Cabal Unplugged

By now you've probably heard about the lacerating speech about Bush's foreign policy "cabal" delivered by former Colin Powell deputy Col. Lawrence Wilkerson. Here now is the full transcript, including Q&A. The money shot:

But the case that I saw for four-plus years was a case that I have never seen in my studies of aberrations, bastardizations, perturbations, changes to the national security decision-making process. What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made. And then when the bureaucracy was presented with the decision to carry them out, it was presented in a such a disjointed, incredible way that the bureaucracy often didn't know what it was doing as it moved to carry them out.

But there's much more of interest in the transcript: On detainee abuse, presidential secrecy, depletion of the Army, Executive Branch concentration of power, bureaucratic infighting, how the State Dept. and even the dreaded Europeans really did believe Saddam had WMDs…. And warming my nostalgic heart, he even gets off a two-paragraph rip on the "military industrial complex." Whole thing here; thanks to Rob McMillin for the link.