The outing of the cabal

Use of the term "cabal" for the power structure running our country is no longer limited to pinkos and anarchists: Colin Powell's former chief of staff says that Cheney and Rumsfield made decisions in secret on a range of critical foreign policy issues.

In a scathing attack on the record of President George W. Bush, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Mr Powell until last January, said: "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.

"Now it is paying the consequences of making those decisions in secret, but far more telling to me is America is paying the consequences."

Poor choices on everything from Korean diplomacy to military deployment were the result. Is the country even capable of hearing this?

(via Talking Points Memo)