Watchman Report March 20, 2022 "Lawrence Wilkerson Excoriates US Arms Makers For 'Obscene Profits' From Ukraine War"

 

Lawrence Wilkerson, as many SpyTalk followers surely know, was a longtime close aide to Colin Powell, the former Army general, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State in the George W. Bush administration. Wilkerson became a harsh critic of US foreign policy after it turned out he and Powell had been duped by the CIA and White House into believing that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. He’s expressed great regret over his own participation in that tragedy and gone on to excoriate what he sees as the oversized roles of big oil, Israel and military weapons contractors in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy.  The latter, he says on this week’s edition of the SpyTalk podcast, is rubbing its hands with joy over soaring profits from increased weapons sales to Ukraine and Eastern Europe. They are, he says, America’s own “oligarchs.” Some listeners will do doubt find his views provocative, even disturbing, but it’s our policy to offer a wide range of opinions here. As for Russia’s brutal assault on Ukraine, Wilkerson said Vladimir Putin hopes it will mark him as the greatest czar in Russian history. “A Russian put it to me this way from Moscow the other day: Vladimir wants to become a man who wants to see his statue in Red Square 500 years from now with an inscription that says, ‘Vladimir Putin, more than Catherine and Peter, the greatest in Russia's history.’” “That’s fully despairing if he's become that way,” Wilkerson told me. But perhaps Putin will come to “realize it would not only be the end of his reign in an ignominious way, but it might be the end of Russia for another 50 to 60 years as a reasonable partner for Europe, and Russia is, after all, a part of Europe.” Give it a listen. You’ll also hear a fascinating discussion there that my co-host Jeanne Meserve had with former senior CIA officer Rolf Mowatt-Larssen on the chilling prospect of Putin unleashing so-called tactical nuclear weapons on Ukraine. “That threat is not zero,” said Mowatt-Larssen, who served two tours in Moscow among his many senior roles in the spy agency. He also spent three years as the director of Intelligence and Counterintelligence at the U.S. Department of Energy. It’s all in this week’s edition of the SpyTalk podcast. You can listen to it—and nearly 50 other past episodes—here, or whenever you get your podcasts.