BioLawrence Wilkerson is a retired United States Army soldier and former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell. Wilkerson is an adjunct professor at the College of William & Mary where he teaches courses on US national security. He also instructs a senior seminar in the Honors Department at the George Washington University entitled "National Security Decision Making." This talk by Larry Wilkerson was the keynote speech given at an event sponsored by the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence, American University History Department, American University’s Nuclear Studies Institute on Oct 21,2009 at American University in Washington DC. Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence describes itself as "a movement of former CIA colleagues and other associates of former intelligence analyst Sam Adams, who hold up his example as a model for those in intelligence who would aspire to the courage to speak truth to power". Comments from Registered Members | (Register or log in to make your comment.) | SocialTexture 2009-10-28
Next, @WarrenMetzler: your sentiment that everyone should be encouraged to live rewarding, loving lives is nice, but why does that need to be prefaced with "don't attempt to change the government"? Why not? Do you really believe that everything comes down to individual choice and personal responsibility? Are we completely free to live the way that we want to in the first place? In the current system of top-down economic, racial, religious, ethnic, national, gendered and sexual segregation, repression and even outright oppression, could you please explain how I am to choose to live exactly the life I want to live? I am interested to hear your arguments for ultimate personal responsibility and against placing our current form of non-representational government by the wealthy and powerful at the center of the problem. | SocialTexture 2009-10-28
First, I'd like to join in commending everyone here for their insightful comments; it seems that Mr. Wilkerson has the ability to provoke quite the response! Unfortunately for him, it seems to be mostly a refutation of his ahistorical analysis of American imperialism, but at least it seems that people are more than up to the task of correcting him. I'd also just like to say that I do support TRNN and think it's one of the leading alternative media sites in terms of its track record of bringing important issues to light and challenging the status quo. Some of my previous comments, while attempting to challenge Wilkerson and call for more radical reporting and analysis in general, could have also been easily interpreted as critical of TRNN for posting this series and I should have done a better job of clarifying my position in that regard. | rc09 2009-10-27
At about 6:27-33 we hear/read “…that would manage this new power without sacrificing what had gotten us to that point in the first place—our civil liberties, our freedom, indeed our entire set of political and cultural values.” -- I'd add "... and also shrewdly staying out of the European war until the balance of debt/payments shifted the US from major debtor to creditor!" Would it be too cynical to suggest that had the UK fallen to Germany then the US would have lost its “investment”? And we won’t mention people like grandpappy Bush doing banking with the NAZIS. | whatthehell 2009-10-26
Those are nice thoughts Warren, but the government is supposed to be "of the people, by the people....." and right now it doesn't seem like the "people" have any effect regarding the path that our government is taking. How can anyone (including myself) seriously think that our politicians don't see themselves as millionaires first and foremost, and then if they get around to it, they might to to enact some changes that help the people. Al this talk of 9/11 and finding out the truth is critical, but do you realize how many hundreds of serious government crimes have been committed since 9/11? We can't catch up. And with people like Pelosi and Reid we're not going to see any real or significant change to the current status quo. | WarrenMetzler 2009-10-26
The comments on these three sections are more insightful than almost any previous TRN segment. I suggest that the problem is the corruption of the average person. Governments reflect the mindset of the majority of the population. Don't attempt to change the government, or one or more members of the government. Encourage the citizens to pursue successful and rewarding living (autonomy; experiencing productivity, skill, creativity and providing assets to customers while working; and in social relationships repeated experiences of intimacy (richness and fullness), love (deeply valuing the other), and that you and your friends repeatedly empower each other). And as more and more become like this the government will give up its imperialistic ways. | whatthehell 2009-10-26
I really appreciate the intelligent and articulate comments that have been appearing here. I was beginning to think everyone I knew had swallowed the Koolaid just wasn't seeing what I'm seeing. Kjohn, SocialTexture and the rest, thanks for all the informative links. When do we start having our voices heard? How is it going to be accomplished?? | Lt. Dan 2009-10-26
SocialTexture I think your position is important in that we need people with that kind of attitude to drive it home to the weaker majority to REALLY make a difference or be a voice in the movement towards making one happen by the people who can. At times we get passionate but I agree with you, kjohn, on TRNN issue. I think they diserve a little more credit than being bashed for allowing us to see the variety (agreed or disagreed with) of opinions people have. | kjohn810 2009-10-26
con't . . . Also Wilkerson saying that pre-Bush presidents did an ok job on the question of democratic rights seems to forget about McCarthyism. Also Hoover in the 60’s and so on. | kjohn810 2009-10-26
I have been watching TRNN from the start. They have done hundreds of stories that make it clear that the issue is an entire system at work, not just a few political personalities or policies. All through the election campaign Jay kept saying that this was a fight between two sections of an elite. He must have said a hundred times that Obama’s foreign policy was a continuation of a century of US imperial pragmatic policy. It should be obvious that TRNN interviews and covers various people with different views. This piece of Wilkerson’s is a great insight into a trend within the Republican Party (somewhat like Ron Paul) that has come to a position opposed to the grand chess game mentality. I would suggest we learn from these stories, rather than attack TRNN every time a subject says something we don’t agree with. That being said, I thought the point about Wilkerson missing pre-WWII US imperialism was good. Jay made the same point in an interview with Bruce Fein. Also Wilkerson saying | genefire 2009-10-26
@SocialTexture...Your right! Though global report did a some of what concerns you but your overall thrust of it doesn't go far enough is very true! I must say, I'm on the same page as yourself and I too seek a news media that will actually take the chance to do something. Its sad in a way because it seems that the information blackout and unaccountability at any level besides us peasants at the bottom are never addressed. If you find something as well post a link in the comments on these foreign policy clips, I'll be watching for them. Thanks for the heads up on Grit tv. I've watched them before, but I didn't stick with it because they haven't brought up that false flag on 911, much less address who was really behind it. The closest is probably the documentary called "Zero-An Investigation into 911" Italian's produced it and I must say its an eye-opener. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2296490368603788739# | SocialTexture 2009-10-26
...nation-builders) in addition to the 40,000 troops McCrystal is asking for. So, ok, great, we know about something "secret" and some high-level criticisms of the war that weren't widely reported. It's good to know these things in some regard, I guess, but I find it hard to believe that it's advancing any kind of substantive debate, e.g. around the morality of war, violence, aggression and occupation. Why isn't the fact that we have no right to decide the fate of other people a topic of discussion? Where is any mention of how many Afghans are being killed, injured and displaced (substituted instead by vapid talk about "resources" and "strategy")? How about a report on the illegality of the war and the despicable, widespread use of torture? Demands for high-level officials to be prosecuted for war crimes and for another war to never again take place on this earth? Show me the site that's doing work like that, and I'll support it. | SocialTexture 2009-10-26
@genefire: Thanks for the tip on The Global Report. After watching their weekly report and reading through a few articles, though, I would level a similar criticism as what I was trying to get across in my earlier comments, namely, that it doesn't go far enough in its criticism or identification of the root issues. For example, the GRTV Oct 20-26 video highlights three "underreported" stories on Afghanistan in its first five minutes. What is the substance of those reports? One speaks of a former army officer's criticism of any further troop deployment on the basis of more troops causing more Afghans to turn against the US, who they "view as occupiers," and suggests some troops pull out and others remain. The second story is about the criticism by the former UK ambassador to the US of the Afghan war, basically just because there's no strategy behind it and it's a waste of resources. Finally we hear about the secret deployment of 13,000 "enablers" like engineers (read: nation-b | neoconbuster 2009-10-26
I agree With Mr. Wilkenson and many others like Gore Vidal who say; that after WWII "War" became the Most Profitable and Dangerous Busisness in US History and has grown like a Cancer. | genefire 2009-10-26
Okay, I don't know what happen to TRNN but it seems they are following the same script as our mainstream media. They shed some light at times on things that are of less information value then we need but other than that I see a pattern here lately. Here is a REAL Independent Media that is under the radar and quit accurate on their reporting. Go here and take a look see: http://www.theglobalreport.org/ | SocialTexture 2009-10-26
...egalitarian, peaceful, representative, participatory democracy the world over. Taking the power out of the elite hands of the few owners of the world and empowering the other 99% of the population would result in a drastic and radical improvement for everyone, everywhere. Could you ever see a well-informed, empowered American people voting to go to war in Iraq? If you got together with all your friends and neighbours each year to decide how to spend your tax dollars, would you ever agree to give trillions to the world's largest banks to keep them afloat, just so they can continue to consolidate wealth and power for a handful of elites? The problem isn't industry or the military or the government, but the entirety of the system itself: it doesn't work for or come close to representing the people, never has, and never will. Change the system and you change your life. | SocialTexture 2009-10-26
While Wilkerson here attempts to identify the modern "military-industrial-congressional" complex, he simultaneously poses American aggression as a post-1947 phenomenon. This is very dangerous. What about the Mexican-American War over 100 years before? The US-Spanish War? The invasion of the Philippines, Panama, Korea, and on and on? What about the genocidal settlement of America itself, that wiped out millions upon millions of indigenous Americans? The US-backed coups and genocidal dictatorships of Latin American from the 1960's until now? The point is, American imperial aggression is not new - in fact, it's as old as settled America. Recognizing this historical fact and exercising basic intellectual honesty around the inherently imperial, oppressive and aggressive nature of the US - not just militarily, but also economically and diplomatically, in all its international and domestic relations - is just the first step towards dismantling the empire and replacing it with a truly egal | gegenwarst 2009-10-26
Painting Eisenhower as a "good man" warning his country against the Military Industrial Complex is pure BULLSHIT. In April 1954, during the struggle for independence in Indochina against French domination, American Secretary of State John Foster Dulles offered to French Foreign Minister Georges Bidault two atomic bombs for possibly being used against the insurgency (in the end, the French government rejected such offer). Mr. Wilkerson should stop behaving like a bullshitter by delivering such nonsense. |
TranscriptLAWRENCE WILKERSON, FMR. STATE DEPT. CHIEF OF STAFF TO COLIN POWELL: Let me express my appreciation for all of you coming out tonight. It's late, and we're on a college campus, and this is really rare to get this many people out. I spoke at East Tennessee State University not too long ago, and we had 1,200 people in the auditorium. We were talking about the cabal. This was a couple of years ago. And I was really impressed with the students' interest in what did I mean by a "cabal", what did I mean by a national security decision-making process that had been captured by not the president of the United States, as was statutorily intended by the 1947 National Security Act and, by extension, the Constitution of the United States of America as it was originally conceived, but by people who were in some cases unelected, not subject to the advice and consent of the Senate. How about the national security adviser, one of the most powerful people in the American panoply of governance now, not subject to the advice and consent of the Senate, and not elected? Wow. Henry Kissinger is co-president, in Bob Dallek's eloquent phrase in his new book Nixon and Kissinger. And he was. Henry Kissinger was making presidential decisions, particularly toward the end, when Dick Nixon was drinking more than he wasn't and he was wrapped up in Watergate. If you've seen the movie about Frost and Nixon, or better you've watched the 13 hours of tape and listened to James Reston talk about it, who was the adviser to David Frost as he went after Nixon, you understand the depth of Nixon's failure, both personal—that is, character-wise—and decision-making-wise. And so Kissinger stepped in to—began to make decisions, unelected, not subject to the advice and consent of the Senate. This is an extraordinary thing. Kissinger also took two jobs simultaneously: national security adviser and secretary of state. Extraordinary. The American people didn't even blink. The founding fathers were rolling in their graves, I assure you. Interestingly, intriguingly, the two men that will take Henry Kissinger out are none other than Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Why? Because Henry Kissinger had decided that the defeat in Vietnam, which Ray gave us some insight into, was so dramatic and had set our prestige back so much, our power was [so] diminished, that we needed détente with the Soviet Union, we needed peaceful coexistence, we needed some room to recover, to recoup, and to recognize the fact that other nations were rising and our power therefore was changing the world. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld didn't like that at all, and so they were the people who maneuvered Kissinger eventually out of a power position, certainly out of his two positions, and eventually out of the Ford administration. We later got them and their beliefs and their decision-making capabilities and so forth in the White House, and you see what it produced. I think everyone, even on the extreme right in my party today, recognizes something about ["CHEE-nee"]—and that is the way they say it in Wyoming. In fact, the town is called ["CHEE-nee"]—["CHAY-nee"] in our jargon today. They recognized that Cheney was different, if nothing else, the most unprecedentedly powerful vice president in our history—I've said in public the most dangerous man in America since Aaron Burr. Joe Biden said the most dangerous man in America, period. I said, um, let's look at Aaron Burr. After all, Burr wanted to go out west, form an army, and attack Washington, and form his own country, and the only reason he wasn't convicted of treason was John Marshall hated Thomas Jefferson so much that John Marshall decided that on a technicality Aaron Burr would be let off. So very dangerous man, in my view. What's that got to do with Afghanistan or Pakistan or Iraq or war in general? Well, it's got a hell of a lot to do with it. And I'm going to play academic here for a minute. I'm going to take you back to 1947, and I'm going to tell you, in 1947, a constellation of world leaders, and principally US leaders, realized that there had been a massive change in power in the world. And let's just sum it up simplistically by saying that the United States looked at being not the rather democratic republic it had been for 150-plus years prior, but the new Rome. Now, the founders had their feet in the Roman camp. The founders like the Roman Senate, they like the idea of Cincinnatus, they like the idea of the citizen soldier. After all, Washington was a quintessential Cincinnatus. Had he not been, we wouldn't be here today, or at least we wouldn't be in the state we're in today. He refused power not once but twice, dramatically—actually three times, because he refused to run for a third term when everyone would've probably voted for him. So they like that part of Rome. But I think it's fair to say Imperial Rome they shied away from. But what we were looking at in 1947 was being Imperial Rome. And so Harry Truman, James Forrestal, James Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower, Ferdinand Eberstadt, and a host of others tried to design a system, through the '47 act, essentially, and the precedents set thereafter, principally by Truman and Eisenhower, that would manage this new power without sacrificing what had gotten us to that point in the first place—our civil liberties, our freedom, indeed our entire set of political and cultural values. Until 2000, I would maintain, those presidents had done a fair or a good or a not-so-good but average job of maintaining the tension between those two fundamental sides of us—the past, the present, and future. (That's three, but I'll throw the present and the future into one.) When we get to 2000, we decide that that's no longer the way we're going to do things. Let me back up just for a moment and say that in 1961 probably the most capable man to assume the presidency in the 20th century in his farewell address warned us about what was happening with regard to the tension between what we had had and what we had created. I'll call it the national security state, as Michael Hogan has and others, and I'll call it a well-governed democratic republic on the other hand. Some have called it the welfare state. That has a pejorative sense. I'll call it a well-governed democratic republic. That tension Eisenhower described in his farewell address as having a real sneaking, insidious, powerful problem. It was called the military-industrial—and he wanted to say, but he was advised against it and accepted that advice—congressional complex. And if you go back and you watch the grainy black-and-white tape of that speech, it is striking, it is stunning, the seriousness with which Eisenhower delivers that message. The military-industrial complex, congressional-military-industrial complex, is not an insidious force out there sneaking up on us and riding down Pennsylvania Avenue to take over Washington, but it is enormous power that is basically unchecked, not overseen adequately, and in particular since the end of the Cold War, when contractors have moved together and become primes and subs and colluded and monopolistic, it has become a real and constant danger to this country, certainly to the democratic republic that we like to think we are. When war is as profitable as it was for Lockheed Martin, who leads this clan of defense contractors, that your share price goes from about $25-3/4 on March 19, 2003, to a year later about $126, $127 a share, when war is that profitable, you're going to have more of it, you're going to have presidents who turn to the war instrument more and more often. Incidentally, since the end of the Cold War that's exactly what we've done. Some people say it's because the restraints of the Cold War were released—we no longer have a rival superpower to keep us in check. That's part of it, but part of it is also the fact that the war instrument is the instrument of choice for presidents of the United States. Now, that's a brief, brief summary. Let me tell you where that's got us right now, and then I'll come in the back door to Afghanistan and Iraq. It's got us to bankruptcy. This country is the greatest debtor nation in human history now. | |
 
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