Wayne Madsen Report

http://waynemadsenreport.com/

December 6, 2005

Retired generals and admirals subject to special investigation by Pentagon  surveillance/intelligence team.

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Retired top U.S. generals and admirals planning to attend a December 7 meeting at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Pentagon City, an office and hotel complex next to the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, have drawn the interest of a special investigation by special agents of the Department of Defense.

According to informed sources, the meeting, described as a "retreat," is to be attended by a number of former members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, former heads of intelligence agencies, and key members of the U.S. Congress, including Sen. John McCain.

The generic subject of the meeting is torture and detaining of prisoners.

The meeting is strictly a "no media" event, according to individuals familiar with its planning.

Pentagon agents have called individuals who have been invited to the meeting and inquired about details and the involvement of active duty officers.

One agent, Special Agent Fred Shaw, said to be with Defense Department security and coordinating his activities with Pentagon Inspector General Steve Anthony, also made contact with local police departments asking for assistance in tracking the movements of some of the invited attendees.

The Rumsfeld Pentagon is clearly interested in the meeting and the identities of the some 40 invited attendees.

http://lnk.nu/rawstory.com/6rx.html

(Supporting Links at Source URL)

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Diebold insider alleges company plagued by technical woes, Diebold defends 'sterling' record

12/06/2005 @ 1:44 pm

Filed by Miriam Raftery

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In an exclusive interview with RAW STORY, a whistleblower from electronic voting heavyweight Diebold Election Systems Inc. raised grave concerns about the company’s electronic voting technology and of electronic voting in general, bemoaning an electoral system the insider feels has been compromised by corporate privatization.

The Diebold insider, who took on the appellation “Dieb-Throat” in an interview with voting rights advocate Brad Friedman (BradBlog.com), was once a staunch supporter of electronic voting’s potential to produce more accurate results than punch cards.

But the company insider became disillusioned after witnessing repeated efforts by Diebold to evade meeting legal requirements or implementing appropriate security measures, putting corporate interests ahead of the interests of voters.

“I’ve absolutely had it with the dishonesty,” the insider told RAW STORY. Blasting Wally O’Dell, the current president of Diebold, the whistleblower went on to explain behind-the-scenes tactics of the company and its officers.

“There’s a lot of pressure in the corporation to make the numbers: `We don’t tell you how to do it, but do it.’ [O’Dell is] probably the number one culprit putting pressure on people,” the source said.

Diebold spokesman David Bear rebuts the charges. “Diebold has a sterling reputation in the industry," Bear said. "It’s a 144-year-old company and is considered one of the best companies in the industry."

Previous revelations from the whistleblower have included evidence that Diebold’s upper management and top government officials knew of backdoor software in Diebold’s central tabulator before the 2004 election, but ignored urgent warnings—such as a Homeland Security alert posted on the Internet.

“This is a very dangerous precedent that needs to be stopped—that’s the corporate takeover of elections,” the source warned. “The majority of election directors don’t understand the gravity of what they’re dealing with. The bottom line is who is going to tamper with an election? A lot of people could, but they assume that no one will.”

Concerns about Georgia, Ohio elections

The insider harbors suspicions that Diebold may be involved in tampering with elections through its army of employees and independent contractors. The 2002 gubernatorial election in Georgia raised serious red flags, the source said.

“Shortly before the election, ten days to two weeks, we were told that the date in the machine was malfunctioning,” the source recalled. “So we were told 'Apply this patch in a big rush.’” Later, the Diebold insider learned that the patches were never certified by the state of Georgia, as required by law.

“Also, the clock inside the system was not fixed,” said the insider. “It’s legendary how strange the outcome was; they ended up having the first Republican governor in who knows when and also strange outcomes in other races. I can say that the counties I worked in were heavily Democratic and elected a Republican.”

In Georgia’s 2002 Senate race, for example, nearly 60 percent of the state’s electorate by county switched party allegiances between the primaries and the general election.

The insider’s account corroborates a similar story told by Diebold contractor Rob Behler in an interview with Bev Harris of Black Box Voting.

Harris revealed that a program patch titled “rob-georgia.zip” was left on an unsecured server and downloaded over the Internet by Diebold technicians before loading the unauthorized software onto Georgia voting machines. “They didn’t even TEST the fixes before they told us to install them,” Behler stated, adding that machines still malfunctioned after patches were installed.

California decertified Diebold TSX touch screen machines after state officials learned that the vendor had broken state election law.

“In California, they got in trouble and tried to doubletalk. They used a patch that was not certified,” the Diebold insider said. “They’ve done this many times. They just got caught in Georgia and California.”

The whistleblower is also skeptical of results from the November 2005 Ohio election, in which 88 percent of voters used touch screens and the outcome on some propositions changed as much as 40 percent from pre-election exit polls.

“Amazing,” the Diebold insider said.

Diebold is headquartered in Ohio. Its chairman Wally O’Dell, a key fundraiser for President Bush, once promised in an invitation to a Republican fundraising dinner to deliver Ohio’s electoral votes for Bush. The staffer said the company has a deep conservative culture.

“My feeling having been really deep inside the company is that initially Diebold, being a very conservative and Republican company, felt that if they controlled an election company, they could have great influence over the outcome,” the source, a registered independent, said.

“Does that mean fixing elections? Not necessarily, but if your people are in election departments and they are biased toward Republicans, you will have an influence…I think this is what they were buying, the positioning. Obviously screwing with the software would be a homerun—and I do think that was part of their recipe for getting into the election business. But the public got involved and said 'Hey, what’s going on?' That pulled the sheet off what their plan was with these paperless voting machines.”

The difficulties of installing paper trails

Responding to public demand for paper trails, Diebold has devised a means of retrofitting its paperless TSX system with printers and paper rolls. But in Ohio’s November 2005 election, some machines produced blank paper.

The whistleblower is not surprised. “The software is again the culprit here. It’s not completely developed. I saw the exact same thing in Chicago during a demonstration held in Cook County for a committee of people who were looking at various election machines… They rejected it for other reasons.”

Asked if Ohio officials were made aware of that failure prior to the recent election, the source said, “No way. Anything goes wrong inside Diebold, it’s hush-hush.”

Most officials are not notified of failed demonstrations like the one in Cook County, the insider said, adding that most system tests, particularly those exhibited for sale are not conducted with a typical model.

California, which recently conducted a test of the system without public scrutiny that found only a three percent failure rate—far lower than earlier tests that found a 30 percent combined failure due to software crashes and printer jams.

Asked if the outcomes of the newest test should be trusted, the whistleblower, who does not know the protocols used in the California test, warned, “There’s a practice in testing where you get a pumped-up machine and pumped-up servers, and that’s what you allow them to test. Diebold does it and so do other manufacturers. It’s extremely common.”

Neither the TSX nor the older TS6 election equipment systems used by Diebold were designed to be retrofitted with paper trails. “The TSX was designed and brought to market after the paper trail issue erupted, yet it was introduced as a paperless system. But the uproar became so great… The public forced Diebold to put printers on their machines.” Adding printers to existing computer hardware together poses challenges.

The TS6 machines can’t be retrofitted with paper at all, leaving 35,000 voters in Maryland and Georgia to rely on paperless, faith-based voting.

Even if the blank paper problem could be solved, there are other serious problems with some TSX equipment. “The system that was offered to San Diego was purely experimental—the TSX and the electronic poll book, the check-in device,” the Diebold insider stated. “Voters couldn’t access the system to vote with the electronic poll book if the batteries died.” The high rate of breakdowns involving access cards for the poll book caused major problems, the source added. “The interesting part about this device is that it had never been used before. That was probably not certified.”

San Diego has since warehoused its TSX system, pending a decision by the state on whether to recertify. San Diego County now uses Diebold optical scanners—but those pose security problems as well.

Although Black Box Voting demonstrated during a demonstration in Leon County, Florida that computer experts could hack into a similar system in less than a minute and alter a memory card to switch votes, election officials still brush off concerns for additional security precautions.

San Diego County Registrar of Voters, Mikel Haas, for example, was questioned by this reporter for the city’s local paper, Citybeat. He insisted that no additional security measures were needed.

Asked if Diebold had implemented any changes to close security holes revealed by the Leon County hack, the source replied, “None that I know of.”

Informed that Haas allowed over 700 voting machines with memory cards inside to be sent home overnight with poll-workers, the insider raised alarm. “These memory cards need to be protected every single step of the way, like money. If they have people taking these machine home with memory cards, that’s out the window.”

The Diebold whistleblower also criticized election officials in San Diego and elsewhere for allowing Diebold personnel to be present when votes reach the server. “The election office’s employees—people who are paid with our tax dollars to conduct elections and have proper security elections and background check should do this – and no one else.” Manufacturers should be a mile away on election night, the source added.

The best way for concerned citizens to detect fraud is to “be there on election night” to observe vote tabulations, the insider said. But in some cities, citizens have been barred from watching votes being counted on Diebold tabulators – and in San Diego, Black Box Voting activist Jim March was arrested in July 2005 and charged with felony trespassing after entered a secured room to watch votes being counted. The charges were later dismissed.

But no amount of observation can totally protect the public from the dangers inherent in electronic voting, the whistleblower says. “People are going to end up losing their rights in many ways that they will never, never understand. For example, the new electronic databases for voter registration is a great idea, but it passes control away from local boards of elections and puts it in the hands of the states…The final database is manipulated by states instead of counties. Every state must have it. It’s mandated by [the Help America Vote Act]. It’s a sleeper issue.”

The source, who once supported the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), now concedes “it’s terrible…Most of this is a big money grab.”

The Diebold hand believes many election officials are na?ve, while others are “downright arrogant. They are serving politicians and in many cases, vendors.”

How Diebold woos state officials

The insider described a systematic process Diebold uses to woo election officials via cash doled out by lobbyists or attorneys and favors to assist budget-strapped public officials. “They promise the election directors the moon and deliver things to them that really aren’t legitimate parts of the contract.” Those promises range from providing personnel to equipping warehouses with electrical systems to recharge batteries in voting machines.

“The corporation pretty much takes over. That’s how they capture so many of these people. Diebold is making them look good and they’re not going to bite the hand that feeds them.”

Diebold creates a “monetary incentive” to stay involved via future servicing contracts after selling election equipment, the whistleblower noted, adding, “The machines are purposely complex and poorly designed.”

Noting that the GEMS software runs on Microsoft Access, Dieb-Throat observed, “There are problems that can’t be fixed. I understand they are going to redesign it around Oracle.”

Diebold spokesman David Bear denied that the company is redesigning software around an Oracle platform. “No, that’s not true to my knowledge,” he said.

Asked whether any TSX machine produced blank paper during a demonstration in Cook County, he replied, “I’m not aware of that.”

Bear initially denied that any Diebold machines in Ohio produced blank paper rolls.

“That’s not true,” he said. “They just ran an election November 8th with over 15,000 of the units and the Secretary of State was overwhelmingly pleased.” After being told of news reports describing blank paper rolls produced in Ohio, however, he replied, “It would not surprise me if a paper roll was installed upside down.”

Diebold consultant convicted for embezzlement

The Diebold insider noted that the initial GEMS system used to tabulate votes for the Diebold Opti-scan systems was designed by Jeffrey Dean, who was convicted in the early 1990s of computer-aided embezzlement. Dean was hired by Global Election Systems, which Diebold acquired in 2000. Global also had John Elder, a convicted cocaine trafficker, on its payroll. Diebold spokesman David Bear told Citybeat that Dean left shortly after the acquisition and that Elder also left “long ago.” Black Box Voting reported that Diebold gave Elder a “golden parachute” in 2004 and that he was let go only after his criminal past was revealed by BBV and mainstream publications.

But the Diebold whistleblower told RAW STORY that Elder remained working for Diebold “as recently as the summer of this year… [Elder creates ] the paper ballots for absentee voting…They were making the ballots for the November election for sure, for all over the country.”

Bear denied that Elder is still on Diebold’s payroll as either an employee or independent contractor.

“He was with the company two companies ago, never was an employee of Diebold, and worked for a company that was acquired by Diebold,” he said.

Asked if Elder works for a company producing ballots for any of California’s Diebold systems, Bear responded, “The counties contract for that. I don’t have the slightest idea… There are probably several different companies that produce ballots for California.”

Bear denied allegations that Diebold has installed uncertified patches. “Nothing is done in any state except under guidance and authority of election officials in the state.”

He also stated that the California Secretary of State’s staff has recommended recertifying the Diebold TSX system retrofitted with paper rolls.

Bear defends Diebold's record.

“In the last presidential election, over 150,000 touch screens were run. They were recognized by CalTech and MIT for having accurately captured the vote. From the presidential election 2004, they believe over 1 million more votes were captured. They singled out touch-screens; the state with the most improvement was Georgia.” (Full text of the Caltech/MIT report)

The Diebold insider says Americans who care about their vote must remain vigilant. “I don’t look for the paperless people, the corporations, to back off at all. They will continue to try to keep the public in the dark.”

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"Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." - Attributed to Josef Stalin

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4505670.stm

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Wednesday, 7 December 2005, 06:30 GMT

Bin Laden is 'alive and fighting'



The new video did not feature Bin Laden himself

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Osama Bin Laden is still alive and leading a "holy war" against the West, according to a videotaped statement by his right-hand man.

Ayman al-Zawahri was speaking in a message posted on the internet and then broadcast by al-Jazeera.

It is not clear when the video, which shows the al-Qaeda figure speaking in a white room, was filmed.

He called for attacks on oil targets and said al-Qaeda was "spreading and expanding and strengthening".

News of Bin Laden's good health was a "message of joy to all Muslims", Mr Zawahri said.

Al-Qaeda, he said, was a "popular organisation confronting a new Crusader Zionist Western and Israeli campaign, in defence of all violated Muslim lands".

In Iraq, he said, the US-led coalition was "receiving blows each day", while the Iraqi government was "begging Americans not to leave because they know the day Americans leave is the day they are finished".

He urged attacks on oil installations in Islamic countries "because most of the revenues of this oil go to the enemies of Islam".

Ayman al-Zawahri, an eye surgeon by training, is seen as the chief ideologue of al-Qaeda.

He is believed by some experts to have been the "operational brains" behind the 11 September 2001 attacks in the United States.

He was number two - behind only Bin Laden - in the 22 Most Wanted Terrorists List announced by the US government in 2001 and has a $25m bounty on his head.

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MORE...

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http://lnk.nu/localnewsleader.com/6sc.html

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Bin Laden still leading war: Zawahri video

Staff and agencies
07 December, 2005

By Heba Kandil

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DUBAI - Al Qaeda‘s leader Osama bin Laden is still alive and leading a holy war against the West, the group‘s deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahri said in an Internet video on Wednesday.

"I bring a message of joy to all Muslims and mujahideen that al Qaeda, thanks to God, is spreading and expanding and strengthening," Zawahri said in a video posted on a Web site frequently used by militants.

"Its prince Sheikh Osama bin Laden, may God protect him, is still leading its jihad," he said, speaking against a white background to an interviewer off-camera who said the interview was to mark the fourth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks on U.S. cities -- carried out by al Qaeda.

"(Qaeda) has transformed into a popular organization confronting a new crusader Zionist campaign, in defense of all violated Muslim lands," said Zawahri, who was wearing a black turban and white robe.

It was not clear exactly when or where the interview was filmed. Bin Laden and his second-in-command, Zawahri, are believed to be hiding in the border regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan and have eluded capture since the 2001 attacks.

Zawahri said the new "crusader" campaign by the United States and its Western allies was failing as evident by U.S. losses in Afghanistan and Iraq .

"America and its crusader allies have not achieved anything. Its forces in the battleground are receiving blows each day."

He discredited Iraq‘s January elections, saying only half the population turned out to vote, and blasted what he called a weak government that was swept into power.

"The (Iraqi) government is begging Americans not to leave because they know the day Americans leave is the day they are finished."

Four years after the U.S. war on Afghanistan, only the Taliban exercised real power in the country, chaos reigned in its capital Kabul, and legislative elections held in September were fraudulent as they were monitored by a biased United Nations , he said.

"If it wasn‘t for the Pakistani army‘s continuous support to Americans, they would have left (Afghanistan) a long time ago and they will leave soon, God wiling."

Zawahri last appeared in October, when he urged Muslims in a video broadcast by Al Jazeera television to help Pakistan‘s earthquake victims even though its government was an "agent" of the United States.

http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=8218

(Supporting Links at Source URL)

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December 7, 2005

Putting America Last

The 9/11 Commission report card: Feds fail

by JUSTIN RAIMONDO

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The 9/11 Commission, which still exists as a nonprofit foundation, recently graded the federal government's implementation of their recommendations, and it's a report card [.pdf] worthy of a juvenile delinquent: five Fs – and those Fs don't mean "fine" or "fantastic." We're talking capital-F failure, as in "massive intelligence failure," when it comes to five key areas:

* The commissioners were shocked – shocked! – to discover that, as the Associated Press reported it, we're "distributing federal homeland security funding to states on a 'pork-barrel' basis instead of risk."

* Incredible as it may seem, we still don't have a radio system that allows local police and fire departments to communicate with various federal and state agencies.

* There is no single "watch list" for airline travelers passing through the U.S. If Mohammed Atta and his flyboys were still around, they could pass through our airports without being noticed. That their would-be successors and emulators are doing exactly that is certain.

* Congress is forced to fly blind when it comes to domestic defenses against terrorism because this administration insists that everything must be kept secret – except, of course, what really does need to be kept secret. The intelligence budget is classified, and therefore cannot be discussed except behind closed doors, and even then only among a select few. If mistakes are made, it's best to make them in the dark: that's a nice way to cover your butt.

* Our insistence on our right to grab anyone, anywhere, declare them a terrorist, whisk them off to secret prisons, and torture them has, uh, alienated other countries whose cooperation is essential to capturing and detaining those who mean us harm.

Those Ds don't look too promising, either. "Checked bag and cargo screening" – D. "International collaboration on borders and document screening" – D. Critical infrastructure assessment – D. Government-wide information sharing – D. The list goes on and on, but most of these Ds have something in common: they are all directly related to the task of physically preventing terrorists from blowing up large numbers of people, just as they did on 9/11/01.

And, as I contemplate the prospect of getting on a plane this weekend, I can't say I'm too happy about that C in "airline passenger explosive screening."

The problem was best summed up by James Thompson, a Republican and former Illinois governor, who, according to the Financial Times, "said the greatest danger was the U.S.'s inability to remain focused on the continued threat of future attacks." Said Thompson:

"As the shock and the horror wore off, as other political and military challenges preoccupied our leaders and the press and our people, I think we've too quickly forgotten the lesson of 9/11, and the odds are very good that we're going to pay a terrible price for forgetting that lesson."

Other matters than the defense of the country preoccupied our leaders in the wake of 9/11: invading and occupying Iraq, a project that now drains scarce resources – and diverts attention – from the vital effort to protect America first. We're debating how to train Iraqi police and military units, when we should be training our own people in how best to avoid a repeat of the worst terrorist attack in our history. We're spending $6 billion a month on a war that creates more enemies, makes us less safe, and serves only to distract us from the essential task at hand – while we can't afford to link up first-responders in a common communications system.

The purpose of the government, after all, is to protect U.S. citizens on their own soil, both from foreign invaders and their fellow citizens. That's what they tell us in our high school "civics" classes, anyway. That this is far from the actual function of government may be the real and enduring lesson of 9/11.

The 9/11 commissioners are mortified that "pork" is the main ingredient of our post-9/11 recipe for preventing another attack – but it's perfectly understandable once one grasps that the whole purpose of government is to reward friends, punish enemies, and generally pig out at the public trough. Forget foreign policy "realism," for the moment: let's have a little domestic policy realism for a change.

A massive dose of this sort of realism was served up as the Katrina debacle unfolded and the American people watched their government flounder, while FEMA "fashion god" Michael Brown wondered "Can I quit now?" and "Is it time to go home yet?"

The big collapse, not only in the president's ratings, but in support for the Iraq war, started around that time, and it's no accident. Suddenly people realized that government sucks at what it is supposed to do – and, not only that, but officials are really much more focused on other matters. Government agencies don't really have the time, energy, inclination, or resources to adequately protect or assist their involuntary "clients" – because their resources are being diverted elsewhere. Government, in short, has another agenda, a hidden one, which, in that moment when Katrina dispelled our illusions, the public saw with a terrible clarity.

The United States wants to rescue the world from "Islamofascism" when it can't even rescue its own citizens as they drown in the floodwaters of New Orleans. That realization on the part of the general public was and is revolutionary in its implications. It permits all sorts of interesting and quite subversive questions to be raised, starting with: well, if they aren't protecting us, then what the heck are they doing with the tax dollars and power we give them?

"We're the government and we're here to help you" – a joke Ronald Reagan was fond of making – was funny in a lighthearted kind of way during the 1980s, that lost age of innocence: today, it qualifies as dark humor of an ominous sort.

Government exists for one reason and for one reason only: the self-perpetuation of the power, perks, and privileges of our rulers and their supporters. Has the distribution of "homeland security" funding become a way for our elected representatives to buy votes at everyone else's expense? Of course it has: that's the way the system works. This is the "democracy" we want to export to the ends of the earth, not in its corrupted form but in its purest essence.

I conclude, from this structural critique of what's wrong with our anti-terrorist effort, that: (a) our leaders will continue their policy, so vividly on display during the Katrina catastrophe, of putting America last, (b) another attack is inevitable, and (c) our rulers will take the same lesson from 9/11-II that they learned in the first instance – they'll use the occasion to grab more power and launch more wars.

I often get letters from people who take me to task for going along with the "myth" that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda were responsible for planning and carrying out the 9/11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, and pointing me toward the various "Bush knew" theories, which essentially claim we bombed ourselves. These people are a trifle cracked, to be sure, but their obsessions reflect the underlying reality, which is that the actions of our government, far from making us safer, actually increase the danger and likelihood of terrorism on U.S. soil. Not being libertarians, most of them, the "Bush did it" crowd fails to realize that it wasn't necessary for our government to plan and carry out 9/11 – because all the factors leading to that event were in place due to the inherent nature of government institutions and personnel.

Who, then, or what, will protect us in the age of terrorism?

That's a subject for another column, but, briefly, our starting point must be to make sure our government isn't increasing the chances that terrorists will strike us once again. And the best way to do that is by reining in the War Party, ending our foreign policy of perpetual war, and, first and foremost, getting the heck out of Iraq – pronto. Some Iraqi kid whose family was killed during the bombing raids we don't hear much about is a perfect candidate for the next generation of terrorists. How long before we get a message from an Iraqi terrorist group claiming responsibility for some future horror enacted on American soil?

Not long, I fear…

LAWRENCE WILKERSON

Lawrence Wilkerson, 60, was for 16 years one of former Secretary of State Colin Powell's closest aides and was Powell's chief of staff from 2002 to 2005. The retired US Army colonel served in the Vietnam War and later was the head of the Marine War College in Quantico, Virginia. He retired with Colin Powell in January 2005.

http://lnk.nu/service.spiegel.de/6sb.html

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December 6, 2005

INTERVIEW WITH EX-POWELL AIDE WILKERSON

"A Leaderless, Directionless Superpower"

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Lawrence Wilkerson, 60, was instrumental in helping then Secretary of State Colin Powell assemble the dossier against Saddam Hussein and Iraq. Now, however, he is one of the Bush Administration's sharpest critics. He spoke with SPIEGEL about America's disdain for international law, Vice President Dick Cheney's oversized influence, and the loss of US moral authority.


DPA
The Bush Administration has lost its ethical compass, says Wilkerson.

SPIEGEL: Colonel Wilkerson, hardly an insider of the Bush Administration has ever criticized it as sharply as you are now. Why?

Wilkerson: The straw that broke the camel's back, what made me finally decide to go public, was the issue of departure from the Geneva Conventions. It was the departure from international law and treaty with regard to what I perceive to be a policy that permeated the leadership from the Vice President through the Defense Department and out to the military forces in the field. In my view, it was not only damaging to the armed forces -- and I was a member of the Army for 31 years -- but also damaging ultimately to America's image and credibility in the world and damaging to our capability to win this conflict against Osama Bin Laden and Abu Musab al Zarqawi and others like them. You can't win what essentially is a war of ideas by departing from your own ideas.

SPIEGEL: How has it come to this?

Wilkerson: What I saw from my perspective at the State Department was essentially involvement in what I prefer to refer to as the statutory process. The President gets advice from every side and ultimately goes away and makes his decision. What I saw was the President making a decision that appeared to be a compromise. He said it was indeed a new enemy and perhaps Geneva did not pertain. But at the same time he said very clearly in the same memorandum, which I saw, that all detainees should be treated in accordance with American values and the spirit of Geneva.

SPIEGEL: So what went wrong?

Wilkerson: In execution of that decision the other side won, the side who thought that terrorists are the new beast, and they had to be dealt with differently. That happened because this is the most powerful vice president in the history of the United States, and he wanted it to happen. It was a secretive little known cabal, led by Cheney and Defense Secretary (Donald) Rumsfeld who short-cut the statutory process. In the case of Geneva they thought there were no holds barred, that the demand for intelligence was so great that there was enormous flexibility in how you interrogated prisoners. And I saw that go all the way down to the lowest level of the armed forces. And when you put those two pressures together, the demand for intelligence and the implicit fact that this isn't the old ball game, then you have opened Pandora's Box. You contaminate the armed forces and you can expect to have things like Abu Ghraib and deaths.

SPIEGEL: How many people have died in American detention?

Wilkerson: When I left the State Department, there were over 70 deaths of people in detention, some of them being investigated, some of them covered up.

SPIEGEL: Is the CIA torturing people?

Wilkerson: I don't know. If the President signed a presidential finding and authorized a certain select group of the CIA, highly trained, to do other than Geneva-type interrogation-techniques, only a very few people will know. I'm not even sure the Secretary of State would know about it.

SPIEGEL: You prepared Colin Powell's now famous speech for the Security Council in which he blamed Iraq for having weapons of mass destruction and connections to al-Qaida. Was this claim a lie to generate support for the war, as some democrats now allege?


AP
Lawrence Wilkerson.

Wilkerson: I don't know. I wish I did. I was the task force leader at the CIA, putting together Powell's presentation. I was housed there for five or six days and nights. Today, I know that the Germans warned about the credibility of their agent "Curveball", who stated that Iraq has mobile production units for biological weapons. Why wasn't I told? Why wasn't the secretary of state told? We used the information from the al-Qaida member Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libbi who claimed that Iraq was training the jihadis in chemical and biological weaponry. Now he has recanted. We are hearing that his confessions were obtained under less than Geneva methods -- waterboarding for example.

SPIEGEL: The administration was also choosing the facts that best illustrated the supposed dangers presented by Iraq and overselling the case for war, isn't that right?

Wilkerson: That is true, at least with regard to Douglas Feith, then the number three in the Pentagon. And there is no question that the vice president overstated the case. I mean, all you have to do is run his tapes. By the way, they tried to get the alleged Prague meeting between Mohammed Atta and Iraq Intelligence officials -- which was discounted by almost everyone -- into the presentation. But we refused.

SPIEGEL: Colin Powell recently said this is a blow to his reputation ...

Wilkerson: ... I call it the low point in my professional career. I mean, I look back on it, and I rack my brain again. I wasn't a novice. I had been an intelligence user for years. How did we get so fooled?

SPIEGEL: Have you been able to find an answer?

Wilkerson: Saddam Hussein was not as dumb as we thought. He actually was a very smart man. He knew his principal enemy was Iran; his second most threatening enemy was his own people. And somewhere in there was the US, but way down at the bottom. And the only way he could maintain the brusque 'I'll knock you out if you try to hit me' attitude that he did was to maintain the myth that he had WMDs. And so he managed to conduct a disinformation campaign.

SPIEGEL: Shouldn't then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice have ensured that President Bush was better advised than he proved to be?

Wilkerson: There was a single word used by countless people in the government to describe the National Security Council under Dr. Rice and that is "dysfunctional." And if you think about it for a moment, this dysfunctionality of the statutory process was a nice camouflage for the alternative decision-making process that revolved around the vice president.

SPIEGEL: Rice had the president's trust and seemed focused on becoming ever closer to him.

Wilkerson: It worked. She had her eye on the prize. And finally she became secretary of state.

SPIEGEL: The Pentagon always claimed that a stable government could be installed in Iraq within a matter of months.

Was there a climate of arrogance?

Wilkerson: Yes there was. Incredible arrogance. I call it the administration of hubris. How could anyone look at that region and believe it? As opposed to the Pentagon, we in the state department never signed up to that idea that our troops would be greeted with flowers. There were so many mistakes from the very outset of the administration -- beginning with sticking our finger in the world's eyes with our rejection of Kyoto without offering an explanation. The gracelessness, the ineptitude of how we confronted the world made foreign policy and international relations in general very difficult in the first Bush term.

SPIEGEL: Now, though, the mood has changed dramatically and the American public is no longer supportive of Bush's Iraq policies. Should the US troops be pulled out of Iraq?

Wilkerson: There are two dimensions to that. First, because Secretary Rumsfeld made the decision not to enlarge the army two years ago, it's inevitable that they'll be pulled out. Otherwise we will break our Army and Marine Corps, sometime in 2006, or 2007. That's the reality. The second and far more important dimension is the situation in Iraq. We now have to finish the job, otherwise we will, at a minimum, have a civil war and the whole Middle East would be in danger; I could see a tragedy of monumental proportions developing. So I agree 100 percent with the President that we have to stay until we get it right -- and I hope that can be done in the one to two years we have before we destroy the Army and the Marine Corps.

SPIEGEL: There is a proposal from the Democrats whereby the President should acknowledge the mistakes that have been made and then ask the country and the world for renewed support.

Wilkerson: I think many Americans, including myself, would be encouraged by some admission of fault and some change. But I don't think it's in this president's disposition and character to do that.

SPIEGEL: Isn't the loss of America's moral authority the biggest problem?


REUTERS
US President Bush and Vice President Cheney.

"Saddam Hussein was not as dumb as we thought."Wilkerson: Yes. Recently I had occasion to be on a panel with a former prime minister of Canada who said, 'It's not so much that we Canadians are anti-American, it's that we are very, very worried about a headless giant.' And that stuck with me because that is an apt metaphor in some cases for this superpower right now. It seems leaderless. It seems directionless.

SPIEGEL: Are there not indications of a more measured foreign policy now emerging?

Wilkerson: I hope so. There have been some changes, and I'm encouraged by them. Dr. Rice is doing some things that would indicate to me that she has learned and that she is working now off a sheet of music that sounds pretty sweet to our allies and friends. That's wonderful. But I still detect, especially from the vice president, a note of unbridled unilateralism that concerns me: the willingness to go it alone, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead, we're the big guy on the block, to hell with you. I mean that sort of attitude is out of place in the 21st century.

SPIEGEL: Haven't the neo-conservatives and their policies failed?

Wilkerson: They are not neo-cons. They are not new conservatives. They're Jacobins. Their predecessor is French Revolution leader Maximilien Robespierre. And to say that these people are dead, dormant or lying quiescent is not encouraging because there are enough of them left. And it's going to be incumbent on the rest of us, in this country at least, to watch these trends and make sure that their ugly head doesn't rise up and cause more problems in the future.

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Interview conducted by Georg Mascolo