Category: Iraq

U.S. Ambassador to Syria in charge of recruiting Arab/Muslim death squads

Robert Ford, US Ambassador to Syria

by Wayne Madsen

WMR has been informed by reliable sources that the U.S. ambassador to Syria, Robert S. Ford, is the key State Department official who has been responsible for recruiting Arab “death squads” from Al Qaeda-affiliated units in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, and Chechnya to fight against Syrian military and police forces in embattled Syria. Ford served as the Political Officer at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad from 2004 to 2006 under Ambassador John Negroponte, the U.S. ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985. Negroponte was a key figure in the covert U.S. program to arm the Nicaraguan contras and his support for vicious paramilitary units in El Salvador and Honduras earned him the nickname of “Mr. Death Squad.”

Negroponte tasked Ford with implementing the “El Salvador option” in Iraq, the use of Iraqi Shi’a irregulars and Kurdish Pesh Merga paramilitary forces to target for assassination and kidnapping/torture Iraqi insurgency leaders in Iraq and across the border in Syria. The operation was named for Negroponte’s death squad operation in Central America in the 1980s.

Ford has become the point man in the recruitment of Arabs and Muslims from the Middle Eastand beyond to battle against the security forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad. The U.S.-backed terrorists have not only carried out attacks on Syrian security forces but have also massacred civilians in “false flag” operations later blamed on Syrian government forces. WMR has been informed that Ford’s operations in Syria are being carried out with the assistance of Israel’s Mossad.

The “El Salvador” option has also been used in Libya, where Al Qaeda irregulars, drawn from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen, have been carrying out murders of Libyan civilians, especially black Libyans and African guest workers, on behalf of the Libyan rebel government. Some of the murders of civilians have been blamed on pro-Muammar Qaddafi forces but they have, in fact, been carried out by Al Qaeda units fighting with the rebels and which are being directed by CIA and MI-6 advisers. Ford has been providing advice to the Libyan rebels on how to carry out their death squad attacks.

From 2006 to 2008, Ford served as U.S. ambassador to Algeria, a nation that opposes the Libyan rebel government and a nation that has begun to see a re-surgence of “Al Qaeda” terrorist attacks against Algerian government targets. In fact, Algeria is viewed as the next domino to fall as the U.S. seeks to establish total military and political hegemony over North Africa.

WMR has learned from a source who was recently in Libya that the Libyan rebel transitional government has agreed to allow the U.S. to establish permanent military bases in Libya, including on the Algerian border. The rebels have also agreed to permit an American to serve as the chief political officer for the planned Libyan transitional advisory body due to be organized by NATO and the United Nations. The body will be modeled on the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.

www.opinion-maker.org, 12. Sep, 2011

September 15, 2011
Former BP boss, the ‘Turkish’ conduit and the Zionist Banker

Tony Hayward in line for multimillion windfall after Iraq oil deal

Hayward, who quit BP 14 months ago following the Deepwater Horizon disaster, will be chief executive of Genel Energy PLC, which has oil reserves in Kurdistan (sic.)

Former BP chief executive Tony Hayward is in line for a windfall after his investment vehicle signed a deal with Turkey's Genel. Photograph: Toby Melville/REUTERS

Tony Hayward has sealed a deal to exploit the oil fields of Iraq’s Kurdistan region, landing the former BP boss an expected windfall of around £14m.

Hayward’s return to the oil industry was finalised on Wednesday as his new investment vehicle, called Vallares, agreed a merger with Genel Energy International of Turkey. The deal will deliver an estimated £176m windfall for Hayward and his fellow backers of Vallares, including Nat Rothschild.

Hayward said the deal would allow Vallares to exploit “one of the last great frontiers in the oil and gas industry”.

“Arguably, it [Kurdistan (sic.)] is the last big onshore ‘easy’ oil province available for exploration by private companies anywhere in the world,” he added.

The combined company will be named Genel Energy PLC, and aims to join the FTSE 100 by early 2012.

Hayward, who quit BP 14 months ago following the Deepwater Horizon disaster, will be chief executive of the combined company, sealing his return to the ranks of major oil firm bosses. On a conference call with reporters he refused to discuss how the transformation of his fortunes over the last year contrasted with the ongoing struggle faced by those affected by the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Genel holds proved and probable reserves of 356m barrels of oil. It is well-placed to tap Kurdistan’s (sic.) huge reserves of hydrocarbons, with an estimated 40bn barrels of oil still to be discovered. Hayward compared the region’s potential to that of the North Sea.

Vallares will issue $2.1bn (£1.3bn) worth of new shares, and use the proceeds to buy Genel in a 50:50 merger that will see the Turkish firm merge with Vallares and take its share listing through a “reverse takeover”.

Vallares was created by Hayward, Rothschild and two other businessmen earlier this year, raising £1.35bn through a stock market flotation.

Under the terms in which Vallares was created, the four co-founders will share a windfall worth 6.67% of the group’s value once it has completed its first major deal, in return for injecting a total £100m at its creation. That means the quartet will share around £170m, depending on their original stakes. The split of the £100m was not made public, but Hayward reportedly contributed £8m.

Mehmet Sepil, the current CEO of Genel, was hit with a record fine of almost £1m for insider trading in February 2010. The Financial Services Authority imposed the penalty after Sepil, and two colleagues, bought shares in Heritage Oil following confidential test results that revealed that Heritage and Genel had made a major oil discovery. Sepil insisted that he had not realised that this breached insider dealing rules.

Sepil will become president of the new company, but will not serve on its board. Some analysts have questioned whether, given this fine, Genel would have been allowed to list in London with Sepil at the helm.

City grandee Rodney Chase will chair the company. He insisted on Wednesday that Genel Energy will show “total adherence” to City rules. Chase added that the merger with Genel showed that companies from around the world could be attracted to list in London.

www.guardian.co.uk, 7 September 2011

[2]

The City forgives trespasses – perhaps too readily when money talks

Only months after Tony Hayward’s near-death experience at BP, he’s back in the oil business

Julia Finch

Tony Hayward is in effect using his name in the City to give cover to a chief executive who was fined £1m by the FSA. Photograph: Win Mcnamee/Getty Images

The City is a forgiving place for those with an aptitude for making money – and losing it. Tony Hayward is set to march back into leadership with a London-listed oil company only months after presiding over a near-death experience for BP.

The Vallares investment vehicle that Hayward recently established with his financier friend Nat Rothschild has merged with Kurdistan (sic.) oil explorer Genel Energy International of Turkey. Hayward will bring it to market under the Genel name via an initial public offering making paper profits for himself and Rothschild of many millions of pounds each.

But Hayward is, in effect, using his name in the City to give cover to Genel’s chief executive, Mehmet Sepil. The Turkish businessman was fined nearly £1m by the UK’s Financial Services Authority for insider dealing around an earlier potential – but ultimately unsuccessful – merger of Genel with London-listed Heritage Oil.

Sepil would probably find it very difficult to bring his company to market himself, so he needs a fine local name to front his business – especially as Genel could soon end up in the FTSE 100 group of leading companies and therefore be automatically included in many workers’ pension funds.

Outsiders might think that Hayward is not an obvious choice. BP has sold tens of billions of pounds’ worth of assets to pay for the cost of potential liabilities in the aftermath of the Gulf of Mexico blowout. Shares in the company continue to trade some 30% below where they were before the accident 18 months ago and speculation continues that it may need to break itself up to create new value.

Clearly, Hayward cannot be held solely responsible for the Macondo oilwell disaster. The facts suggest there were very many different parties who played a role.

But still – like the bankers who have largely got off scot-free in the UK despite blowing up the financial system – it adds to a feeling that the City’s willingness to forgive is inappropriate, if not irresponsible. And it adds to the sense of a race to the bottom among stock markets keen to pull in petro-dollar businesses without much regard for corporate social responsibility.

www.guardian.co.uk, 7 September 2011

September 10, 2011
Libya and Syria: The Neocon Plan to Attack Seven Countries in Five Years

Kurt Nimmo

In the video below, former four star general and NATO commander Wesley Clark talks about the neocon plan to invade seven countries in five years. Included in the plan was an attack on Libya. Clark mentions the plan at two minutes, 26 seconds into the video.

The video was recorded on October 3, 2007, at the Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco.

Clark’s revelation is nothing new, although it reminds us that the attack on Libya fits into a larger context and there are horrific conflicts to come if the globalists have their way.

Following the election of Obama and a reshuffling of the same old deck in Congress in 2008, it was believed the bad old days of neocon wars were finally behind us. Obama said he would close down the wars and bring home the troops. Instead, he intensified the effort to spread chaos, mayhem and mass murder in the Middle East and South Asia, thus underscoring the fact there is absolutely no difference between Democrats and Republicans when it comes to creative destruction (it is telling that the neocon Michael Leeden has used the term – creative destruction is a Marxist concept).

Clark has talked about the neocon plan on several occasions. He said the following during a speech at the University of Alabama in October of 2006, recounting a conversation with a general at the Pentagon:

I said, “Are we still going to invade Iraq?” “Yes, Sir,” he said, “but it’s worse than that.” I said, “How do you mean?” He held up this piece of paper. He said, “I just got this memo today or yesterday from the office of the Secretary of Defense upstairs. It’s a… five-year plan. We’re going to take down seven countries in five years. We’re going to start with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, then Libya, Somalia, Sudan, we’re going to come back and get Iran in five years. I said, “Is that classified, that paper?” He said, “Yes Sir.” I said, “Well, don’t show it to me, because I want to be able to talk about it.”

The neocons, of course, are merely one of a number of establishment factions, all of them reading from the same script. Obama’s attack on Libya and the impending attack on Syria under the ruse popularly known as the “Arab Spring” (pushed by elite NGOs and the CIA) is interchangeable with the Bush regime’s call to action against the Axis of Evil. The only difference between Democrat Obama and the (supposedly) Republican neocons (who have roots in Trotskyism) is that the neocons are decidedly Israeli-centric in their geopolitical stance.

The global elite do not care about Israel or any other nation-state, but are not above using the neocons – who are highly organized and motivated (despite propaganda depicting them as inept) – in their quest to destroy Arab and Muslim nationalism that directly threatens their drive for hegemonic rule (in particular, Sharia law with its restrictions on banking poses a threat to the banksters).

Syria is the next target followed by the big Kahuna, Iran. For the globalists, who are determined to wreck all nation-states and eradicate national sovereignty and borders, the fact this effort will precipitate the destruction of the “world’s policeman,” the United States, is an extra added bonus.

Multiple wars in multiple and far-stretched “theaters” will ultimately bankrupt the United States, as Ron Paul and a handful of others have warned. Obama has made if perfectly clear that the U.S. will not leave Iraq and Afghanistan and plans to continue attacking Pakistan and failed states in Africa where the CIA cut-out al-Qaeda has appeared on cue.

Wesley Clark’s warning is prescient, but nearly a decade too late. Clark is, at best,disingenuous because he himself a war criminal for the role he played in the slaughter of civilians in Yugoslavia.

www.infowars.com, September 2, 2011

September 4, 2011
MI5 former chief decries ‘war on terror’

Lady Eliza Manningham-Buller uses BBC lecture to criticise ‘unhelpful’ term, attack Iraq invasion and suggest al-Qaida talks

Richard Norton-Taylor

MI5's former director general Lady Eliza Manningham-Buller during her 2011 BBC Reith lecture. Photograph: Jeff Overs/BBC/PA

Lady Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former head of MI5, delivered a withering attack on the invasion of Iraq, decried the term “war on terror”, and held out the prospect of talks with al-Qaida.

Recording her first BBC Reith lecture on the theme, Securing Freedom, she made clear she believed the UK and US governments had not sufficiently understood the resentment that had been building up among Arab people, which was only compounded by the war against Iraq.

Before an audience which included Theresa May, the home secretary, she also said the 9/11 attacks were “a crime, not an act of war”. “So I never felt it helpful to refer to a war on terror”.

Young Arabs, she said, had no opportunity to choose their own rulers. “For them an external enemy was a unifying way to address some of their frustrations.”They were also united by the plight of Palestinians, a view that the west was exploiting their oil and supporting dictators. “It was wrong to say all terrorists belonged to al-Qaida,” added Manningham-Buller.

Pursuing a theme which some in the audience may have been astounded to hear from a former boss of MI5, she said terrorist campaigns – she mentioned Northern Ireland as an example – could not be solved militarily. She described the invasion of Iraq as a “distraction in the pursuit of al-Qaida”. She added: “Saddam Hussein was a ruthless dictator but neither he nor his regime had anything to do with 9/11.” The invasion, she said, “provided an arena for jihad”, spurring on UK citizens to resort to terror.

September 11 was a “monstrous crime” but it needed a considered response, an appreciation of the causes and roots of terrorism, she said later in answers to questions. She said she hoped there were those – she implied in western governments – who were considering having “talks with al-Qaida”.

Some way must be found of approaching them, she suggested, though she said she did not know how, at the moment, that could be done.

Manningham-Buller, who retired in 2007, attacked the invasion of Iraq in an interview with the Guardian in 2009. However, she has never before expressed such antipathy towards the prevailing policies and rhetoric of the government which she had to endure when she was in office. The lecture is to be broadcast on Radio 4 on 6 September, and entitled Terror.

www.guardian.co.uk, 2 September 2011

September 4, 2011
Meet Professor Juan Cole, Consultant to the CIA

“Democracy Now?”

by JOHN WALSH

Juan Cole is a brand name that is no longer trusted. And that has been the case for some time for the Professor from Michigan. After warning of the “difficulties” with the Iraq War, Cole swung over to ply it with burning kisses on the day of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. His fervor was not based on Saddam Hussein’s fictional possession of weapons of mass destruction but on the virtues of “humanitarian imperialism.”

Thus on March 19, 2003, as the imperial invasion commenced, Cole enthused on his blog: “I remain (Emphasis mine.) convinced that, for all the concerns one might have about the aftermath, the removal of Saddam Hussein and the murderous Baath regime from power will be worth the sacrifices that are about to be made on all sides.” Now, with over 1 million Iraqis dead, 4 million displaced and the country’s infrastructure destroyed, might Cole still echo Madeline Albright that the price was “worth it”? Cole has called the Afghan War “the right war at the right time” and has emerged as a cheerleader for Obama’s unconstitutional war on Libya and for Obama himself.

Cole claims to be a man of the left and he appears with painful frequency on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now as the reigning “expert” on the war on Libya. This is deeply troubling – on at least two counts. First, can one be a member of the “left” and also an advocate for the brutal intervention by the Great Western Powers in the affairs of a small, relatively poor country? Apparently so, at least in Democracy Now’sversion of the “left.” Second, it appears that Cole’s essential function these days is to convince wavering progressives that the war on Libya has been fine and dandy. But how can such damaged goods as Cole credibly perform this marketing mission so vital to Obama’s war?

Miraculously, Cole got just the rehabilitation he needed to continue with this vital propaganda function when it was disclosed by the New York Times on June 15 that he was the object of a White House inquiry way back in 2005 in Bush time.   The source and reason for this leak and the publication of it by the NYT at this time, so many years later, should be of great interest, but they are unknown.   Within a week of the Timespiece Cole was accorded a hero’s welcome on Democracy Now, as he appeared with retired CIA agent Glenn Carle who had served 23 years in the clandestine services of the CIA in part as an “interrogator.” Carl had just retired from the CIA at the time of the White House request and was at the time employed at the National Intelligence Council, which authors the National Intelligence Estimate.

It hit this listener like a ton of bricks when it was disclosed in Goodman’s interview that Cole was a long time “consultant” for the CIA, the National Intelligence Council and other agencies. Here is what nearly caused me to keel over when I heard it (From the Democracy Nowtranscript.):

AMY GOODMAN: So, did you know Professor Cole or know of him at the time you were asked? And can you go on from there? What happened when you said you wouldn’t do this? And who was it who demanded this information from you, said that you should get information?

GLENN CARLE: Well, I did know Professor Cole. He was one of a large number of experts of diverse views that the National Intelligence Council and my office and the CIA respectively consult with to challenge our assumptions and understand the trends and issues on our various portfolios. So I knew him that way. And it was sensible, in that sense, that the White House turned to my office to inquire about him, because we were the ones, at least one of the ones—I don’t know all of Mr. Cole’s work—who had consulted with him. (Emphases mine.)

That seems like strange toil for a man of the “left.” But were the consultations long drawn out and the association with the CIA a deep one?   It would appear so. Again from the transcript:

AMY GOODMAN: Well, the way James Risen (the NYT reporter) writes it, he says, “Mr. Carle said [that] sometime that year, he was approached by his supervisor, David Low, about Professor Cole. [Mr.] Low and [Mr.] Carle have starkly different recollections of what happened. According to Mr. Carle, [Mr.] Low returned from a White House meeting one day and inquired who Juan Cole was, making clear [that] he wanted [Mr.] Carle to gather information on him. Mr. Carle recalled [his] boss saying, ‘The White House wants to get him.’”

GLENN CARLE: Well, that’s substantially correct. The one nuance, perhaps, I would point out is there’s a difference between collecting information actively, going out and running an operation, say, to find out things about Mr. Cole, or providing information known through interactions. (Emphasis mine.) I would characterize it more as the latter.

And later in the interview Carle continues:

On the whole, Professor Cole and I are in agreement. The distinction I make is it wasn’t publicly known information that was requested; it was information that officers knew of a personal nature about Professor Cole, which is much more disturbing.There was no direct request that I’m aware, in the two instances of which I have knowledge, for the officers actively to seek and obtain, to conduct—for me to go out and follow Professor Cole. But if I knew lifestyle questions or so on, to pass those along. (Emphasis mine.)That’s how I—which is totally unacceptable.

It would seem then that the interaction between the CIA operatives and Cole was long standing and sufficiently intimate that the CIA spooks could be expected to know things about Cole’s lifestyle and personal life. It is not that anyone should give two figs about Cole’s personal life which is more than likely is every bit as boring as he claims. But his relationship with the CIA is of interest since he is an unreconstructed hawk. What was remarkable to me at the time is that Goodman did not pick up on any of this. Did she know before of Cole’s connections? Was not this the wrong man to have as a “frequent guest,” in Goodman’s words, on the situation in the Middle East?

This is not to claim that Cole is on a mission for the CIA to convince the left to support the imperial wars, most notably at the moment the war on Libya. Nor is this a claim that the revelation about the White House seeking information on Cole was a contrived psyops effort to rehabilitate Cole so that he could continue such a mission. That cannot be claimed, because there is as yet no evidence for it. But information flows two ways in any consultation, and it is even possible that Cole was being loaded with war-friendly information in hopes he would transmit it.

Cole is anxious to promote himself as a man of the left as he spins out his rationale for the war on Libya. At one point he says to Goodman (3/29), “We are people of the left. We care about the ordinary people. We care about workers.” It is strange that a man who claims such views dismisses as irrelevant the progress that has come to the people of Libya under Gaddafi, dictator or not. (Indeed what brought Gaddafi down was not that he was a dictator but that he was not our dictator.) In fact Libya has the highest score of all African countries on the UN’s Human Development Index (HDI) and with Tunisia and Morocco the second highest level of literacy. The HDI is a comparative measure of life expectancy, literacy, education and standards of living for countries worldwide.

Whither the Left on the Question of Intervention?

None of this is all too surprising given Cole’s status as a “humanitarian” hawk. But it is outrageous that he is so often called on by Democracy Now for his opinion. One of his appearances there was in a debate on the unconstitutional war in Libya, with CounterPunch’s estimable Vijay Prashad taking the antiwar side and Cole prowar. It would seem strange for the left to have to debate the worth of an imperial intervention. Certainly if one goes back to the days of the Vietnam War there were teach-ins to inform the public of the lies of the U.S. government and the truth about what was going on in Vietnam. But let us give Democracy Now the benefit of the doubt and say that the debate was some sort of consciousness raising effort. Why later on invite as a frequent guest a man who was the pro-war voice in the debate? That is a strange choice indeed.

This writer does not get to listen to Democracy Now every day. But I have not heard a full-throated denunciation of the war on Libya from host or guests. Certainly according to a search on the DN web site, Cynthia McKinney did not appear as a guest nor Ramsey Clark after their courageous fact finding tour to Libya. There was only one all out denunciation of the war – on the day when the guests were Rev. Jesse Jackson and Vincent Harding who was King’s speechwriter on the famous speech “Beyond Vietnam” in 1967 in which King condemned the U.S. war on Vietnam. Jackson and the wise and keenly intelligent Harding were there not to discuss Libya but to discuss the MLK Jr. monument. Nonetheless Jackson and Harding made clear that they did not like the U.S. war in Libya one bit, nor the militarism it entails.

If one reads CounterPunch.org, Antiwar.com or The American Conservative, one knows that one is reading those who are anti-interventionist on the basis of principle. With Democracy Now and kindred progressive outlets, it’s all too clear where a big chunk of the so-called “left” stands, especially since the advent of Obama.   In his superb little book Humanitarian Imperialism Jean Bricmont criticizes much of the left for falling prey to advocacy of wars, supposedly based on good intentions. And Alexander Cockburn has often pointed out that many progressives are actually quite fond of “humanitarian” interventionism.   Both here and in Europe this fondness seems to be especially true of Obama’s latest war, the war on Libya . It is little wonder that the “progressives” are losing their antiwar following to Ron Paul and the Libertarians who are consistent and principled on the issue of anti-interventionism.

Democracy Now, quo vadis? Wherever you are heading, you would do well to travel without Juan Cole and his friends.

John V. Walsh can be reached at John.Endwar@gmail.com After wading through Cole’s loose prose and dubious logic to write this essay, the author suspects that the rejection of Cole by the Yale faculty was the result of considerations that had little to do with neocon Bush/Cheney operatives.

www.counterpunch.org,

September 3, 2011
Ex-Bush Official Col. Lawrence Wilkerson: “I am Willing to Testify” If Dick Cheney is Put on Trial

As former Vice President Dick Cheney publishes his long-awaited memoir, we speak to Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. “This is a book written out of fear, fear that one day someone will ‘Pinochet’ Dick Cheney,” says Wilkerson, alluding to the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who was arrested for war crimes. Wilkerson also calls for George W. Bush and Cheney to be held accountable for their crimes in office. “I’d be willing to testify, and I’d be willing to take any punishment I’m due,” Wilkerson said. We also speak to Salon.com political and legal blogger Glenn Greenwald about his recent article on Cheney, “The Fruits of Elite Immunity.” “Dick Cheney goes around the country profiting off of this sleazy, sensationalistic, self-serving book, basically profiting from his crimes, and at the same time normalizing the idea that these kind of policies…are perfectly legitimate choices to make. And I think that’s the really damaging legacy from all of this,” says Greenwald. [includes rush transcript]

Guests:

Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005.

Glenn Greenwald, constitutional law attorney and political and legal blogger for Salon.com.

AMY GOODMAN: Today marks the official launch of one of most anticipated memoirs of any top Bush administration official. I’m talking about former Vice President Dick Cheney’s 576-page memoir, In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir. Cheney has begun a publicity blitz to promote his new book, with a string of TV appearances scheduled on Fox News Channel, as well as C-SPAN and the major networks. He appeared on The Today Show this morning. This is an excerpt of his pre-taped interview with Jamie Gangel that aired last night on NBCNews Dateline.

JAMIE GANGEL: In your view, we should still be using enhanced interrogation?

DICK CHENEY: Yes.

JAMIE GANGEL: Should we still be waterboarding terror suspects?

DICK CHENEY: I would strongly support using it again if we had a high-value detainee and that was the only way we can get him to talk.

JAMIE GANGEL: People call it torture. You think it should still be a tool?

DICK CHENEY: Yes.

JAMIE GANGEL: Secret prisons?

DICK CHENEY: Yes.

JAMIE GANGEL: Wiretapping?

DICK CHENEY: Well, with the right approval.

JAMIE GANGEL: You say it is one of the things you are proudest of, and you would do it again in a heartbeat.

DICK CHENEY: It was controversial at the time. It was the right thing to do.

JAMIE GANGEL: No apologies?

DICK CHENEY: No apologies.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Dick Cheney speaking to Jamie Gangel onNBC Dateline. Cheney says his memoir is loaded with revelations. He told Gangel, quote, “There are going to be heads exploding all over Washington.”

In addition to unequivocally defending what he calls “tough interrogations” on captured terrorism suspects, Cheney writes he argued against softening the president’s speeches on Iraq. He says he sees no need for the administration to apologize for erroneously claiming Iraq hunted for uranium in Niger. Cheney also reveals he tried to have former Secretary of State Colin Powell removed from the cabinet for expressing doubts about the Iraq war. And Cheney notes he unsuccessfully urged President George W. Bush to bomb Syria in June 2007.

One of those to come under the most scrutiny in the book is Bush’s former Secretary of State, Colin Powell. This is an excerpt of Cheney’s interview with Jamie Gangel, again from Dateline.

JAMIE GANGEL: The portrait you paint of Colin Powell makes it sound as if he was disloyal and undermining the administration.

DICK CHENEY: Well, those are your words. I don’t think I say it as harshly as you have presented it. I did feel that the State Department did not serve the president well. I would hear discussions, for example, that General Powell had objected to or opposed our operations in Iraq. But that never happened sitting around the table in the National Security Council. It was the kind of thing that seemed to be said outside to others.

AMY GOODMAN: To discuss former Vice President Dick Cheney’s version of history as outlined in his book In My Time, we’re joined from Washington, D.C., by Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Lieutenant Wilkerson. Can you respond to what Cheney just said on NBC, Colonel Wilkerson?

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Amy, listening to your recitation—yeah, listening to your recitation of events at the head of the show and then your in-depth interview with the gentleman from Vermont, particularly the deaths in Afghanistan of American and allied troops and the devastation of Hurricane Irene, I think I could characterize Cheney’s book as singularly insignificant. That said, I think his use of phrases like those that were quoted — “exploding heads all over Washington” — as my former boss and former Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Face the Nation on Sunday, is more of a grocery store tabloid, and certainly not the kind of language that a former vice president of the United States of America should be using. Again, like Brent Scowcroft, I think in 2003 or 2004 in an interview with The New Yorker magazine, I simply don’t recognize Dick Cheney anymore.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about what he had to say about your boss, about General Colin Powell and his views on the Iraq war.

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: The most inciteful thing—with a C, not an S—that the Vice President apparently has put in his book, due to excerpts I’ve seen and so forth—I have not read the book, I have to say that; I do not have a copy of it, not sure I’m going to buy a copy of it—was that he had something to do with Colin Powell leaving in January 2005. That’s utter nonsense. Colin Powell had told the president of the United States, the president-elect of the United States, that he’d be a one-term secretary. He had told all of us that, “us” being his inner team and also the team that he used most confidentially and most often within the State Department. In fact, when he asked me to be his secretary—to be his chief of staff in August of 2002, he was very kind to me. He said, “Look, you can stay on beyond the turn of the year and so forth when I leave, because you’ll be working for Ambassador Haass, which I know you enjoy, in policy planning, and you could stay on for eight years, if the president is reelected, or as long as you wish. But if you come to work for me as my chief of staff, you will have to leave. You will have to leave very soon, and no later than December-January, ’04-’05.” So this contention by Cheney is utterly preposterous.

AMY GOODMAN: In his memoir, Cheney accuses Colin Powell of trying to undermine President Bush during the run-up to the Iraq war and tacitly allowing his deputy to leak the name of a covert CIA agent. Speaking on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, Powell defended his approach to the Iraq war.

COLIN POWELL: Mr. Cheney may forget that I’m the one who said to President Bush, if you break it, you own it. And you have got to understand that if we have to go to war in Iraq, we have to be prepared for the whole war, not just the first phase. And Mr. Cheney and many of his colleagues did not prepare for what happened after the fall of Baghdad.

AMY GOODMAN: And let me turn to, again, Vice President Cheney’s interview on NBC News Dateline with Jamie Gangel last night. In this clip, Gangel talks to Cheney about discovering there were no WMDs in Iraq.

JAMIE GANGEL: In his book, President Bush wrote he had, quote, “sickening feeling.” But you don’t seem to express the same reaction or regrets.

DICK CHENEY: Well, I didn’t have a sickening feeling. I think we did the right thing.

AMY GOODMAN: Your response, Colonel Wilkerson?

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: I, unfortunately—and I’ve admitted to this a number of times, publicly and privately—was the person who put together Colin Powell’s presentation at the United Nations Security Council on 5 February, 2003. It was probably the biggest mistake of my life. I regret it to this day. I regret not having resigned over it. So I fully support his contention that he was hardly undermining the positions of the president of the United States, particularly with regard to Iraq. He put his reputation on the line. And he has said publicly that he will be always remembered as the man who gave that presentation at the U.N. in 2003. So, again, the Vice President’s contentions are preposterous.

Furthermore, the Vice President seems to find fault with Condi, Condi Rice, the secretary after Powell, with Powell, with Armitage, with the President himself. The only person Cheney does not seem to find fault with is Cheney. I think we have a word for that kind of person. I won’t use it here on television. But I think Mr. Cheney’s view is totally, utterly, completely Mr. Cheney’s view. I doubt there are very many people in America, other than the cheerleading squad for people like Cheney, who love torture and the like, who will even read his book. Or if they do read it, they’ll read it in order to increase their revulsion of him, rather than their respect for him. And that’s a pity, because he is a former vice president.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you, Colonel Wilkerson, talking about your having written that speech for Colin Powell, how you put it together. And at that time, because there was so much skepticism, did you have doubts about what you were writing?

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Absolutely, Amy. My whole team had doubts. In fact, we asked the question early on, why wasn’t this our ambassador at the United Nations, John Negroponte, as Adlai Stevenson had done for Kennedy during a far more serious crisis in October 1962, the so-called Cuban Missile Crisis? And we all laughed and answered our own question immediately. It was because no one in the Bush administration had high poll ratings, amongst the American people or the international community. Colin Powell’s ratings were up there with Mother Teresa at the time, in the low seventies, sometimes even going up into the high seventies, low eighties. So this is the reason they put him in New York.

And I didn’t write the speech. That belongs to his speechwriters. I actually orchestrated the entire team—the White House team, the CIAteam and so forth—out at Langley at CIA headquarters. And the way we did that was under the leadership and under the respect for and really the umbrella of George Tenet, the director of Central Intelligence/head of the CIA. And George was constantly asked by me, by Colin Powell, by Rich Armitage, by Condoleezza Rice and others—she was national security adviser at the time—in front of everyone on that team, “You stand by this, George? You corroborate to the Secretary of State that you have multiple sources independently determining each one of these facts that we’re giving?” And we threw lots of the facts out. We threw literally a third of the presentation out. The unfortunate thing is that we left in what George was most convincing on, and that was the mobile biological laboratories, the existing stocks of chemical weapons, and worst of all, an active nuclear program. And as I said, I will regret that to my grave.

AMY GOODMAN: How did the intelligence get so contaminated, manipulated? How was it so wrong?

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: In my view, you have to look at each one of the so-called pillars of the presentation, the three that I just named being the most prominent. “Curveball,” we didn’t even know that term when George Tenet was presenting us the information about the mobile biological labs. Curveball, as we all know now, was an agent being run by the BND, the CIA’s equivalent in Germany. And the Germans, as well as the CIA station chief in Germany—or in Europe, actually, Tyler Drumheller, had expressed their dismay with and lack of reliability of Curveball. And yet, we went ahead and used that information. George Tenet or John McLaughlin, his deputy, never said a word about Curveball to us. They simply gave us four independently corroborable sources for the existence of the labs. They even gave us drawings, and so forth, of those labs, that had supposedly come from an Iraqi engineer who was injured in an accident that occurred in one of the labs that actually kill people, testifying to the lethality of the ingredients being used in the labs. So, we had all of this prima facie, circumstantial, if you will, evidence that George Tenet and his team presented to us, indeed representing the entire 16—at that time, 16-entity U.S. intelligence community.

The same on the chemical stocks, the same on the active nuclear program, aluminum tubes of which was a big aspect of. Colin Powell doubted them so much that John McLaughlin actually brought one of them in and rolled it around on the DCI’s conference table and explained to the Secretary of State how the metal in that tube was so expensive that it was impossible to believe that Saddam Hussein would be spending that much money on tubes that were simply for rocket shielding, which was the other explanation of what the tubes were for. So, the DCI and the deputy DCI spent a lot of time and effort trying to convince the Secretary of State not to throw things out of the presentation. Unfortunately, we left enough in that made us really sort of the laughing stock of the world afterward.

AMY GOODMAN: You said in 2009—I think this is what you’re getting to now—in the Washington Note, an online political journal, you talked about how finding a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qaeda became the main purpose for the abusive interrogation program that the Bush administration authorized in 2002.

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: In summer of 2002, my FBIcolleagues, my CIA colleagues, who will speak the truth to me, have told me that. I’ve also gleaned it from other methods that I can’t talk about here on the television. Someday they will come to light, and historians will record them. But let me explain to you how Colin Powell dealt with that in his presentation, to return to that infamous moment again. We were throwing out—he had pulled me aside in the National Intelligence Council spaces in the CIA, put me in a room, he and I alone, and he told me he was going to throw all the presentation material about the connection between Baghdad and al-Qaeda out, completely out. I welcomed that, because I thought it was all bogus.

Within about an hour, George Tenet, having scented that something was wrong with the Secretary vis-à-vis this part of his presentation, suddenly unleashes on all in his conference room that they have just gotten the results of an interrogation of a high-level al-Qaeda operative, and those results not only confirm substantial contacts between an al-Qaeda and Baghdad, the Mukhabarat and Baghdad, the secret police, if you will, but also the fact that they were training, they were actually training al-Qaeda operatives in the use of chemical and biological weapons. Well, this was devastating. Here’s the DCItelling us that a high-level al-Qaeda operative had confirmed all of this. So Powell put at least part of that back into his presentation.

We later learned that that was through interrogation methods that used waterboarding, that no U.S. personnel were present at the time—it was done in Cairo, Egypt, and it was done by the Egyptians—and that later, within a week or two period, the high-level al-Qaeda operative recanted everything he had said. We further learned that the Defense Intelligence Agency had issued immediately a warning on that, saying that they didn’t trust the reliability of it due to the interrogation methods. We were never shown that DIA dissent, and we were never told about the circumstances under which the high-level al-Qaeda operative was interrogated. Tenet simply used it as a bombshell to convince the secretary not to throw that part, which was a very effective part, if you will recall, out of his presentation.

AMY GOODMAN: Colonel Wilkerson, we also have Glenn Greenwald on the line with us from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He is a constitutional law attorney, political and legal blogger for Salon.com. His recent article on Cheney’s book is called “The Fruits of Elite Immunity.” Glenn, explain.

GLENN GREENWALD: One of the most significant aspects of the rollout of Dick Cheney’s book is that he’s basically being treated as though he’s just an elder statesman who has some controversial, partisan political views. And yet, the evidence is overwhelming, including most of what Colonel Wilkerson just said and has been saying for quite some time, and lots of other people, as well, including, for example, General Antonio Taguba, that Dick Cheney is not just a political figure with controversial views, but is an actual criminal, that he was centrally involved in a whole variety not just of war crimes in Iraq, but of domestic crimes, as well, including the authorization of warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens in violation of FISA, which says that you go to jail for five years for each offense, as well as the authorization and implementation of a worldwide torture regime that, according to General Barry McCaffrey, resulted in the murder—his word—of dozens of detainees, far beyond just the three or four cases of waterboarding that media figures typically ask Cheney about.

And yet, what we have is a government, a successor administration, the Obama administration, that announced that there will be no criminal investigations, no, let alone, prosecutions of any Bush officials for any of these multiple crimes. And that has taken these actions outside of the criminal realm and turned them into just garden-variety political disputes. And it’s normalized the behavior. And as a result, Dick Cheney goes around the country profiting off of this, you know, sleazy, sensationalistic, self-serving book, basically profiting from his crimes, and at the same time normalizing the idea that these kind of policies, though maybe in the view of some wrongheaded, are perfectly legitimate political choices to make. And I think that’s the really damaging legacy from all of this.

AMY GOODMAN: Colonel Wilkerson, do you think the Bush administration officials should be held accountable in the way that Glenn Greenwald is talking about?

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: I certainly do. And I’d be willing to testify, and I’d be willing to take any punishment I’m due. And I have to say, I agree with almost everything he just said. And I think that explains the aggressiveness, to a large extent, of the Cheney attack and of the words like “exploding heads all over Washington.” This is a book written out of fear, fear that one day someone will “Pinochet” Dick Cheney.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I thank you very much for being with us, both, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005, and Glenn Greenwald, speaking to us on that crackly phone line from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, constitutional law attorney and political and legal blogger forSalon.com. We’ll link to your article there.

This is Democracy Now! When we come back, there’s another Bush administration official on a book tour. He’s Donald Rumsfeld. And he got quite a surprise as he was traveling through Washington State. The widow of a soldier who committed suicide questioned Donald Rumsfeld. He had heard taken out. Stay with us.

www.democracynow.org, 30 August 2011

September 2, 2011