Larry Wilkerson was Colin Powell's chief of staff at the State Dept. and claims that Powell was essentially duped by Cheney into providing justification for the Iraq War at the U.N. Ray McGovern, a former CIA official, wrote a similar story in 2009 but in 2004, Greg Thielmann, an intelligence analyst at the State Dept., stated that Powell had enough evidence to dispute several of the claims he later presented at the U.N.
For me, Wilkerson's and McGovern's excuses for Powell aren't plausible because it crucially relies on the claim that Powell could be fooled by Cheney.
UPDATE: David Swanson has an impressive list of the analyses of the State Dept.'s intelligence section (INR) available to Colin Powell, that cast serious doubt on several of the Bush Administation's claims about WMD.
Much more important, Swanson claims that Powell deliberately lied about a translation of a phone intercept between two Iraqi military officers.
Friday, February 18, 2011
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4 comments:
http://www.counterpunch.org/mcgovern05292009.html
How about this?
"Tell lies to support the White House decision for war on Iraq? No problem. As was his wont, Powell saluted sharply, even though four days prior to his Feb. 5, 2003 U.N. speech HE AND his chief of staff, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, had decided that some of the “intelligence” the White House had conjured up to “justify” war was pure “bull---t,” according to Wilkerson. Powell ended up using it anyway."
"But why Powell acquiesced is less important than THAT he went along. Though perhaps not the brightest star in the galaxy, HE CERTAINLY WAS AWARE HE WAS BEING COOPTED and that he needed not only to bless the war but also to wax enthusiastic about it, in order to remain welcome in the White House."
"How about this" should be outside frame of story.
Ken,
I found a different excerpt from Counterpunhc:
“Powell and I had a one-on-one — no one else even in the room — about his angst over what was a rather dull recounting of several old stories about Al Qa’ida-Baghdad ties [in the draft speech],” Wilkerson said. “I agreed with him that what we had was bull___t, and Powell decided to eliminate all mention of terrorist contacts between AQ and Baghdad.
“Within an hour, [CIA Director George] Tenet and [CIA Deputy Director John] McLaughlin dropped a bombshell on the table in the director’s conference room: a high-level AQ detainee had just revealed under interrogation substantive contacts between AQ and Baghdad, including Iraqis training AQ operatives in the use of chemical and biological weapons.”
Although Tenet and McLaughlin wouldn’t give Powell the identity of the al-Qaeda source, Wilkerson said he now understands that it was Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, who had been captured 15 months earlier; who later claimed he gave the CIA false information in the face of actual and threatened torture; and who now seems to be quite dead.
Presumably not realizing that the “new” intelligence was tainted, “Powell changed his mind and this information was included in his UNSC presentation, along with more general information from a previous draft about Baghdad's terrorist tendencies,” Wilkerson said.
This is very interesting blog that play an important role in the twisted tale. Wilkerson's and McGovern's excuses for Powell aren't plausible because it crucially relies on the claim that Powell could be fooled by Cheney.
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