Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, has concluded that former Vice President Dick Cheney is no longer in his right mind.
In an interview with Andy Worthingon of The Public Record, Wilkerson says: "I’ve come to the conclusion that the man truly is—whether he was that way when I knew him before, when he was Secretary of Defense, I don’t know, that’s not at issue with me any more—the man now is just crazy."
Wilkerson further refers to former BushCo factotum Alberto Gonzales as "that idiot," and describes Cheney's principal War on Terra aide, David Addington, as "a strange person," known in "the uniformed military as 'Weird David,'" who was nonetheless allowed to serve as "both the Zawahiri and the bin Laden" of BushCo.
Wilkerson notes that although Cheney is now deranged, the media continues to enable him. "Our media loves to keep it going. They love to throw him out there and, you know, stoke the fires." And that Democratic leaders, terrified of being portrayed as "soft" on national security, have also capitulated to this man who is, in fact, mad.
Says Wilkerson of Congressional Democrats:
They don’t believe they can show another square centimeter of ankle on national security, because the Republicans will eat their lunch, and every time I’m told this I die laughing. I say, your guys are captured by the Sith Lord, Dick Cheney, you’re captured by Rush Limbaugh, whose real radio audience is about 2.2 million, and whose employer, Clear Channel, lost $3.7 billion in the second quarter of this year. I said, when are you gonna wake up? These are kooks. And Cheney is the kook leader. But [Nancy] Pelosi and [Harry] Reid are such feckless leaders they haven’t got any spine. We have no leadership in the legislative branch on either side of the aisle.
Wilkerson confirms much of what we used to speculate about over on Never In Our Names.
He says the State Department early on received reports that Afghani warlords bought by the US for Operation Enduring Fiefdom were summarily executing prisoners: "We got signs that they weren’t taking prisoners; that is to say, they were shooting them."
He believes that BushCo stashed some War on Terra prisoners on the UK island of Diego Garcia (as Unitary Moonbat speculated here): "I still believe we had a few at Diego Garcia, and perhaps a few in other places too, but Guantánamo was the principal place."
He concludes that most of the War on Terra prisoners interned in Guantanamo were and are innocent:
I received one particular assessment from a person for whom I had no reason whatsoever to believe that he would give me an inaccurate portrayal—and one reason was, that was his character, but another reason was that he had no dog in the fight—and his estimate of the number of people—I think it was 741 or 742 that we suddenly had on a piece of paper somewhere—of any significance was as follows. He said, “I’ll tell you right now that 700 of them haven’t done a damn thing except get in the way of somebody capturing them.”
He states that when the existence of overseas "black prisons" was publicly exposed in 2005, George II's motive in transferring prisoners out of these facilities and into Guantanamo was "principally so they could get some hardcore terrorists to Guantánamo"—which was otherwise largely occupied by innocents.
He reveals that "when 9/11 went down there was no interrogation capability in the United States, other than in the Federal Bureau of Investigation. There was none. Everything the military had was geared still to the Cold War, everything the CIA had had been dismantled, and the FBI had maybe . . . there were maybe two dozen. Here we have this attack, and then we captured people, and we had no interrogation capability other than a small contingent in the Bureau."
Yet, after the FBI interrogators "proved their worth," Wilkerson says, "they were sidelined."
[I]t was something this administration almost made a cult of doing—not just on interrogation, but on almost everything, whether it was Iraq, whether it was the Middle East in general, whether it was North Korea. The attitude was: Don’t talk to me from a position of expertise, talk to me from a position of fixed religious adamancy, you know.
He estimates that BushCo interned tens of thousands of people in the War on Terra: "For Iraq, Afghanistan, secret prisons, Guantánamo, people who were being held in prisons in other countries on our behalf—the highest figure I ever came to was about 65,000, but it could have well been more than that".
He states that "with the exception of Knight Ridder, now McClatchy," "just about all" US media outlets cooperated with Cheney in using false information derived from torture to justify Operation Iraqi Fiefdom.
That the media to this day continues to enable Cheney, though he is both mad, and a killer, may be nauseating, but it is hardly unprecedented.
I was nonplussed, as a young journalist, to learn in the early 1980s that the quickest way to success in big-time traditional journalism seemed to be to take a shot at the president. For John Hinckley, after having attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan as part of a looney-tune campaign to win the heart of actress Jodie Foster, began regularly placing pieces in Newsweek . . . submitted from St. Elizabeth's Hospital for the Insane.
Charles Manson—mad as a hatter—used to periodically dance across my television set in "interviews" of up to an hour, wherein he was allowed by network bobbleheads to "explain" his vision of the world.
When Ted Bundy, on the eve of his execution, soberly intoned that "pornography" lay at the root of all his many crimes, he immediately became the darling of wingers everywhere, who have continued to religiously churn out his words, as if a new sort of bible.
So Dick Cheney, destroyer of worlds, described by a man who should know as today out of his gourd, ritually and routinely trotted out to TV studios and speaker's rostrums across the land, there to give us the Truth?
Why not?
Any good news from this Wilkerson interview?
Maybe.
In re investigations and prosecutions, Wilkerson says:
My wife thinks that ultimately there’s going to be something. I’m a little more cynical than she, but she’s convinced that this investigation that’s been going on [by John Durham]—very low-key, the guy’s very persistent, he’s very determined, he reminds me of [Patrick] Fitzgerald on the Valerie Plame case, and his starting point is the destruction of the videotapes, and I’m told he’s got a plan, and he’s following that plan, and I’m told that plan is bigger than I think.
We shall see. Meanwhile, we shall have Deranged Dick, to keep us all company. Still.
(This piece, illustrated, also available in red.)