Ex-Powell Aide Criticizes Bush on Iraq - Yahoo! News

Ex-Powell Aide Criticizes Bush on Iraq - Yahoo! News: "Tue Nov 29, 6:58 AM ET

WASHINGTON - Former Secretary of State
Colin Powell's chief of staff says
President Bush was 'too aloof, too distant from the details' of post-war planning, allowing underlings to exploit Bush's detachment and make bad decisions.
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In an Associated Press interview Monday, former Powell chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson also said that wrongheaded ideas for the handling of foreign detainees after Sept. 11 arose from a coterie of White House and
Pentagon aides who argued that 'the president of the United States is all-powerful,' and that the Geneva Conventions were irrelevant.

Wilkerson blamed Vice President
Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and like-minded aides. Wilkerson said that Cheney must have sincerely believed that
Iraq could be a spawning ground for new terror assaults, because 'otherwise I have to declare him a moron, an idiot or a nefarious bastard.'"