Colin Powell has to be getting tired of the flip flopping:
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.
What bugs the shit out of me on this is you got Powell, a ex officer in the military, who went to the U.N. and conveyed what he now admits to be “lies” in order to sell the Iraq war. He knew he was sending these young men and women into hell on a lie and did not do a single thing to stop it. If you ask me – he is worse than Bush. Bush could be crazy enough to believe he is right – Powell has now admitted he helped in a lie.