Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson was Colin Powell's chief of staff until last January. In this Financial Times article Wilkerson explains what he saw as a member of the Bush administration:

“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.”