Wilkerson speaks

If you haven’t seen it yet, here is the link to former Colin Powell aide Lawrence Wilkerson’s blistering op-ed piece in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times. Here is what he says about what he describes as the “cabal” led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld:

WILKERSON: Its insular and secret workings were efficient and swift — not unlike the decision-making one would associate more with a dictatorship than a democracy. This furtive process was camouflaged neatly by the dysfunction and inefficiency of the formal decision-making process, where decisions, if they were reached at all, had to wend their way through the bureaucracy, with its dissenters, obstructionists and “guardians of the turf.”

But the secret process was ultimately a failure. It produced a series of disastrous decisions and virtually ensured that the agencies charged with implementing them would not or could not execute them well.

Last Friday, I participated in a panel on blogging and podcasting at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation. One of the other participants, Christopher Lydon (link now fixed), was beside himself that Wilkerson’s speech before the New America Foundation earlier that week hadn’t gotten much coverage.

Lydon’s complaint was right on the mark. But sometimes stories disappear, and sometimes they seem to disappear, only to gain strength once people in the mainstream media start to recognize their importance. (The Valerie Plame investigation would be a good example of that.)

Wilkerson’s critique could fall into the latter category.