"Incompetence" as camouflage

Detailing his career inside the national security bureaucracy, Col. Wilkerson describes the hothouse atmosphere in which Libby's recklessness incubated and flourished:

"[What] I saw for four-plus years was a case that I have never seen in my studies of aberrations, bastardizations, perturbations, changes to the national security decision-making process. 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. And then when the bureaucracy was presented with the decision to carry them out, it was presented in a such a disjointed, incredible way that the bureaucracy often didn't know what it was doing as it moved to carry them out."

This seeming incompetence, however, only masked the ruthless effectiveness of what Wilkerson calls "the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal" in carrying out their own agenda: "The dysfunctionality," says Wilkerson, "camouflaged the efficiency of the secret decision-making process."

- Justin Raimondo