What I know About Colin Powell That You Won't Read Elsewhere-- A Personal Anecdote

 

(Photo, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson U.S. Army ret. and Colin Powell in inset)

I would like to contribute something based on my personal experience about the life of Colin Powell which will yield some insights about how things work in the circles of power in DC, and also the type of person that he was. I never met him. This is something that I know from my political work, and is not the standard material for an obituary. 

Powell was forced to resign by Cheney in 2004, right after Bush 43's re-election. He knew that by making the US Iraq War Resolution speech at the UN which included Cheney's fake Intel on WMD, he had effectively destroyed any prospect of seeking higher office, and that his career in government was dead and buried. Yet he did not retire, in the literal sense.

Powell's years long Chief-of-Staff, including throughout his stint as Secretary of State was Col. Lawrence Wilkerson. Wilkerson was forced out as well, but continued his working relationship with Powell. Wilkerson soon after went very public in owning his own failure to blow the whistle on Cheney's lies about Iraq, and actually helped form an organization to oppose the Iraq War and the entire set of wartime policies brought into being by the Bush 43 administration. It was called VIPS. Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

VIPS is well known to me, because several of its founders such as Wilkerson and Ray McGovern worked very closely with the intelligence staff of my former organization and our News Service, EIR magazine. I did not know them personally, but worked closely with associates that had regular contact with them and knew them well. We worked with VIPS to enlist retired CIA and other National Security officials in our very public campaign to overturn the Bush policies, including torture, renditions, extreme surveillance measures, assassinations, deployment of Private for profit security firms like Blackwater into combat and interrogations such as the atrocities at Abu Ghraib, and inhuman treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo, etc.

We would enlist these people and publish full page ads which I fundraised for condemning these policies, with the list of endorsers. The ads were placed in The Hill, Washington Post, Politico and others. The Washington Times was the pro-Bush Moonie front, so we didn't bother with them.

So, with all that, Wilkerson was a major figure on the board of this group as a founder, and it was well established that everything he did and said publicly was not only in coordination with his former boss, but that he was in fact speaking on behalf of Powell. Powell delegated Wilkerson to be his unofficial spokesman, and as such was actually leading the Military/Intelligence community opposition to the war which he had tragically helped start. Powell was the guiding hand. This is generally not known.

In reality, there was no point at which Powell retreated into an apolitical private life. Up until a year ago, Col. Wilkerson continued his activity in tandem with Powell, mainly to ensure the defeat of Donald Trump, and some semblance of a lawful transition. Wilkerson's activity was covered by me in my Special Report on Trump's plan to use Foreign Influenced Terrorist Entities (heavily armed White nationalists steered by Russian Intelligence) to provoke Civil conflict, create a modern "Reichstag Fire" emergency, and overturn the election result. My report went live in early September of 2020. My conclusions were virtually the same as Wilkerson's, who was brought in to work with Biden campaign advisers, lawyers, election integrity specialists, and Democratic leaders to "Game" all of the possible scenarios for Trump to steal the election. My report had been read by several of the people in these meetings,, as I sent it to them and they communicated back. 

Wilkerson was aghast at the naivete and myopia of these attendees, and spoke out publicly before the election, including a frightening interview on Bill Maher.

All of this was done in tandem with Colin Powell, operating behind the scenes. So, to those of my readers for whom it is tempting to trash Powell's memory by embracing any misleading "Liberal/Anti-War narratives about him, I urge you to realize that Powell never for a moment stopped trying to atone for his grievous and tragic failure of judgment until this week with his passing.

Consider this a lesson, that often in big history, and with big personalities, things are not always what they appear to be on the surface.

Such was the case for this giant among very small men.