Interesting transcript- talk by Col. Wilkerson (former Powell Staff Chief)

[pinto]

Col. Wilkerson presents some very specific assessments about foriegn policy and the nature of decision making in the White House, some supporting past Rep. administrations, some supporting past Dem. administrations...(I assume the "UI" notes in the transcript means unintelligible)

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/c925a686-40f4-11da-b3f9-00000e...

Transcript: Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson
By Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson
Published: October 20 2005 00:17 | Last updated: October 20 2005 00:17

The following is a transcript of talk given by Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Mr Powell until last January.

<snip>

We need to force the inter-agency process, for example, to conform to President Clinton’s PDD 56, if you’re familiar with that. It was a document that described, it could be improved on, but it described very well how America should deal with crisis. The problem was nobody followed it.

Problem was nobody followed it so bad that when a Senate group was set up to investigate that very subject and called my boss, that was then a private citizen for whom I was working in a private capacity, and said, would you come sit on our group, would you help us with this, because we really think the process is .

My boss’ answer was simply, no, I won’t because you’ve got it already. You can’t hardly improve on what you’ve got already. You just have to force execution of what you’ve got.

<snip>

I don’t know what the case is today. I wish I did. But the case that I saw for 4 plus years was a case that I have never seen in my studies of aberration, bastardizations, , changes to the national security process. What I saw was a cabal between the Vice President of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the Secretary of Defense and on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made.

And then when the bureaucracy was presented with those decisions and carried them out, it was presented in such a disjointed incredible way that the bureaucracy often didn’t know what it was doing as it moved to carry them out.

<more>

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/c925a686-40f4-11da-b3f9-00000e...

There is also an LBN post from the Financial Times "Cheney 'cabal' hijacked foreign policy" linked below. Together these make for a good read.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x1863267#1863432