Powell Crticizes Iraq (NRR)
33thirdcom
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Just saw this... Powell Criticism
33thirdcom
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deseves a reading copy--from www.timesonline.co.uk
September 10, 2005
Powell regrets ???mess??? of Iraq[/b]
From Tim Reid in Washington
COLIN POWELL, the former US Secretary of State, harshly criticised the Bush Administration yesterday for its failures in Iraq, calling the country a mess and voicing concerns that it may slide into civil war.
General Powell, who left the Administration in January, also said that his speech in February 2003 to the UN, making the case for war, was a painful blot on his record.
Making his most damning remarks about the conduct of the war since he was replaced by Condoleezza Rice, General Powell criticised the White House and Pentagon for their post-war planning and failure to send sufficient troops.
Asked in an interview broadcast on ABC whether he regretted his support for the war, he replied: ???Who knew what the whole mess was going to be like???? He added: ???What we didn???t do in the immediate aftermath of the war was to impose our will on the whole country, with enough troops of our own, with enough troops from coalition forces, or by recreating the Iraqi forces, armed forces, more quickly than we are doing now.
???And it may not have turned out to be such a mess if we had done some things differently.???
Turning to his pre-war address to the UN Security Council, when he forcefully made the case for invasion and offered proof that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, General Powell said that he felt terrible about the claims he made. Asked whether the speech would tarnish his reputation, he replied: ???Of course it will. It???s a blot. I???m the one who presented it on behalf of the United States to the world, and (it) will always be part of my record. It was painful. It???s painful now.???
General Powell, 68, did not blame George Tenet, the CIA???s Director at the time, for the misleading information, which included satellite photographs of trucks that he asserted were mobile biological weapons laboratories. Instead, he blamed lower-level intelligence analysts for not speaking out during the five days he pored over reports at the CIA as he prepared the speech.
He said: ???George Tenet . . . believed what he was giving to me was accurate.??? He added: ???There were some good 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.???
General Powell said that he had ???never seen evidence to suggest??? a connection between the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the regime of Saddam Hussein, unlike Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, who has made such a claim.
He said that there was little option now but to continue investing in the Iraqi Armed Forces. Despite his hesitation about the war ??? ???I???m always a reluctant warrior??? ??? he said that he was glad that Saddam and his regime had been removed.
Voicing concerns about the possibility of civil war, he said: ???A way has to be found for the Sunnis to be brought into the political process. You cannot let . . . Iraq devolve into a mini-state in the north, a larger mini-state in the south and sort of nothing in the middle.???
shit just keeps getting deeper... Even their own posse is not defending their actions...
That says a whole lot to me.
this is from the new republic 07.11.03:
MEMO TO COLIN POWELL: You'd think that as distinguished an old soldier as Colin Powell would know that when you find yourself in a hole, you stop digging. But that's the opposite of what the secretary of state was doing in Botswana yesterday. Defending President Bush from charges that he misled the public by asserting in his January State of the Union address that Iraq was trying to procure uranium from Niger--a claim based on poor intelligence, including forged documents, that some members of the administration knew to be faulty as early as February 2002--Powell told reporters, "There was sufficient evidence floating around at that time that such a statement was not totally outrageous."
But if so, why did Powell drop the claim from his February 5 presentation to the U.N. Security Council? As Powell explained it, "After further analysis, looking at other estimates we had and other information that was coming in, it turned out that the basis upon which that statement was made didn't hold up, and we said so, and we've acknowledged it, and we've moved on."
Give this man a golden shovel. As we understand it, in early 2002 intelligence analysts at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) pored over the bits of intelligence the United States had about the Niger uranium procurements. The INR analysts never received Ambassador Joe Wilson's now-famous debriefing of his trip to Niger, during which Wilson determined that the procurement probably never happened. Independently, however, they came to the same conclusion: Taking into account Saddam Hussein's past procurement patterns, the sub rosa nature of the alleged transaction occurring despite the numerous eyes--both in Niger and internationally--that would have noticed such a large uranium purchase, and the kinds of risks the Iraqi dictator had previously run, INR concluded that the transactions did not in fact take place. And so, in March 2002, the bureau--whose sole reason for existence is to provide the secretary of state with intelligence analysis--sent Powell a memo explaining exactly that. "We knew it was important," an intelligence analyst who worked on the Niger issue for INR tells &c. "The [Niger] issue might have traction, and so we wanted him to know what our opinion was."
So Powell's office received a definitive intelligence assessment about the validity of the Niger-procurement claim from his own department in March 2002--ten months before the State of the Union address. [/b] Yet as late as December of that year, the State Department was still publicly treating the Niger-procurement claim as credible. A fact sheet on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction declarations that month asked, "The declaration ignores efforts to procure uranium from Niger. Why is the Iraqi regime hiding their uranium procurement?" And, of course, Powell now suggests that it wasn't until some time between Bush's speech on January 28 and his own on February 5 that he received "other estimates ... and other information" which opened his eyes to the holes in the Niger story. We know it's a clich??, but we have to ask: What memos did Colin Powell read, and when did he read them?
damn, you know whast fucked up??
i read this and figured that lsat part was about u.s.a.
they'd be the only i could actualyl stomach, but the rest of the party would
never get behindsabotage them.That's how I first read it too.....
Me as well, which is why I initially highlighted it...
We all remember when he sat in front of the U.N. waving this prop of dry anthrax talking about the biological threat Iraq posed against the U.S.
" It should come as no shock then, that since Saddam Hussein forced out the last inspectors in 1998, we have amassed much intelligence indicating that Iraq is continuing to make these weapons."
Riiiiight... So where is all of that anthrax and the WMD's they were producing?