Debating Colin Powell’s Guilt

Colin “Cancer” Powell cannot possibly feel any less guilt about his deception regarding the nonexistent/invisible “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq than the lack of guilt that Clarence “Uncle Tom” Thomas feels when he thinks about sexually harrassing Anita Hill and lying about it to Congress. If Powell was an honorable man, although he is not, then he would admit that he was holding up his urine sample in front of the United Nations and claimed that it was uranium. In fairness to the man, “urine” and “uranium” sound somewhat similar.

Wilkerson-bashing is counterproductive in the present moment. I don’t see anyone else saying “I will testify” against what Cheney, McGlaughlin and Tenet did.

Wilkerson is not being the “perfect” whistleblower, but nobody else this high up the food chain has come forward. Wilkerson has been like the tortured conscience of Powell who remains a wishy-washy spectator in the aftermath of Hubris.

I admire Mr. Swanson, but we do “blame Bush less” if we expend time writing faulting Wilkerson instead of Cheney. Melvin Goodman of Consortiumnews.com for example, recently wrote about the failure of the Washington Post to spot the Iraq Team “bullshit” in recent coverage.

Also food for thought:

– from the start of his whistleblowing, Wilkerson has always said Powell believed WMD could be found in country, which effectively could have made moot the idea that he “knowingly lied”. Powell might have been banking on this as he cowered from Cheney’s onslaught…

– the statement above that Powell’s presentation “is widely credited with turning the tide” in favor of invading Iraq might speak to public support, but operationally speaking, this is just an afterthought. Judith Miller’s NYT article of 9/8/02 predated Powell’s speech by about 5 months and got much of Congress on board. See this timeline at MotherJones for more.

– Wilkerson, who eventually did step down in protest, could have had defensible reasons. Suppose he wanted to gather documentation first without blowing his cover. Maybe he felt he was still going to be able to do something good from inside one of the nation’s senior most foreign policy positions. He also had to consider his resignation at any time would have a coffin nail for his boss. It was effectively the end of Powell when Wilkerson did finally come out…

Mr. McGovern reminds us Wilkerson has earned credibility where Powell has not, seemingly been dragging Powell as he’s gone public with the story. But in continuing to give Powell the benefit of the doubt, Wilkerson is undermined by Powell himself.

Wilkerson made his charges on PBS seven years ago already. Powell has left him in limbo throughout. But even when Powell said something with teeth, the US media failed to cover it. In February 2011, as Curveball was all over US media (NYT, 60 Minutes, etc.) confirming he’d lied all along, Powell was questioned by The Guardian about his role, replying:

“It has been known for several years that the source called Curveball was totally unreliable…[t]he question should be put to the CIA and the DIA as to why this wasn’t known before the false information was put into the NIE sent to Congress, the president’s state of the union address and my 5 February presentation to the UN.”

Yes, that sounded like a call for an investigation, but we never heard this in our media – indeed, when Powell published his memoir in May 2012, he blamed the VP and CIA for bad intel but didn’t call for action of any kind.

Continuing to have it both ways as he tours the lecture circuit, Powell’s bio is aptly named “It Worked For Me”.

How can Powell and others claim they didn’t know the contents of his speech at the UN were false when knowledgeable Middle East reporters such as Robert Fisk spotted the lies immediately after they exited Powell’s mouth? It was also patently obvious to anyone with a modicum of street smarts that Powell’s dishonesty was preceded by a constant litany of mendacity from Bush and his administration. And, what does it say about the American people that they keep re-electing guilty politicians who voted aggressively for this war with one now serving as vice president and are apparently willing to have another become president in 2016?

Debating Colin Powell’s Guilt or anything here is more than difficult because of censorship.
.
in an interview at ‘Meet the Press’, Collin Powell defended his lies at United Nations about Iraqi WMDs in 2003. “We were basing all of our actions on a national intelligence estimate that the Congress asked for and was provided to the Congress by the CIA. And all of us in the Bush administration at that time accepted the judgment of our 16 intelligence communities. I presented it to the U.N. Three months before I presented it to the U.N., Congress passed a resolution, also supported by Senator Hagel and many other senators that would give the president the authority to go to war. They weren’t half-truths is what we were being told by the intelligence community. We subsequently found out that a lot of that information was not accurate and that is very unfortunate but that’s the way it unfolded,” said Powell.
.
According to independent media, the Iraqi WMD information like the names of 19 Arab hijackers who carried the 9/11 – were provided to CIA by Israeli Mossad.
.
Colin Powell was fully aware that Iraq probably did not have WMD – if only
because CIA’s Mss. Susan Lindauer personally warned him so – before he went to UN to give his speech, and yet he later complained on national TV that no one in the intelligence community had warned him that this was so. With General Powell’s reputation,one would never expect him to lie and put on a show on TV in order to protect himself and the “official story”, and yet he did so, and you will find all this in Lindauer’s book.

For some time I’ve been curious as to whether the claims made by Susan Lindauer in her book “Extreme Prejudice” were real and/or could be confirmed by others, and if, as she says, they were communicated to the President through her second cousin Andrew Card, and to Secretary Powell the night before his speech to the UN, and also to Congress- including Senators McCain and Feinstein and their partners in crime. Whether or not she is right, Saddam’s overtures wouldn’t have mattered to Bush anyway since they were inconsistent with his plan to take him out and create a new paradigm in the Middle East as MSNBC’S recent documentary “Hubris” makes clear, but it would have made Powell’s decision to misrepresent the facts before the UN and the rest of the world that much more egregious. Col. Wilkerson has been one of the few from the Bush Administration that have acknowledged that the Iraq war was a terribe mistake, and since that time have been urging a reset of our foreign policy, though very recently he seemed to backtrack and assert that Powell’s speech, which he himself drafted, was not necessarily an unfair approximation of what they knew at the time. So, I wonder if anyone has ever asked him about Lindauer.

It is now widely accepted that the march to war with Iraq was all a massive con job, (though our invasion of Afghanistan is still not widely questioned), but it was a big lie, of such magnitude that a poorly informed and undiscerning public might be forgiven for having believed it. No one who now has the facts, except possibly the most unrepentant and/or psychopathic of the neocons such as, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Perle and Feith, can continue to maintain with a straight face that Iraq had WMD, or at least reasonable to believe. Yet, the Administration has been following the same basic foreign policy of taking out each and every country on the original list, albeit with different tactics in its targeting and manner of waging war; and it has continued to hold all materials and relevant information about 9/11 and its aftermath, even up to the the present wars, under State Secrets wraps and away from public view- including, credible testimony about what happened, facts about all those who were responsible, what they did, and why. As a result, it has been left to the 9/11 A&E Truthers to march forward undaunted seeking answers that should have been declassified a dozen years ago. Where does that leave us today? We are still mired in the “War on Terror”, or “War of Chaos”, or whatever it might be called, which is in reality a policy of perpetual war intended and designed to contain our former Cold War enemies, and to neutralize, dismember and atomize all of the non-aligned Third World so that we might expand our hegemonic reach and control, while using our allies in a form of ‘pay for play gang rape’ to achieve it; and, we are still tied up in a web of national security legislation and Executive Orders, to defend ourselves at home against mostly imaginary terrorists- i.e., persons and groups who may or may not have been appropriately classified as such under these laws- and, yet, because of the deference of the courts to the Presidential War Power, we’ll never know if the original findings that they were terrorists were, or still are, correct or not.

Moreover, even if they are terrorists, it may still be hard to know whose they really are.
And, as our civilization has advanced into the 21st century and we no longer hire Hessians to shoot enemies of the Empire, we find our government outsourcing our wars and our interrogations, or a portion thereof, to shadowy military contractors, and in a true spirit of cooperation, and as part of a COIN strategy without a “positive purpose”, encouraging our putative allies to hire mercenary jihadists, which we then train to spread terror, and even behead or maim their victims- the argument being that we must terrorize the population to turn it against its government and then save it, and must make a complete break with the past and replace it with a clean canvas on which to paint our image of “democracy” and “human rights” for our most favored dictatorships to ignore.

I see it all as part of that inevitable march toward world government, where every nation, except the U.S., and every citizen of every nation, except the 1% of the 1%, is a castrati serving the boss. So, watch out, because those who are making the rules no longer see national borders or national sovereignty, or a UN Charter, or Geneva Conventions as particularly practical or relevant anymore, but instead are promoting multinational treaties such as the Trans Pacific Partnership, which from most accounts is already a done deal everywhere else in the Pacific region, and that the kingmakers think will be a slam dunk in the U.S. Senate, even if (like the targeted assassination memos) no one voting on it in Congress is supposed to have seen any of it (though don’t count on Feinstein-Blum, or Kerry-Heinz, or Clinton-Clinton being in the dark). And don’t expect anything different with the Keystone project. The deal has already been cut, and the EIR prepared under Hillary’s watch, but which she has been careful not to address so as not to offend her future constituency- i.e., those who love her even while she is picking their pocket- will, together with House and gubernatorial support, give Obama the ammo he needs to sign off and “put the ‘Tiger’ in the tank” (i.e, with a redeemed Woods on the green helping the President sell his plan to the energy companies, while Jesse’s son is packed and on his way to jail.)

So, this is turning out for those marginalized on the left to be a race during Obama’s second term to make more sense of the past, and stop too much more of the bad stuff from happening before it overwhelms us, and maybe even make enough noise to prod the government finally to change course for the future. As more and more of the story seeps out, and Congress embarrasses itself in the Hagel and Brennan hearings, it is becoming clearer and clearer that those who could have, and should have protected the public interest ought now to have the decency to resign, or give up their chairmanships and step aside for others who are serious about fixing the mess and are less tainted by it. For example, it is appalling that Democratic leaders like Pelosi and Feinstein and Levin, and dinosaurs from earlier Administrations, such as Madeline Albright, should still be so supportive of our President’s targeted assassination program, a program they have shielded themselves from fully understanding, and still don’t get. Albright escaped with murder on her hands in Yugoslavia and is still living off of a reputation she built off of the carnage we wreaked, and propaganda war we waged to legitimize it- and off of the Dayton Accords which would not have been necessary if Clinton had been willing to accept a more inclusive deal that our allies had proposed in Lisbon Conference eighteen months earlier. War is a racket, war is hell, and war won’t work in a world too big for one or a few countries to control in this day and age, unless we commit genocide to get what we want and maybe blow ourselves up in the process.