Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson talking:
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.
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.
In summer of 2002, my FBI colleagues, 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 DCI telling 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.
Glenn Greenwald talking:
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.
Discussion:
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.
– from democracynow.org