THIS NEEDS REPEATING

(h/t Atrios)

Back in 2004, Colin Powell adnmitted that his infamous UN presentation about WMD in Iraq was "in some cases, deliberately misleading." Powell still regrets his mistake:

Colin Powell Says Iraq ‘Blot’ Teaches Need for Skepticism
By Tony Capaccio and Roxana Tiron - May 3, 2012 12:09 PM MT
Bloomberg News

Colin Powell says his erroneous address to the United Nations about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction provides a lesson to business leaders on the importance of staying skeptical and following their intuition.

“Yes, a blot, a failure will always be attached to me and my UN presentation,” the former U.S. secretary of state writes in a new book of leadership parables that draws frequently on his Iraq war experience. “I am mad mostly at myself for not having smelled the problem. My instincts failed me.”

Powell’s UN speech, part of the Bush administration’s public case for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, with its unsupported assertions of mobile Iraqi biological-warfare labs and a “sinister nexus” between Iraq and al-Qaeda terrorists, was based on “deeply flawed” evidence, Powell writes.

“So why did no one stand up and speak out during the intense hours we worked on the speech?” Powell writes. “Some of these same analysts later wrote books claiming they were shocked that I have relied on such deeply flawed evidence.”

Powell, who has quarreled over policy for years with former Vice President Dick Cheney, writes that Cheney had his chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, make the case for Iraq having weapons of mass destruction “as a lawyer’s brief and not as an intelligence estimate.”

This seems to be a case of cognitive dissonance:

Powell lists among the top accomplishments of former President George W. Bush’s administration that “we got rid of the horrific Hussein” regime in Iraq and ousted the Taliban from power in Afghanistan.