caption: Colin Powell examines the remains of his integrity.
ba-zing!
There's a phenomenon known as "magical thinking" (ref. Emily Pronin of Princeton), whereby people believe that they have influenced distant events or can sense connections between things that have no known physical connection. Remind you of the neocons' magical thinking re WMD, "last throes," "Mission Accomplished", etc.?
I was watching part of it at lunch in downtown Austin, and I thought AWWWW Shit he got some old exhibit posterboard from the Matlock show that used ta come on the TEE-vee.
I was in a doctor's office waiting room when the Powell show came on. Good times.
It's smaller than I thought it would be.
d,
this comment *must* be read out loud every fourth year anniversary of the event in question.
aimai
Thing is, you can't just recite the old lies without explaining to the readers of the future -- most of whom won't be as well-versed in the history as us -- that:
1) THESE WERE LIES.
2) THE PEOPLE SAYING THEM KNEW THEY WERE LIES.
THE PEOPLE SAYING THEM KNEW THEY WERE LIES
Hm. I hold no brief for Powell, but his version is that Tenet personally assured him that the intel was good. Have we heard Tenet deny doing so?
Phoenix Woman: It was a "slam dunk" case, remember? And trust me, Tenet is da bomb - he won the Bronx slam drunk contest three years in a row!
Things change, you know? Powell's gone, the Prez is hella uncool, and we have lots scarier shit to deal with than Sadaam.
But that snarly bald guy with the heart problem is *still* all, like, "grrrrrrrrrr,"
his version is that Tenet personally assured him that the intel was good.
Perhaps, but that excuse further underlines the fatal flaw of Powell's performance: we were being asked to believe what was said based entirely on the man saying it.
Hey, Phoenix Woman - You'll need to explain to the readers of the future who Tommy Chong was, too, for this comment to really make sense.
Powell knew a big chunk of what he was saying was bunk. Ask Wilkerson. His most trusted aide thinks Powell was too loyal to the administration at the expense of the country's best interests.
his version is that Tenet personally assured him that the intel was good.
Powell, as Secretary of State, had his own intelligence organization (INR) which had already confirmed to him that some of the CIA's claims were wrong (e.g. the aluminum tubes and the Niger yellowcake stories) and that many others were tenuous at best. To use the excuse that Tenet said it was correct when he knew Tenet's organization had screwed up several times on the same target (and on the most important pieces) is nothing more than passing the buck.
The biggest problem with Powell's presentation wasn't that he knew it was lies. He carefully eliminated the "intelligence" that he could prove conclusively was false. The problem was that he used information which he knew to be doubtful and other information which, although likely true, was only suggestive of WMDs rather than evidence and then took that thin gruel and gave it the hard sell.
At his performance regarding My Lai was just an after-the-fact white wash rather than a proximate cause of an atrocity.
Looking back to that prewar period, the thing that strikes me the hardest:
Saddam was telling the truth
Bush and his lackies were lying
It takes a whole lot of something to make a tinpot murderous dictator like Saddam look better than the "leader of the free world", but Bush managed it.
Powell is the guy who made a big point of how, after we'd caught Miguel Noriega, the troops had found white powder and whole chickens in his freezer, evidence that he was a coke-snortin', Santeria worshipping bad dude.
The white powder was masa flour, so really he was equipped to fry chickens. So he was hatin' the arteries, but nothing else from the evidence that was provided.
Powell has not, to the best of my knowledge, retracted his comments. Noriega may have been a bad dude, but perhaps we could villify him for what he did, not shit we made up.
Powell wasn't that different from any other lying politician. He always seemed sincere.
He said that? And was everyone like "Whoa, he must be some kind of badass king-hell Satanist if he keeps chickens in his freezer?"
Did he also have soup? I believe that soup is evil.
I have never and will never forgive Powell for that day at the UN. Suddenly we were morphed into the russian delegation from the 60's, circa the Cuban Missile Crisis.
May this hopeless piece of dung roast in hell for eternity for what he dide to this country and to the world.
I remember a statement he made before way before he held up that snakeoil in the picture. The inspectors hadn't found anything and Powell said it's not up to us to find the WMD, it's up to the Iraqis to give it up. I knew we were screwed then. It's like a cop coming to your house and saying it's not up to us to find the drugs, it's up to you to give them up; and if you don't we are gong to tear you a new...
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