Rob Kall: Okay. Yeah, i t ' s very frightening to think that the C.I.A would lie to the Secretary of State . And , do you think this happens regularly , or often enough, so we ought to be concerned that the C.I.A . cannot be trusted ?
That anybody, whether it ' s the Vice President or the President, can get the C.I.A. to lie ?
Lawrence Wilkerson:
I think that "
Rob Kall: Or another major officer?
Lawrence Wilkerson:
I think that should be a profound concern of every American . And let me characterize it for you, I think a little more complexly, and " but more accurately. It ' s not the C.I.A. as an organization that ' s lying to the President.
Indeed , there were people in the C.I.A. who contested the views that Tenet and McLaughlin were presenting to Secretary Powell and me.
There were people we didn ' t even know about , who were being h eld in abeyance, as it were, being held back from seeing the Secretary or talking to the Secretary, because they disagreed ( i n some cases they disagreed strongly) with what Tenet and McLaughlin were presenting as 'T he P osition ' .
There were even people in the Department of State ' s own
Intelligence Research Bureau , the intelligence arm of the State Department, who disagreed, particularly on the nuclear weapons program .
Which, you may recall, Cheney made a number of statements about being absolutely positive that Saddam Hussein was working on a nuclear weapon. Nothing could have been further from the truth, and yet Cheney said that over, and over again. Dr. Rice said "W e don ' t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud ' . An d images like that, that were patently false.
Rob Kall: Well, let ' s just stop with that, those last two words, ' pat ent' and ' false .' And are you basically saying that Cheney was a liar, or worse ? Can you describe how you look at him in those terms?
Lawrence Wilkerson:
I look at him in the following way. Dick Cheney was not a n eo-Conservative in the sense that we ' ve come to know people like Richard Pe rle and Paul Wol fowitz, and Douglas Feith, and others.
Dick Cheney was what I would call a n arch, or an ultra, or a hyper " you pick your ha lf' - adjective N ationalist. Dick Cheney would d o anything to protect America, including slaughtering half the world if he had to. Dick Cheney was the guy, as Ron
Suskind said, of the "O ne percent [1%] solution. ' And what that means in its most graphic terms is that, the Vice President of the United States believe d that if there is a one percent [1%] chance that a terrorist would get through and explode a nuclear weapon or a dirty bomb in an American city , t hat he was going to do anything that he had to do , including torture, including lying, including cheating, anything that he had to do to prevent that. That ' s the position " as extreme as it may sound , that I can understand. I mean, I can " I don ' t hold that position myself, but I can understand it. And that ' s what differentiates Cheney, I think, from some of the other minions who were simply carrying out what he directed them to carry out.
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