WASHINGTON, Dec 24: The former top aide to then-secretary of state Colin Powell has emerged as an increasingly high-profile and vocal critic of US administration policy at home and abroad, The New York Times reported on Saturday.

Lawrence Wilkerson, who was Mr Powell’s chief-of-staff, ‘says his decision to speak in the open about the policy wars of the first Bush term was slow in coming, but a major factor was the revelations about Abu Ghraib, which he said he realized ... had resulted from decisions on prisoner treatment and intelligence set shortly after Sept 11, 2001,” the daily reported.

“What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made,” the paper recalled Mr Wilkerson saying in a speech at the New America Foundation in October.

“And you’ve got a president who is not versed in international relations and not too much interested in them either,” he added, according to the Times.

The report said Mr Wilkerson has been ‘assailing the president as amateurish, especially compared to the first President Bush, and describing the administration as secretive, inept and courting disaster at home and abroad. Nor has he spared his former boss, who he says was overly preoccupied with damage control for policies set by others’.

A retired army colonel, Mr Wilkerson ‘has also attacked the Bush administration for allegedly condoning torture and setting lax policies on treatment of detainees that led, he charges, to the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the black eye they gave to the United States Army’, the report said.

Though Mr Powell has kept mum about his former aide, ‘he has let it be known through friends that he objects to the charges, especially the suggestion that he was overly loyal to President Bush’, the report said.

“It’s very painful for me,” Mr Wilkerson told the daily. “I’ve lost a friend of 16 years. I won’t say I’ve lost him, but the estrangement is palpable.” One e-mail message the Times said he says he received from Mr Powell grumbled: “Don’t characterize my loyalty.”

Mr Wilkerson argues that Mr Powell won key policy battles in making sure that the issue of Iraq was taken to the United Nations and in battling Mr Rumsfeld and Mr Cheney for the cause of improving relations with Europe, encouraging negotiations with North Korea and Iraq, and avoiding confrontation with Russia and China, the report said. —AFP