Cheney
Teh Crazy Spying Veep

The remarkable interview of Lawrence Wilkerson by Andy Worthington published this week has a number of insightful revelations, including the now-famous conclusion by Wilkerson that Cheney is crazy. One bit, mentioned almost as an aside, stands out to me. Near the end of the interview, Worthington and Wilkerson are discussing Cheney’s "team" that he had dispersed throughout the government. At the end of a paragraph we’ll come back to later, there is this sentence:

I even figured out that they were reading my emails, but I wasn’t reading theirs.

Isn’t that just lovely? The Chief of Staff to the Secretary of State finds out that a team led by the Vice President is reading his email without his knowledge (or, presumably, his approval). This is an especially important revelation because earlier in the interview, Wilkerson talked about the reports he got from various individuals, scattered across the globe, on a number of topics. For example, when discussing the attempted "infliltration" of "6’ 4” white males with 19-inch biceps" into foreign capitals, Wilkerson mentioned how he got reports of this activity:

Other information came from other places like conventional formations in Afghanistan and Iraq, where I had people I knew in the military who were reporting back to me, usually by email, and also from the other side of the house, if you will, from the diplomats and the people in the embassies and the consulates and so forth in some of these countries,

[emphasis added]

It’s not too big a stretch to believe that the next topic Wilkerson mentions includes information he received through the same sorts of sources (and emails):

I’ve said before that one of the things that, with regard to the armed forces, has made me proud of a lot of those young guys out there — and young gals out there — was that a lot of these people apparently refused to do this stuff, and their leaders, whether they were captains or lieutenants, or whether they were majors, lieutenant colonels, colonels, brigadier generals or whatever, were not eager to order them to, because they knew, from past experience, that when that happens, then you get whistleblowers, you get people who write their Congressmen, and call their Congressmen, and take pictures and so forth, so I was elated to hear that a lot of these young officers — in particular, young NCOs — were refusing to do this stuff, but nonetheless they were talking about what others were doing.

Putting these bits together, it’s easy to imagine that Wilkerson received reports of torture from individuals who refused to carry it out and were upset enough about it to report it to him, presumably in an attempt to stop it.

That is where the pervasiveness of Cheney’s web comes into play. Let’s go back now for the full paragraph from which I took the first quotation. The context is that Wilkerson is discussing the remarkable day of January 13, 2005, when Colin Powell informed Bush that it was Cheney who was in reality running the country. When I first read this part of the interview, I was confused because Wilkerson and Worthington first confirmed the 2005 date for Powell’s disclosure to Bush and then Worthington launched into a discussion of 2004. However, after further thought, I decided that it made sense for them to take some time before they told Bush:

The sad thing is that, until early January 2004, I’m not sure we did either. I understood that there was a team, I understood it was highly placed and probably under the Vice President, I understood that it was membered in almost every aspect of the interagency group that dealt with national security, I understood they had a strategy, I understood they were ruthless in carrying out that strategy, and I understood that I was a day late and a dollar short, because they’d beaten me to the marketplace. But it took me a while to figure that out. I even figured out that they were reading my emails, but I wasn’t reading theirs.

So Wilkerson and Powell realized in January, 2004 that Cheney was running things and did not tell Bush until January, 2005. Part of that delay could have come from caution. Wilkerson realized his email had been monitored, and he knew Cheney’s team, although dispersed, was DoD based, and was "ruthless". That would seem like a good reason to take some time in informing the President of what they had learned, if they wanted to protect any whistleblowers who had come to them. In fact, waiting a year would allow most NCO’s to rotate out of their active tour. Of course, they also had to proceed with caution to determine just when and how it would be safe to make the revelation. Sadly, it appears that Bush was either too dim or too intimidated to take any action in response to Powell’s revelation.