Lawrence Wilkerson is a retired U.S. Colonel and former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell. Since the end of his military career, Wilkerson has publicly criticized many aspects of the Iraq War, including his own preparation of Powell’s presentation to the United Nations. Wilkerson said that his contribution to Colin Powell’s address, that claimed that Iraq had chemical weapons, was “probably the biggest mistake of my life”. In particular Wilkerson has denounced the decision-making process of the Bush Administration and Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s parts in it.
Before working at the State Department, Wilkerson served 31 years in the U.S. Armed Services. He retired from active duty in 1997 as a colonel and currently is a distinguished visiting professor of government and public policy at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA. And he’s working on a book about the first George Bush administration.
In April 2007, Wilkerson was featured in a Dutch documentary, entitled The Israel Lobby. He said that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) was highly influential in the Bush Administration’s decision to go to war in Iraq. Today he makes the case that AIPAC plays a role again in the 2018 campaign to launch war against Iran.
On March 2, 2018 Lawrence Wilkerson spoke at the annual conference on the Israel Lobby, held at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, and organized by the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy and the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.
He began his presentation by referring to the mysterious way in which Israel acquired nuclear weapons and expressed his agreement with the previous speaker, Jefferson Morley. Morley had explained in his talk how Israel had managed to steal the uranium from the NUMEC plant in Apollo, Pennsylvania.
Wilkerson was one of the speakers at the annual conference organized by the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy and the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. He spoke at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, on March 2, 2018.
Videos and transcripts of the conferences can be found via the web site or IRMEP, short for Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy or on the web site of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.
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