Another voice - one year too late.

Lawrence Wilkerson, former top chief of staff to Colin Powell, has come forward to tell what he knows about the Bush administration. Via Steve Clemons.

According to an interview appearing in today's Financial Times,

In a scathing attack on the record of President George W. Bush, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Mr Powell until last January, said: “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.

“Now it is paying the consequences of making those decisions in secret, but far more telling to me is America is paying the consequences.”

Other points:

■ The detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere was “a concrete example” of the decision-making problem, with the president and other top officials in effect giving the green light to soldiers to abuse detainees. “You don't have this kind of pervasive attitude out there unless you've condoned it.”

■ Condoleezza Rice, the former national security adviser and now secretary of state, was “part of the problem”. Instead of ensuring that Mr Bush received the best possible advice, “she would side with the president to build her intimacy with the president”.

■ The military, particularly the army and marine corps, is overstretched and demoralised. Officers, Mr Wilkerson claimed, “start voting with their feet, as they did in Vietnam. . . and all of a sudden your military begins to unravel”.

I don't want to appear ungrateful, and Mr. Wilkerson has had to pay a personal price for his new outspokenness, the loss of his friendship with "good soldier" Colin Powell. But for some reason this line from The Wedding Singer keeps coming into my head: Once again, Things that could have been brought to my attention YESTERDAY!