Raspberry’s Powell Whitewash Doesn’t Wash

WaPo’s William Raspberry said this morning in his “We're Past Politics With Iraq” article, “Colin Powell, who -- unwittingly, I believe -- passed along some of the cooked evidence, is on record as having changed his mind. As Powell told Barbara Walters in September, when he made his dramatic show-and-tell presentation before the U.N. Security Council, there were "people in the intelligence community who knew at the time that some of these sources were not good and shouldn't be relied upon, and they didn't speak up. That devastated me. . . . It's a blot . . . [that] will always be a part of my record.” Raspberry went on to say, “Powell is nobody's flip-flopper. People who wanted a certain conclusion gave him bad information and he passed it on -- to his regret. Can't members of Congress who believed the bad evidence enough to vote us into war also experience regret?” I am sure Colin Powell regrets every minute of his pandering to Republican Party politics, but his complicity in the lies that pushed us into the Iraq war is a little more than passing along information. The Colin Powell treachery in front of the UN is on tape. He dramatically held up a bogus vial of poison to illustrate Saddam Hussein’s ability to use chemical warfare. But please note that he did not refer to the Nigerian uranium. Later, he said the story "had not stood the test of time.” On February 24th, 2001, Colin Powell said "Saddam Hussein has not developed any significant capacity with respect to weapons of mass destruction…he is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors." When Colin Powell told the world that George Tenet had misled him, it was total baloney and he knew it was baloney. Colin Powell had always been well aware that there were no WMD’s in Iraq. However, that said, I am becoming more convinced as each day passes that Mr. Four-star General Colin Powell was not the big powerful alpha male figure in the first Bush administration that he has been portrayed as being. I believe that Powell was little more than National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice’s errand boy. It was Rice and political strategist and WHIG member Mary Matalin who cooked up the “smoking gun…mushroom cloud” rhetoric that was seized on by the BushMen and used as a major justification for attacking Iraq. Raspberry’s defense of Colin Powell does not stand up to scrutiny. Powell willingly told lies to justify a war in Iraq in order to curry favor in the Republican Party. And it probably was because Powell had eyes on running for President. But Powell does not come close to having the power-mad driven amoral qualities of now-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. When casting about for “Official A” who leaked the Plame info, I would bet on Condoleezza Rice. She is one bloodthirsty war-mongering bitch. And of all the people in the White House or with ties to the White House that I would not want to encounter in a dark alley at midnight, Condoleezza Rice and Mary Matalin are high on my list.