Washington – A top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell said Monday that wrongheaded ideas for the handling of foreign detainees arose from White House and Pentagon officials who argued that “the president of the United States is all- powerful” and the Geneva Conventions irrelevant.
In an interview, former Powell chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson also said President Bush was “too aloof, too distant from the details” of postwar planning. Underlings exploited Bush’s detachment and made poor decisions, Wilkerson said.
Wilkerson blamed Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and like-minded aides. He said Cheney must have sincerely believed that Iraq could be a spawning ground for new terrorist assaults in other countries, because “otherwise I have to declare him a moron, an idiot or a nefarious bastard.”
On the question of detainees picked up in Afghanistan and other fronts in the war on terrorism, Wilkerson said Bush heard two sides of an impassioned argument within his administration. Abuse of prisoners, and even the deaths of some who had been interrogated in Afghanistan and elsewhere, have bruised the U.S. image abroad and undermined support for the Iraq war.
Cheney’s office, Rumsfeld aides and others argued “that the president of the United States is all-powerful, that as commander in chief the president of the United States can do anything he damn well pleases,” Wilkerson said.
On the other side, Wilkerson said, were Powell, others at the State Department, top military brass and occasionally Condoleezza Rice, who was then national security adviser. Powell raised frequent and loud objections, his former aide said.
Wilkerson said Bush tried to work out a compromise in 2001 and 2002 that recognized that the war on terrorism was different from past wars and required greater flexibility in handling prisoners who don’t belong to an enemy state or follow the rules themselves.
Bush’s stated policy was defensible but was undermined almost immediately in practice, Wilkerson said. In the field, the U.S. followed the policies of hard-liners who wanted essentially unchecked ability to detain and harshly interrogate prisoners, he said.
