Colin Powell's newest revelation on the Bush admin. lies

Wurm

The president played the scoundrel -- even the best of his minions went along with the lies -- and when a former ambassador dared to tell the truth, the White House initiated what Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald calls "a plan to discredit, punish or seek revenge against Mr. Wilson." That is the important story line.

If not for the whistle-blower, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, President Bush's falsehoods about the Iraq nuclear threat likely would never have been exposed.

On Monday, former Secretary of State Colin Powell told me that he and his department's top experts never believed that Iraq posed an imminent nuclear threat, but that the president followed the misleading advice of Vice President Dick Cheney and the CIA in making the claim.


Now he tells us.

The harsh truth is that this president cherry-picked the intelligence data in making his case for invading Iraq and deliberately kept the public in the dark as to the countervailing analysis at the highest level of the intelligence community. While the president and his top Cabinet officials were fear-mongering with stark images of a "mushroom cloud" over American cities, the leading experts on nuclear weaponry at the Department of Energy (the agency in charge of the U.S. nuclear-weapons program) and the State Department thought the claim of a near-term Iraqi nuclear threat was absurd.

"The activities we have detected do not, however, add up to a compelling case that Iraq is currently pursuing what INR would consider to be an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquire nuclear weapons," said a dissenting analysis from an assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research (INR) in the now infamous 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, which was cobbled together for the White House before the war. "Iraq may be doing so but INR considers the available evidence inadequate to support such a judgment."

The specter of the Iraqi nuclear threat was primarily based on an already-discredited claim that Iraq had purchased aluminum tubes for the purpose of making nuclear weapons. In fact, at the time, the INR wrote in the National Intelligence Estimate that it "accepts the judgment of technical experts at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) who have concluded that the tubes Iraq seeks to acquire are poorly suited for use in gas centrifuges to be used for uranium enrichment and finds unpersuasive the arguments advanced by others to make the case that they are intended for that purpose."

The other major evidence President Bush gave Americans for a revitalized Iraq nuclear program, of course, was his 2003 State of the Union claim -- later found to be based on forged documents -- that a deal had been made to obtain uranium from Niger. This deal was exposed within the administration as bogus before the president's speech in January by Ambassador Wilson, who traveled to Niger for the CIA. Wilson only went public with his criticisms in an op-ed piece in the New York Times a half year later in response to what he charged were the administration's continued distortion of the evidence. In excerpts later made available to the public, it is clear that the Niger claim doesn't even appear as a key finding in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, while the INR dissent in that document dismisses it curtly: "[T]he claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa are, in INR's assessment highly dubious."

I queried Powell at a reception following a talk he gave in Los Angeles on Monday. Pointing out that the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate showed that his State Department had gotten it right on the nonexistent Iraq nuclear threat, I asked why did the president ignore that wisdom in his stated case for the invasion?

"The CIA was pushing the aluminum tube argument heavily and Cheney went with that instead of what our guys wrote," Powell said. And the Niger reference in Bush's State of the Union speech? "That was a big mistake," he said. "It should never have been in the speech. I didn't need Wilson to tell me that there wasn't a Niger connection. He didn't tell us anything we didn't already know. I never believed it."

When I pressed further as to why the president played up the Iraq nuclear threat, Powell said it wasn't the president: "That was all Cheney." A convenient response for a Bush family loyalist, perhaps, but it begs the question of how the president came to be a captive of his vice president's fantasies.

More important: Why was this doubt, on the part of the secretary of state and others, about the salient facts justifying the invasion of Iraq kept from the public until we heard the truth from whistle-blower Wilson, whose credibility the president then sought to destroy?

In matters of national security, when a president leaks, he lies.

By selectively releasing classified information to suit his political purposes, as President Bush did in this case, he is denying that there was a valid basis for keeping the intelligence findings secret in the first place. "We ought to get to the bottom of it, so it can be evaluated by the American people," said Sen. Arlen Specter, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. I couldn't have put it any better.

__________________
"Bush is the first President to admit to an impeachable offense."

- John Dean, former Counsel to the President (Nixon)

The aim of big corporations is to separate fools from their money all of the time and ordinary folks from their money most of the time. The rest of us must fend for ourselves.

limerickman

Powell admitted to BBC's Newsnight programme several weeks ago that he lied when he spoke about WMD in Iraq, as part of the buildup to the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Powell is as reprehensible as his former boss.
Powell's a token.



The invasion was about oil, not WMD.
I've been saying this for the last 2.5yrs.

__________________
.."But finally the last thing I’ll say to the people who don’t believe in cycling, the cynics and the sceptics. I'm sorry for you. I’m sorry that you can’t dream big. [I]I'm sorry you don't believe in miracles. You should believe in these athletes, and you should believe in these people. I'll be a fan of the Tour de France for as long as I live. And there are no secrets" - this is a hard sporting event and hard work wins it - Armstrong 2005 TDF
morelike hypocrisy.

Wurm

As have I. Well, oil and the control of the 40% of the world's useage that passes through the Gulf, and of course the Iraq attack was also mainly about BushCo winning Congress in the '02 elections.

As author Mark Weisbrot has put it:

"...At the time [2002], the Republicans were facing what looked like potentially serious scandals: alleged accounting manipulations at the Harken Energy Corporation (when President Bush was a director) and Halliburton (under the chairmanship of Vice President Cheney, who was also accused of insider trading), the Enron fiasco, and the intelligence failures leading up to September 11. Democrats were leading on the issues that seemed to matter most to the electorate: the job market, the economy, Social Security, and Medicare. Millions of people had lost their retirement savings in the stock market crash of 2000-2002, and exposures of corporate fraud were erupting every week. The economy was still down more than 200,000 jobs from when President Bush took office. The Bush team changed the channel, and their problems vanished. From August 2002 to the November 5 election, the national news was all about Iraq. The Republicans picked up six seats in the House and took majority control in the Senate.

Link

And now, just in time to attempt to sway the off-year Congressional elections this fall, comes the Iran "problem".

But perhaps the American voters won't go for the ruse this time around.

__________________
"Bush is the first President to admit to an impeachable offense."

- John Dean, former Counsel to the President (Nixon)

The aim of big corporations is to separate fools from their money all of the time and ordinary folks from their money most of the time. The rest of us must fend for ourselves.

davidmc

Just goes to show, BushCo. is about enriching the already rich & some of his and dicks oil buddies
Another pic of my bike. She is sooo sweet

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__________________
I'm completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death.
George Carlin
US comedian and actor (1937 - )

limerickman

I thought that Americans wouldn't have re-elected him in 2004.
The fact that the American people did re-elect them makes me wonder about the USA.

I know that there is a lot of vocal opposition to Bush within the USA - but I am beginning to think that Americans actually do support what are the imperialistic tendencies of the Bush goverment.

__________________
.."But finally the last thing I’ll say to the people who don’t believe in cycling, the cynics and the sceptics. I'm sorry for you. I’m sorry that you can’t dream big. [I]I'm sorry you don't believe in miracles. You should believe in these athletes, and you should believe in these people. I'll be a fan of the Tour de France for as long as I live. And there are no secrets" - this is a hard sporting event and hard work wins it - Armstrong 2005 TDF
morelike hypocrisy.

Wurm

A very valid point, Lim. It seems that much of the population here can't see past what the MSM feeds to them on a spoon, hence, we have something as despicable as BushCo in power.

Yet it's not all the right-wing-owned-media's fault. They've only been the water carriers. The real problem is that 'Merkuns don't want to take the time and effort to look behind the curtain...or they're too gutless and dishonest to face the ugly truth.

Hey wolfux....I think i'm playing yer theme song...

__________________
"Bush is the first President to admit to an impeachable offense."

- John Dean, former Counsel to the President (Nixon)

The aim of big corporations is to separate fools from their money all of the time and ordinary folks from their money most of the time. The rest of us must fend for ourselves.

Hypnospin

there is a prevelant contemporary history of deception based war lies, the us seems especially prone to go for the baited hook.

www.commondreams.org/views06/0321-20.htm

i credit this to many basing decisions on emotional appeal rather then practical
forethought. ignoring what has come before, and/or the ignorance of past events also must get the limelight here as a causative factor.

europeans at home went through two world wars, the us does not have this scope of reality based experience on which to form full knowlegable decisions. the us also has not outgrown the whole imperialist grab mentality, which historically seems also to diminish only out of the revulsion at lives maimed and lost for a supposed cause.

many times i cannot agree with the mindset of those those who find a way support the direction the us finds itself headed, both in terms of national and international "policy", but maybe we need to identify the symptoms to understand the disease.

__________________
"The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present...As our case is new, so must we think anew and act anew"
Abraham Lincoln, in his address to congress dec. 1st, 1861

davidmc

You mean that catchy tune entitled-"Come all ye Sheep"

__________________
I'm completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death.
George Carlin
US comedian and actor (1937 - )

Hypnospin

or just maybe, "bark at the moon"

www.cuttingedge.org/news/n1758.cfm


do note the following is preceded with disclaimer, disturbing nature.
www.bushflash.com/warpig.html

__________________
"The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present...As our case is new, so must we think anew and act anew"
Abraham Lincoln, in his address to congress dec. 1st, 1861