Ex-Powell Aide Criticizes Bush on Iraq

Yahoo! News reports Former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff

Powell's FORMER Chief of Staff is apparently sad that he is no longer significant, and he knows that the press will cover anyone saying bad things about the President.

says President Bush was "too aloof, too distant from the details"

In other words they would not listen to him, or any of the other bureaucrats at the Department of State.

of post-war planning, allowing underlings to exploit Bush's detachment and make bad decisions. In an Associated Press interview Monday,

Let me see now. Who should be involved in war and post war planning, the Secretary of State and his Chief of Staff, or the Secretary of Defense and others in the Pentagon. I think it should be the latter.

former Powell chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson also said that wrongheaded ideas for the handling of foreign detainees after Sept. 11 arose from a coterie of White House and Pentagon aides who argued that "the president of the United States is all-powerful," and that the Geneva Conventions were irrelevant.

Actually what they argued, and correctly, is that the Geneva Conventions were written to cover soldiers of a country, fighting in uniform, not terrorists and insurgents dressed in civilian clothes and not in the military of any country.

Wilkerson blamed Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and like-minded aides. Wilkerson said that Cheney must have sincerely believed that Iraq could be a spawning ground for new terror assaults

Which is true.

, because "otherwise I have to declare him a moron, an idiot or a nefarious bastard."

That sounds more like former Powell chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson

Wilkerson suggested his former boss may agree with him that Bush was too hands-off about Iraq.