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PAUL JAY: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Washington. We continue our
series of interviews with Larry Wilkerson. Thanks for joining us again.
LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Thanks.
JAY: So you're sitting there in the hours after Colin Powell's presentation to the United
Nations. You're, if I'm reading this correctly, fairly certain that most of this intelligence
that was presented by Powell is not true.
WILKERSON: Not not true, just circumstantial. Just circumstantial.
JAY: So may turn out to be false.
WILKERSON: Yeah, could go any way. And it's not--.
JAY: Certainly not verified enough to be grounds for war.
WILKERSON: I think that's a fair way of putting it, yeah.
JAY: So time goes on. Tens of thousands of people are killed in the war, Iraqis, Americans.
So bring us from there to now and sort of what happens to the man in 1966 who went to
Vietnam to fight for truth, justice, and the American way.
WILKERSON: The thing that probably turned me off my enthusiasm for truth, justice, and
the American way more than any other element of what occurred during the Bush administration,
Cheney administration--not Iraq, not the 5 February presentation at the UN. Those were
bad enough. Not the 9/11 Commission, where essentially we were hypocrites in front of
the 9/11 Commission, saying we'd been all alerted to al-Qaeda beforehand, when in fact
we'd been alerted to the things I told you--ABM, NCLB, lowering taxes, and so forth. The thing
that really got me was torture, torture and abuse. And I agonized over coming out publicly
and speaking out, because that's not really the way I do business. That's not the way
any good soldier does business. And in October 2005, I finally made a decision that I had
to speak out, and it was all based on the fact that we had the Armed Forces of the United
States involved in what the administration was calling, euphemistically, enhanced interrogation.
We were torturing people for the Armed Forces. Abu Ghraib was just the manifestation, a tiny
little manifestation, actually, of what was happening in Afghanistan, in Iraq, at Guantanamo,
and probably elsewhere. We were actually treating people the way you saw people treated in those
photographs at Abu Ghraib. And so I had to speak out. I had to speak out. This was a
perversion of American values and a perversion of American beliefs. I thought that it was
so significant that it represented the same thing that happened to Rome when Caesar crossed
the Rubicon. It represented the same thing that happened to Germany when Hitler was able
to--when Hindenburg died and Hitler was able to consolidate both the powers of the chancellorship--or
the presidency and the powers that he had as chancellor. This was bad. This was truly
bad. We were doing something that was not only damaging to the republic but damaging
to all the people that were participating, and tearing my organization that I'd spent
my life in, 31 years in, apart at the seams. John McCain realized this immediately. John
McCain may have had some differences with people on other issues, but he had no differences
with me over this. He said it's not about them; it's about us. We do not torture.
JAY: But McCain, as a result of that conclusion, does not come to where you end up, because
if I understand it correctly,--
WILKERSON: He can't. He's a senator.
JAY: --I mean, you know, as your career develops, you have to keep saying, well, the means justifies
the end, we're fighting for a greater cause here. I don't like this means. I don't like
that means. And at some point there's an epiphany and you say, hold on here, the means and the
end actually are the same. The bigger cause here is the underlying problem. When's that
moment for you?
WILKERSON: I think most profoundly it came to me when I realized that the torture issue
was not just an aberration. It was a manifestation of where we had come as a country, that we
had built ourselves into a state. We'd been state-building since 1945. We'd been building
the national security state. We also concomitantly built, as you've pointed out on a number of
your shows, a financial apparatus around that national security state that could dominate,
at any time and place it chose to dominate, the whole American people. And those two things
happening together, the corruption of our very governance process and the fact that
we were turning into a country that knew only one way of achieving its purpose, and that
was to kill people, really troubled me. It troubled me as both an individual who'd participated
in that, from both a diplomatic and a military perspective, and it troubled me as a somewhat
historian of our republic and a teacher of presidential decision-making since World War
II and how that process had taken place. I'm not sure we can recover from this. I am not
in any way, fashion, or form sure that my grandchildren are going to live in a democratic
federal republic.
JAY: How unique are you? And what I mean by that: it's within the military professionals.
Are you on the margins? Or do you think there are others like you there?
WILKERSON: I think there are quite a few like me. Last month's issue of Proceedings, Naval
Institute Proceedings, one of the most prestigious magazines in the military, got a nice article
in there by a guy who says, let's return to the American way of war. And in that article
he essentially says what I've just told you, in more eloquent terms, that we've strayed
very far from George Washington's concept of the best way to prevent war is to be prepared
for it, not to fight it all the time.
JAY: And, just in conclusion, the man whose career yours is most linked--what's your communication
with Colin Powell? And has he come to any of these kinds of conclusions you have?
WILKERSON: In private, I have to expect that he has. Recently, when he was asked about
Donald Rumsfeld's latest book, he essentially said, he's delusional and deceptive and I
can prove both points. That's really forward-leaning in the foxhole for Colin Powell to be saying
things like that. He must have some difficult times, nights, days, whatever. But in the
end, he's a product of this very process, this very state-building that I've just described.
So to abandon it completely would require a complete reversal of his role for the past
50 years of his life. I don't think that's going to happen. There are people in the Armed
Forces who can make that sort of transformation because they have the background to make it.
He doesn't have the background to make it, and in fact has the background to keeping
clad in that iron suit of armor that is military adviser to the secretary of defense, national
security adviser to Ronald Reagan, and so forth. I don't have that straitjacket on me,
so I'm able to move a little more nimbly, if you will, intellectually, than he is. That's
not to denigrate him in any way. He's a great man, in my eyes. I just hope he's not one
of the last great men of the American Empire.
JAY: And I said finally, but here's another finally. Did President Obama make a mistake,
was he wrong not to--at least, to have a proper due process of investigation, the possibility
of crimes committed by Bush and Cheney, both on the front of torture and on the question
of the Iraq War itself?
WILKERSON: Yes. Yes. And the way I would have done that would have been to give, as Bill
Clinton did for different reasons to Janet Reno on one or two occasions, I would have
distanced myself from it as president, because I realize the political ramifications, but
I would have given Eric Holder carte blanche: do what you think is right; I will not stop
you. And I think Eric Holder would have done it. I think he would have found some guilty
people, too.
JAY: Thanks for joining us.
WILKERSON: Surely.
JAY: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.