Former Secretary of State, Colin Powell, told Robert Sheer that neither he, nor the State Department ever believed Iraq posed an imminent nuclear threat and blames Vice President Dick Cheney for pushing these false notions onto the president. While this doesn't surprise me, I have to admit that I am disappointed that Powell does not feel more obligation to totally come clean and tell the public what he knows.
Robert Scheer writes in The Truthdig, on April 11, 2006, Now Powell Tells Us
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.
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.
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.
This last paragraph raises the question of whether Colin Powell would have ever said anything at all, after participating in one of the greatest frauds every perpetrated on the world.?
Colin Powell's Latest Revelation
Robert Sheer reports a question and answer exchange with Colin Powell at a talk Powell gave in Los Angeles on Monday.
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.
Senate Intelligence Committee Complicity?
I hope the Senate Intelligence Committee is paying attention. Their previous attempts to whitewash the Phase 2 investigations into the political dimensions of this rapidly emerging scandal does not give many of us much hope for substance from their purportedly impending final report.
How are they going to issue such a report without public hearings? And will they have any credibility at all if they do not include reference to the many astonishing revelations we have heard in the last few weeks?
But if they have known this all along, how do they justify their long silence? Does this not seem like complicity? Or in the cases of the many potential criminal violations, accessories after the fact?
Who will investigate the role of the Senate Intelligence Committee in this massive fraud on the American people and the world?
Even More Evidence Of Intelligence Cherry Picking Led By Cheney
But Scheer goes on to provide his perspective on this.
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 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."
Other Long Known Background Just For Poignance
These next paragraps are well known, but in the spirit of really nailing down and supporting a correct collective memory of the past, after this long period of lies and suppression by the Administration, I quote a few more.
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."
Why Were These Doubts About Iraq WMD Evidence Kept Secretly For So Long? Colin Powell and Others Involved Need to Come Clean And Explain Themselves
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.
Conclusions
While I admire his respect for the tradition of confidentiality to those one has served in the past, unlike Dick Morris who has exploited past confidences for personal gain, I believe clear evidence of wrong doing creates an exceptional circumstance that requires Colin Powell and others who participated in this, to come forward and provide a full public accounting and explanation of their role, and their ethics.
We need to re-establish clear expectations and behavioral norms for high public officials with regard to lying to the public and engaging in criminal behavior.
The "I was just following orders" explanation was not accepted at Nuremberg, and I do not believe it should be accepted now.
It was, after all, Colin Powell's personal credibility and testimony before the United Nations Security Council that led many doubters in Congress to finally support the dubious proposition for war in Iraq.
If Colin Powell wishes to redeem any shred of this tattered credibility he needs to come clean with the public now.
And all others involved with this, including the complicit and enabling Senators and staffers of the Senate Intelligence Committee, need to come clean as well.
We can not allow such people to believe ever that criminal behavior will be tolerated in high public office.
Especially, from the President of the United States, White House, Congress and other government officials.
We need a much broader prosecutorial mandate than the narrow scope US Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was given here.
Update 1: Story Picked Up By The Nation
Because of the slowness of the MSM in picking up this story, I thought readers here might be reassurd to know this article has just been picked up by the Nation.
The Nation: Now Powell Tells Us
Also, the Nation runs this biography of Robert Scheer.
Robert Scheer, a contributing editor to The Nation, is editor of Truthdig.com. He is a Puffin Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute and the author, with Christopher Scheer and Lakshmi Chaudhry, of The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq, published by Akashic Books and Seven Stories Press. His weekly column, distributed by Creators Syndicate, appears in the San Francisco Chronicle.
Update 2: 4:45 PM EST
The MSM has started to pick this up and run with it. Looks like you will probably see it in your newspape tomorrow. But rememeber. You read it here first.
UPI Up-Take
CBS Up-Take
Also, Powell, seems to be an a global speaking tour. Is making critical remarks about Donald Rumsfeld's handling of the war.