss's reputation is what had been convincing and not the presentation.
So you get no fight from me that it was a slow day in my life.
Well, I've got to tell you, I was painting a house, which is, I think, a form of manual labor that ranks lower than digging a ditch.
And I had the door to my truck open and was listening to the presentation on NPR News and was denouncing every single assertion off the top of my head.
The aluminum tubes, don't give me that.
That's been debunked since the Washington Post in September of 2002.
What am I, a fool here?
Well, you know, we were very suspicious of the aluminum tubes, too, until John McLaughlin brought one of them into the DCI's conference room, rolled it around on the table, and began to throw out facts, along with DCI tenants, about how this particular metal was so many dollars per kilogram, as opposed to the kind of metal which one would wrap around rockets or mortars, which was the purported alternative use Saddam had bought the things for.
And why would anybody buy $75 a kilogram metal, as opposed to $750 a kilogram of metal, if they were going to blow it up in rockets and so forth?
And went through this litany of why the CIA and its best analysts, I put that in quotes, thought that this was for a centrifuge program, rather than for rocket shielding or mortar shielding.
When you're sitting there in front of the DCI, the head of all the U.S. intelligence, and the guy who has contact with the world's intelligence agencies, and his deputies, and they have a combined 40 or 50 years' experience in the intelligence community, even if you're Colin Powell, it's difficult to argue with what they're telling you.
My concern now, my deep concern now, especially after reading Tenet's book, which is, in my view, replete with misinformation and even lies, and John McLaughlin, who won't talk to anybody much anymore about it, my concern is, did they know that they were telling the Secretary of State information that was anything but firm?
Did they know that on occasion, I believe, they were lying?
I don't know.
I can't answer that question, but as an American citizen, as much as a person who was involved in it and embarrassed by it, shamed by it, I'm concerned.
I'm concerned the next time somebody has to listen to a DNI now, or the head of the CIA, or any intelligence person, talking about some grave threat to the United States of America.
I'm very concerned, because it was an intelligence failure of enormous proportion.
Right.
I mean, you know, I probably would have assumed at the time that the DCI told Powell, okay, look, we all know this is a bunch of crap, but we're putting it together to make a convincing case.
But you're telling me that the DCI was telling Colin Powell in front of you, oh, believe me, it's all true.
Absolutely.
I will tell you another place where we were getting ready to throw...
We got about 25 pages of scripted material from the White House and from the CIA on terrorism and contacts between al-Qaeda and Baghdad.
Powell was getting ready to throw the whole thing out.
We'd already cut it down to about seven pages.
He was getting ready to throw the whole thing out and not even mention it.
And then all of a sudden comes the breathtaking news that a high-level al-Qaeda operative has just been interrogated and has just confessed to substantive contacts between al-Qaeda and Baghdad that even involved the Muqabbaraat, Saddam Hussein's intelligence service, training al-Qaeda operatives in how to use biological and chemical weapons.
This was stunning.
Only later, only later did we learn that it was Sheikh al-Libi, who was the one furnishing the information, that he was being tortured when he furnished it, and that, as he later said, he would have said anything to stop the pain.
We also learned, and this really gets me, we learned that DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, had dissented for obvious reasons, because they knew how the information was gained on this information within weeks of it having been given.
And we were never shown that DIA dissent.
In fact, when we asked about it afterwards, we were told that there was a computer glitch, and that when the CIA, under Powell's instructions, searched for any dissenting information, that dissenting information didn't show up.
Now, go figure that one.
Yeah, well, it's a terrible coincidence, I guess.
Well, now, this information, so-called, that was tortured out of Sheikh al-Libi, did this include that Zarqawi had lost a leg that he was friends with Osama, that he had received a wooden leg as a gift from Saddam Hussein, and that kind of thing?
No, this was information, what you just cited, was information that had come about as a result of, according to the CIA, intelligence community sources that had independently corroborated one another about the relationship between Zarqawi and Saddam Hussein's henchmen in Baghdad.
Much of that was taken out of the pages that Powell actually let go into the official presentation that he made.
Well, we know that the military knew this wasn't true.
They had asked for, well, wait, that includes you, maybe.
You're the military.
I don't know if they told you, but we know from Jim Michalczewski at NBC News and others that the military had asked George Bush for permission to go into Kurdistan to get Zarqawi before the war ever started, because, of course, there was a big carte blanche in autonomous, independent Kurdistan up there in the north, and that they were refused over and over again, because the war party needed their excuse for the war.
Well, my understanding was Al-Anbar up there, or not Al-Anbar, what was the name of the group that was in the northern part of Iraq?
Al-Ansar.
Ansar al-Islam.
Our understanding, it may be false, I don't know, but our understanding, and I think I'm speaking for the Secretary, too, is that that group up in the northern part of Iraq, which was underneath our no-fly zone in the north, and therefore Hussein couldn't get to it, was actually, basically, a poison manufacturing place, which probably manufactured as much bad as it did good, that is to say, didn't work as was effective, and basically let it out to people in Afghanistan and other places in training camps and so forth, and no one could ever track it from that point on.
We did have some rather horrendous NSA revelations about some of the communications between that camp and other camps, which would make your hair stand on end in terms of some of the tests they had done on animals and so forth.
So it was a rather scary group, but we didn't see that as connected with Zarqawi, and we didn't see that as connected with Al-Qaeda.
They were sort of a freelance operation, more or less, doing anything they could to furnish their ingredients to whatever terrorist organization wanted them.
So, Zarqawi, your understanding was he wasn't even really even tied with them?
Actually, my understanding was that he was hibernating, much as were other terrorists like Abu Nadal, as I recall, in Baghdad, because it was sort of a free territory for him, and no one was going to hunt him down and take him out or imprison him.
And so he was in that area simply because he could seek safe haven there, and perhaps medical attention.
There wasn't a clear connection between him and the group to the north, or certainly not a clear connection between him and Al-Qaeda.
It's my own personal feeling that he gained a connection with Al-Qaeda, simply when we invaded, there were no Al-Qaeda in Iraq, and not that anyone knew about, anyway.
I think Saddam Hussein would have exterminated them had he known about them.
And so what we did by invading Iraq was invite Al-Qaeda into Iraq, because it was a target-rich environment for them.
And also, we invited Zarqawi to throw his lot in with Al-Qaeda, so that he could gain some more fighters, money, probably, and the reputation of being with Al-Qaeda.
He didn't even begin to call himself that until December 2004.
We created what my military now calls Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
We created it.
Yeah.
All right, now, well, you mean in effect or deliberately?
No, no, I don't think...
I would never say that the military created it deliberately, because initially they were probably the biggest killers of Americans in Iraq.
I think it was just an unintended consequence, as were so many things, of our invasion of Iraq.
In that sense, President Bush has been right in saying that, in a very narrow sense, that we're killing Al-Qaeda in Iraq, because I think lots of Al-Qaeda trained in the Fatah and in the wilder areas of Pakistan, and trained earlier, before we went into Afghanistan, in the camps in Afghanistan.
I think a lot of those people flocked to Iraq, flocked to Zarqawi's banners, flocked to his successor's banners, simply because, as I said, it was a target-rich environment, and they could kill Americans, and didn't care if they killed Muslims, men, women, and children in the process.
Once they figured out that that wasn't working too well, it actually helped turn the Sunnis against them, and was a forerunner, if you will, of the motivation to create the Sons of Iraq, the Awakening Movement.
They stopped and took on different tactics and so forth, but initially, it was just a target-rich environment, and so Al-Qaeda operatives flocked there in order to kill Americans.
All right, now, let me rewind to the run-up to the war again.
Michael Scheuer, the chief once and then again chief of the CIA's Bin Laden unit, tells me that he and his team finished a report in January of 2003 that went back and showed that, in fact, he had been wrong in his initial conclusions, and that there were no substantive links between Iraq and Al-Qaeda.
That was in January of 2003.
Were you and Colin Powell made aware of that report by Alex Station?
No.
Not at all.
We pushed and pushed.
Powell pushed.
Of all the things that he tried to clean out of the presentation, the so-called, quote, substantive ties between Al-Qaeda and Baghdad, unquote, was at the top of the list.
As I said, I don't believe any of it would have survived had not that revelation suddenly been made that al-Libi had confessed that there were substantive ties.
I don't believe Powell would have left one iota of the portion on terrorists and terrorist contacts with Baghdad in his presentation if that hadn't occurred.
Well, did you guys know about Habush and Najib Sabri?
I didn't.
I can't speak for the Secretary.
I did not know about that.
It was never made known to me.
One night, I may have slept an hour, an hour and a half on a bench outside the DCI conference room.
I was there 24-7 for the entire preparation time until I went home to change my clothes and fly to New York for the actual presentation.
I never heard it said.
If it was said to the Secretary, it was said in private with Mr. Kenned or Mr. McLaughlin or someone else, and he never shared it with me.
So I have to assume, on the surface at least, that they didn't tell him either.
All right.
Now, you've been quoted widely in your description of what you call the Cheney neocon cabal.
And wasn't it clear at the time that Dick Cheney had this gaggle of neoconservatives from the American Enterprise Institute that he'd install all over the place, that the Office of Special Plans at the Pentagon was doing their end run around the CIA and all those kinds of things by the time you guys put this thing together?
I have to admit, and here again I'm criticizing myself strongly, I didn't come to the conclusion that such a network existed, that it had a vision, it had a strategy, and was absolutely ruthlessly single-minded in carrying out that strategy until probably late 2003, early 2004.
And that is one reason why I was stunned when the Secretary asked me to look into the torture issue, the Abu Ghraib photographs and so forth, in April, May 2004, when I began to discover how much of that network was involved in making the decisions that would ultimately lead to renditions, to secret prisons, to torture and abuse, and so forth and so on.
I have to just plead that I was one ignorant son of a gun.
I knew that Cheney had a very effective network because I'd seen John Bolton, I'd seen Scooter Libby, I'd seen a host of other people in the network function with regard to policy issues, particularly national security, Iran, North Korea, and so forth.
But I had no idea that they so permeated the government in almost every walk of life, every corridor of power, until late 2003 and 2004.
And I fought myself for not being able, bureaucratically, to sort this out and to understand just how powerful the Vice President was and what he was doing with that power.
And it's too bad all you guys don't read Antiwar.com.
All this was laid clear at the beginning of 2002.
Let me make a comment on that.
One of the things I find happening with my students, for example, and no doubt it happened with me and it happens with lots of other Americans, is that the Internet has caused people to read blogs or to read postings with which they agree.
Not postings, not blogs with which they don't agree.
And so what you've done with this, by and large, is to, and I'm not saying you personally, but what the Internet has done is increase the polarization in America, not decrease it.
What you have is people who will only read this side and people who will only read that side.
And it's about, I don't know, it's about 45-45 with some 10 or so percent in the middle undecided at any given time.
And it actually adds to the separation of people in this country rather than unifying people.
Yeah, I agree with that.
I mean, a lot of these arguments take place right past each other.
For example, we get letters all the time saying, ah, see, they moved yellowcake uranium out of Iraq and that proves that Saddam really did try to buy that yellowcake from Niger and all these things.
When, no, in fact, the argument is obvious that this was yellowcake that was under IAEA seal sitting declared in Iraq untouched.
Has nothing to do with Niger at all.
But these arguments don't really pass each other.
One side makes all their assertions, the other side makes all their assertions, but nobody hears each other speaking.
Yeah, and we're seeing that big time in the campaign right now, Obama and McCain.
You got one side that won't listen to the other and the other side won't listen to the other and they're going more vitriolic and more of a two parted and more angry in their consolidation of their side, if you will.
Now, now let me get back in the torch.
You said it was you were asked by, was it Powell to go back and review?
How did it end up that we were torturing people?
And then you went through the paperwork and found the neocons fingerprints all over.
Well, what I began to find was that this wasn't just a case of bad apples, which I thought it had been, for example, in my war, Vietnam, because there were things that happened in my war that were untoward.
And I knew that those kinds of things could happen in any war and that one of the leader's responsibility was to find them and root them out and hold people accountable and so forth.
Otherwise you'd slip off the cliff.
So when I started looking, I thought what I was going to find, I thought what Admiral Church at the Defense Department was going to find, who is my counterpart for Secretary Rumsfeld.
Secretary Rumsfeld asked him to look into it from the Defense Department side.
I thought what we were going to find was that what happened in Vietnam had happened again in Iraq.
Indeed, what happens in every conflict, we'd had a few bad apples, a few soldiers, Marines, whatever did this or did that.
What I found was that from the very highest levels in the United States government, the policies that were put out to Guantanamo, to Abu Ghraib, to Bagram in Afghanistan and elsewhere, the general policies were those kinds of policies that would be conducive to this sort of thing sweeping through the ranks.
That in fact, we had had people who, and I will name the six people who I think were most involved in this.
They were Jim Haynes, OSD General Counsel at the Defense Department, Douglas Fyfe, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy.
They were in the Office of Legal Counsel at Justice, Jay Bivey and John Yu.
They were at the White House, David Addington, who led the entire enterprise, the counsel for Vice President Cheney.
And I'd throw into that Flanagan and Gonzales from the White House, because they were counselor and deputy counselor to the President at the time.
They were all lawyers.
They were all lawyers.
And they crafted the legal justification, flawed as it is, for everything that transpired so that both the CIA and the Defense Department, because Rumsfeld was jealous of the CIA and wanted some of the turf for himself, followed later and promulgated down to the ranks, which they thought was so finely crafted that every soldier, every Marine, anyone encountering it would be able to move exactly in consonance with their wishes.
Well, they're idiots.
That's not the way a big, huge bureaucracy like the Defense Department works.
That's not the way the armed forces work.
They're not surgical instruments in the hands of a 40-year-trained surgeon.
They're blunt instruments.
And when you put these kind of policies down, and the twin policies were, we need intelligence and we need it now, and the second leg of that was, and the gloves are off.
When they articulated these policies down to the lowest ranks, they got exactly what anybody like me with 30 years in the military would know they were going to get.
They got chaos, and they got lots of people abusing prisoners from one end of Iraq to the other in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo.
And when they found out that this was happening, of course, they began to pull back the memos.
They began to soften their advice and try to confine it just to the CIA.
And John McCain helped them with this.
I'm not saying he aided and abetted them.
I'm just saying that his recoil from this torture business and the armed forces' involvement in it helped them get an amendment through the Senate and get the armed forces out of the torture business.
But before that, the armed forces were simply another leg of the instrument they were using to get information at any cost.
And when I discovered all this, working for Powell, and then later discovered much more of it after I got out and did more research, it was quite appalling to understand.
I mean, it happens in every conflict.
Every soldier knows it happens.
That's one reason officers are there to try to keep it from happening.
But to have it condoned at the highest levels in the American government?
I mean, we actually had an occasion where Dick Cheney was over lobbying the Congress of the United States on behalf of torture.
Well, and as you say, in the Detainee Treatment Act, they said the military can't torture people anymore, but the CIA can continue on.
What a cop-out.
I mean, this was a, let's get the armed forces out of it, which I praise God for.
That should have been done.
And John McCain did a yeoman's service there.
But to allow the CIA to continue to do it, in my view, was a travesty also.
Now, I will say this.
I've got a lot of contacts in the intelligence community, retired and otherwise, who tell me that it probably stopped, it being torture, probably stopped because, and when they say probably, they put a 90% firm factor on it, because there is no one in the CIA who will do it anymore, realizing that another administration coming in in January, a new Congress coming in with it, might just take a hard look at it and punish them, regardless of what legislation has been passed to this point.
So, though the President and the Vice President might say that, you know, they're still hanging in there and still doing these sorts of things, what I'm hearing is that they can't find anybody to do them.
So that's a good thing, I think.
Well, you testified, I guess, two years ago before the Congress that last year you had seen 108 people had been murdered in custody.
And I don't know whether this was just in secret prisons around the world, like Thailand, and on ships at sea, the Salt Pit torture dungeon in Bagram, or whether this included in Iraq as well.
No, it wasn't that total of murders.
It was about 125 at that point had been determined to have died while in detention, and that was in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo and elsewhere.
And of that, other organizations like Human Rights First and Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International had determined that at that point, I think it was about 25 or 26 of them had been judged by the services, by the Army coroner or the Marine coroner or whatever on the scene as homicides.
As I understand it now, the total is a little higher than that.
Those people suffered, in my view, the ultimate torture.
That is to say, they didn't just have organ failure, they died while in detention.
And if it's one, it's too many.
But to have that many people die and have their deaths judged homicides, murder in other words, that's when you start having to have some accountability and some investigations.
And there were some investigations, and there was some accountability, but you look at it and you see all along the way that, by and large, services tried to throw monkey wrenches into the investigations whenever they could.
And when they did come to some justice, if you will, the sentences that were doled out were reflective of the fact that the court marshal or whatever the determinant was decided, well, these are the little guys at the bottom.
They may have carried out some fairly heinous things, but we know, we know where the policy came from, so how dare we put these people in jail for 25 years or for 15 years or whatever.
So if you look at the punishments that resulted from most of this accountability, you'll see a clear recognition on the part of the people sitting for the court marshal that these guys at the bottom had orders.
And though they may have been punished this way or that way, many times the punishment is reduction in rank, a fine, maybe a few years at Leavenworth.
It's not the kind of punishment that you would equate with the nature of the crime that they're accused of committing.
And it's clear to me as a military man that the reason for that is because the people sitting on these court marshals understood that the orders came from quite high up in the administration.
So you can't be out there punishing these enlisted men and NCOs to the maximum extent, because after all, they were operating under guidance that clearly said the gloves were off.
Well, I'm not much for belief and diffusion of responsibility.
It seems like everybody involved can be responsible for their actions, whether they're low or high on the chain.
Well, I don't disagree with that.
And of course, that is the Nuremberg finding when we held the trials post-World War II and found that operating under orders was no defense.
We seem to have, in many respects, forgotten all about those trials and the deliberations that have occurred in the last few years, particularly in what has happened with regard to some of the general officers and others who were, by and large, aware of what was going on and even, in some cases, complicit in its happening.
All right.
Is it okay if I keep you another couple of minutes?
Go ahead.
I've got one more question for you here about the burnt offering, as Gareth Porter called it in The American Prospect, Iran's offer in 2003 to, as I understand it, put everything on the table.
And now we've heard in the papers, Flint Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett have talked about this.
And I read last night that you were actually privy to this internal discussion inside the administration when this peace offer was made.
So I was wondering if you could comment on how credible it was, what all it included, and then what happened in the administration that ended up where it went nowhere.
Well, I thought it was a fairly credible offer.
It included almost all of the things, if not all of the things, that we in policy planning at the State Department, for example, had determined would be on the Iranians' minds were we ever to come to talks, as well as those things we knew were on our minds if it ever came to talks.
And that ranged from minor things like al-Qaeda operatives who might be somewhere in Iran to the nuclear program of Iran on our side, and on their side, what kind of security guarantees we might have to offer the government in Tehran in order to get them to back away from their nuclear program.
In other words, this package that seemed to be in the Iranians' eyes negotiable, included all the things we thought that they would want to put on the table and all the things we knew we would want to put on the table.
That's a serious offer, in my view.
No preconditions.
We'll talk about all these things.
Now, what happened to it, in my view, is a number of things.
First of all, it was deadly opposed in the Vice President's office, and probably in the National Security Advisor's office, Dr. Rice, too.
But they turned to the State Department, notably Dr. Rice, and asked what the State Department's view was.
And when that view was rendered, it reflected a battle royal that had occurred even in the State Department, belying the idea that the State Department is unifiedly communist pinko-dogs.
The argument in the State Department took place between Bill Burns, who was an Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs, some of his people, the NSC staff, who were responsible in the White House for monitoring the Middle East, and Richard Haass and his policy planning staff.
And it had been ongoing since the very beginning of the Bush administration.
And it was how to treat Syria, how to treat Iran, how to treat Libya at the time, and other countries with whom we had significant problems or challenges.
And some wanted to talk, and some didn't want to talk.
Some wanted to abide by Congress's legislation, the Iran-Libya Act, and others wanted to see if they could soften that up.
So this was an argument that was going on.
Bottom line is, in the State Department, the argument that got up to Colin Powell was, essentially, this is not a serious offer.
And even if it were, the negotiations wouldn't go anywhere, because we know the people we'd be negotiating with, and so forth.
And so Powell, as I understand it, and subsequently Powell has confirmed this for me, his advice to the White House was that it was not a serious offer.
So when that flowed into an already adamant opposition to recognizing any negotiating with the Iranians, it didn't have much problem getting killed right there on the spot.
I will point out, too, that it was a very serious time for Secretary Powell.
That is to say, he already had more fights than he wanted with the Vice President's office and with others who were opposed to such things as the Six-Party Talks in North Korea, who were opposed to some of the things that he had done with Russia with regard to the Moscow Treaty and ballistic missile defense.
And he had enough fights on his hand that I can imagine, and he's never said this to me, but I can imagine that he was thinking something like this, the Vice President is vehemently opposed to this, that, and the other thing.
I don't need another fight with him over this one.
I've got enough fights.
Therefore, I think I'll just take the position that Bill Burns has given me, Assistant Secretary for NEA, and I'll tell the White House that this is not a serious offer.
So all of this kind of came together at that particular juncture, and that was the advice, and so the offer was not taken seriously.
There was also criticism of the Swiss, who are protecting power in Tehran and who made the offer known to us, that the Swiss were, you know, batting for the, not batting for the Iranians, but they were interpreting the Iranians as being too straightforward rather than Machiavellian.
There was also the business of the Europeans are playing in this, the Europeans are wanting to influence this, and they just don't understand Tehran.
We do.
A lot of arrogance, a lot of hubris, which is earmarked and hallmarked, this administration, from the very beginning.
Well, now, it's funny, I'm not sure the exact words you used, but I think you said that cooperation against Al-Qaeda was considered a minor issue among some of these others, and I guess when you're talking about the nuclear program and recognizing Israel and things like that, I guess it sort of is, but presumably the Al-Qaeda attack on America on September 11th is the excuse for all this, and, you know, everybody complains that, well, they took the eye off the ball in Afghanistan in order to go to Iraq, and yet, I'm sure you saw, I guess I shouldn't assume, but did you see the 60 Minutes a couple of weeks ago with the Delta Force commander explaining how they had all these great plans and different ways they were going to drop mines all over the valleys to Pakistan, they were going to come in from the backside of the mountains and trap them, and they had all these different arrangements, and, of course, the famous New York Times story, Lost at Tora Bora, there was a Marine General with 4,000 men about 10 miles away or something, and, boy, it just seems like nobody in the White House or in the civilian levels of the Pentagon actually wanted this guy captured.
I think they took their eye off the ball.
I have subsequently learned that the Central Command commander, Tommy Franks, General Tommy Franks, was given instructions to take his staff and put them on planning for war with Iraq well into this period you're talking about.
So when you tell a staff like that to change its focus, you have just redirected them, and that has to have some impact on the theater you redirected them from.
We're talking November 2001.
We're talking November 2001, and this is bad news for the effort in Afghanistan.
Let me say something else, too.
The war in Afghanistan was principally CIA.
The military got there a day late and a dollar short.
With the exception of Special Operating Forces and the kind of picture that Rumsfeld liked to tout afterwards with the Green Beret riding the horse and with a laser designator in his hand as being indicative of the transformation he was trying to bring about, the military really didn't get to Afghanistan in time to do a whole lot that the CIA hadn't already done, with the exception of a few Special Operating Forces.
So one of the reasons for going to Iraq, in Rumsfeld's mind, had to be that he was going to justify what he was talking about in terms of transformation and so forth, and he was going to show that the military could get to a theater and could do what it needed to do.
So this shift from Afghanistan to Iraq had behind it the momentum of Rumsfeld's desires to do better, also.
And that, I think, shifted us so rapidly that we lost track of what we were trying to do in Afghanistan.
And if you read Douglas Spike's book, War and Decision, he's very proud of the fact in that book that he describes he and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and others wanting to widen the war, not wanting to just go after al-Qaeda, the perpetrators of 9-11, but to go after every terrorist in the world who might hold the potential to do harm to the United States, and every state that, in any way, fashion, or form, backed those terrorists or supported those terrorists.
We at the State Department on the other hand were thinking about the international relations principle of conservation of enemies.
That is to say, you don't want any more enemies than you can fight at any given time.
And so you want to be very precise about whom you define as an enemy and whom you say you're at war with.
On the other hand, in the Defense Department, at Feist's own admission in his book, they wanted to go to war with every terrorist in the world.
And when you do things like that, you dissipate your power, you dissipate your focus, you take your eye off the ball, which in this case was to get bin Laden and most of his hierarchy of command.
And that's exactly what happened.
We lost.
Okay, but help me understand.
Delta Force calls in and says, okay, here's what we're going to do.
We're going to drop a bunch of landmines from the air, and we're going to fill this mountain pass to Afghanistan with landmines.
The first time, I guess in his words, first time a guy loses his leg, they're all going to stop.
Then we're going to point our laser designators at them and blow them to hell.
And yet, when he asked for permission to do this, he's told no.
So it's not just that they couldn't hear him because they were paying attention to, you know, the Saddam Hussein regime.
They had Delta guys on the ground saying, here's what we're going to do.
We've got him trapped.
We're going to kill him.
And they were denied permission to act.
Well, I've got to throw my normal military skepticism into this now.
All right.
Yeah, help me speculate, because I'm only using my imagination here and thinking that Rumsfeld is saying, no, you know, I'd rather have Goldstein on the run.
Thank you very much.
Well, I've seen Delta's briefings before.
I've been around Delta before, at SOF, Rangers.
I was a Ranger.
Let me just say that you could drop thousands of mines on those mountains in Afghanistan and have an elephant train still get through and never hit a mine.
So those kind of pronouncements made to people who don't understand the technology and the military way of doing things completely, or even at all, sound very convincing.
They sound like, oh, why didn't we do this?
Why didn't we do that?
They shouldn't be.
Someone who's been around mines, who understands what mines can do, who understand what mines drop from the air do, anywhere from 20 to 30 percent of them won't work, understands the technology involved, understands the terrain involved, understands the angle of the terrain involved and so forth, knows that a lot of the things that 60 Minutes puts on as being, oh, man, why wasn't this done, are really not quite as airtight as they seem to be.
So I'll just leave it there.
Yeah, that's fair enough.
All right.
Well, listen, I've got to go.
I've kept you way over time here.
I really appreciate your time on the show today.
Surely.
Take care.
All right, everybody.
That's Larry Wilkerson, formerly Colin Powell's chief of staff.
He's a professor of national security at the College of William and Mary.
And we'll be right back after this.
