Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays!
Oakley and I wish you a fantastic holiday weekend. I’m working with my new Apple Powerbook and appreciate all of the advice from knowledgable Mac practitioners.
While Oakley has the blue ball, it seems that my powerbook does have the blue tooth — so many things are possible.
And to cap off an interesting season of foreign policy work, the October 19th talk by Lawrence Wilkerson at the New America Foundation and Wilkerson’s subsequent thoughtful and impassioned commentary on America’s broken national security decision making “system” drew a great profile piece by Steve Weisman today in the New York Times.
Weisman writes:
“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,” Mr. Wilkerson said in a well-publicized speech at the New America Foundation in October. “And you’ve got a president who is not versed in international relations and not too much interested in them either,” he added in the speech.
Mr. Wilkerson has also attacked the Bush administration for allegedly condoning torture and setting lax policies on treatment of detainees that led, he charges, to the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the black eye they gave to the United States Army.
SINCE starting to speak out a few months ago, Mr. Wilkerson has become something of a Washington celebrity. He has given interviews and speeches, appeared on television, written op-ed articles and taken telephone calls from journalists and senators.
That talk Col. Wilkerson gave at New America was an event that “mattered”, and my New Year’s Resolution for 2006 is to make sure that we have more such occasions that “matter.”
I salute Larry Wilkerson for what he has done these last few months with regard to getting this country’s foreign policy back on track — and I feel privileged to have worked with him and enjoyed make his speech a “well publicized” one as Weisman remarked.
Just a short note to Col. Wilkerson’s wife, Barbara, who recently sent me some fantastic Christmas cookies. I had two of them — and Oakley, the very crafty weimaraner, decided he deserved the rest.
Thanks on behalf of both of us for the cookies, and thanks from TWN‘s readers for supporting your husband during this complicated time.
Happy holidays to all — and more soon.
— Steve Clemons
P.S. Keep the Mac advice coming. I’m reading everything you post and send. Really appreciate it.
