Larry Wilkerson

Larry Wilkerson   (soldier, spook, whistleblower)
Born	June 15, 1945 Gaffney, South Carolina
Member of	Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

Lawrence 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."

Wilkerson became a critic of US foreign policy during the Iraq war, when he saw the results of US actions in Iraq as a consequence of phony intelligence laundered through Colin Powell at the UN, that Wilkerson had the responsibility to review in short timeframe before; the subsequent developments led Wilkerson to become disillusioned. He told an audience at one point:

"Combine the detainee abuse issue with the ineptitude of post-invasion planning for Iraq, wrap both in this blanket of secretive decision-making...and you get the overall reason for my speaking out."

Iraq war intelligence was "a hoax"; the war was for oil and Israel

At a congressional hearing recorded on C-SPAN in June 2005, he gave his analysis of the Iraq war's motivation: "'I use the acronym OIL,' he said, 'O for oil, I for Israel and L for the logistical base necessary or deemed necessary by the so-called neocons – and it reeks through all their documents – the logistical base whereby the United States and Israel could dominate that area of the world.'" He said Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon "has our president wrapped around his little finger" and that Bush has been "mesmerized" by Sharon.

During an October 19, 2005 speech at the New America Foundation, Wilkerson criticized the intelligence community which compiled the Iraq War intelligence:

"I can't tell you why the French, the Germans, the Brits and us thought that most of the material, if not all of it, that we presented at the U.N. on 5 February 2003 was the truth".

Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom (August 29, 2024) - COL. Lawrence Wilkerson : US Empire Failing

In a 2006 interview, Wilkerson said that the speech Powell made before the United Nations on February 5, 2003—which laid out a case for war with Iraq—included falsehoods of which Powell had never been made aware. He said, "My participation in that presentation at the UN constitutes the lowest point in my professional life. I participated in a hoax on the American people, the international community and the United Nations Security Council." Wilkerson said in 2011 that his preparing of the presentation was "probably the biggest mistake of my life", he regrets it, and that he regrets not resigning over it.

He stated in the 2006 interview that neither CIA Director George Tenet nor the CIA analysts that gave Powell information on mobile weapons laboratories explained that there were disputes about the reliability of the informants who had supplied the information—information which was used in the speech.

 

A Document by Larry Wilkerson

Title	Document type	Publication date	Subject(s)	Description
Document:Ex-Intelligence Officers, Others See Plusses in WikiLeaks Disclosures	statement	7 December 2010	Wikileaks	A statement of support for Wikileaks. "The big question is not whether Americans can 'handle the truth.' We believe they can..."

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