Rising Hegemon
Somebody needs to make sure his Q-rating stays high:
Colin Powell, the US secretary of state at the time of the Iraq invasion, has called on the CIA and Pentagon to explain why they failed to alert him to the unreliability of a key source behind claims of Saddam Hussein's bio-weapons capability.
Because the time to do that is definitely eight years later, not before you personally go out and base your case for war upon it.
"It has been known for several years that the source called Curveball was totally unreliable," he told the Guardian . "The question should be put to the CIA and the DIA as to why this wasn't known before the false information was put into the NIE sent to Congress, the president's state of the union address and my 5 February presentation to the UN."
Oh it's "delightful" how willfully naive old hands get to appear in this country for the sake of their own reputations. Somehow all the policy-makers are both blameless and guileless in manufacturing this crap at the time. And then they pretend to demand answers a generation later.
This is modern America Mr. Powell, the one you helped make. The Village never looks back on the old lies, they just move on to pushing the new ones.
[Cross-posted at Firedoglake]
8 comments:
Powell seems to have adopted the Flounder Defense, as Otter described it: "Hey, you fucked up--you trusted us."
Doesn't exactly square with all the excuses made a couple of years ago by his trusted aide, Larry Wilkerson, though.
See, if he actually came clean and confesed that he betrayed his men for the sake of his career, he'd be a pariah in Washington.
But if he's a lying fraud, all the best invitations await.
The Ruling Class, ladies and gentlemen.
Powell's strategy is from the Republican rulebook: Denigrate, deny, deflect.
Jesus ... It is well known - and documented - that Cheney was stovepiping raw intelligence into his office. Ultimately, it didn't matter how the CIA felt about Curveball (and we know there were dissenting opinions on his trustworthiness within the agency, and certainly with people who had dealt with him in the past) as Cheney was cherry-picking the intelligence to suit his ends. Top CIA officials knew a good way to end your career was to contradict Cheney's findings and "Freedom Medals" (with fries) came from going along to get along.
The Village never looks back on the old lies, they just move on to pushing the new ones.
The Village CAN'T look back, if they did they'd be implicating themselves in all the illegal, evil crap that's been going on... take a look around the village, same faces for the last 40 years, they only bring in new meat when one of the old ones die off, and only if they're willing to push the same line of crap.
Nothing gets done in DC without the full cooperation of the pundits, pontificators and policy pimps, and the only people that are constant are the ones that have been in on the con for the last 40+ years.
Tell me this is an archive, right? This is happening in 2011?
In other news, Powell called the descendents of Admiral Kimmel demanding to know why our Pearl Harbor defenses were unprepared in 1941.
never trust a republikkkan.
Doesn't exactly square with all the excuses made a couple of years ago by his trusted aide, Larry Wilkerson, though.
C'mon now, Montag, you're being a bit harsh! Let me tell you a little story.
Once upon a time a couple of years ago, my wife was surfing radio stations as the two of us were take a long driving holiday through Quebec and Maine.
She happened to tune into one station just as a voice was saying that Dick Cheney had better never travel to Europe, or he'd be immediately arrested and have to go before the ICC for human rights violations,
"Woo hoo! Who is this rabid left winger? And how did he actually get some radio time?" my wife and I wondered.
At the end of the interview, the interviewer thanked him and told us his name--- Lawrence Wilkerson!
So we've been Wilkerson fans ever since!
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