Lies from Colin Powell

Lies from Colin Powell:

Staying Powell: Yeah, [the reaction to my U.N. speech] hurt. Let me point out that the same intelligence I provided that's subject to so much controversy--that's the same intelligence that the Senate and House used four months earlier to vote for a resolution. It's the same information the President thought was accurate after his director of intelligence told him it was a slam dunk. And it was the same kind of intelligence that President Clinton used to bomb Iraq in 1998.... So when it turned out that part of that information was wrong, the spotlight was on me. And I'm disappointed. I'm sorry it happened and wish those who knew better had spoken up at the time. But there isn't anything else I can say about it. When people ask me, "Is this a blot on your record?" Yeah, okay, fine, it's a blot on my record. But do you want me to walk around saying I have a blot on my record every day? I have a blot on my record. There it is. It's there for everybody to see forever.... You know it wasn't right away that I discovered this stuff was wrong. We sent 1,400 people to look for the stuff that we were sure was there. So the only part that kind of annoys me is "Well, did you lie? Or were you misleading?" No, I didn't lie, and I wasn't misleading. If I was lying and knew what the truth was, which has to be the basis of a lie—you know the truth—we wouldn't have sent 1,400 people wandering around Iraq looking for the stuff. They didn't find it. So the intelligence was wrong. And that's all you can really say about it. Yeah, it comes up almost every day...

But that's not what happened, is it? Powell and his chief-of-staff Wilkerson knew very well that what they were presenting to the U.N. was "anything but an intelligence document," didn't they? It's now accident that Wilkerson calls his role in preparing the Feb. 14, 2003 U.N. speech "the lowest point of my life":

Wonkette: Colin Powell's former chief of staff, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, interviewed for the upcoming CNN documentary "Dead Wrong--Inside and Intelligence Meltdown," tersely characterizes his role in the preparations for his boss's historic Feb. 14, 2003 UN speech making the case for invading Iraq and unseating Saddam Hussein. "It was," Wilkerson says, "the lowest point of my life." The unsourced materials the administration gave to Powell to present were, Wilkerson recalls, "were anything but an intelligence document"; rather, they were "sort of a Chinese menu from which you could pick and choose"...