It's been 4 years since then-Secretary of State Colin Powell delivered his speech at the UN.
Here are some highlights. Early on in the speech, he said:
My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence. I will cite some examples, and these are from human sources.And what else did he say?
A few moments later he said:Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent. That is enough agent to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets.
Even the low end of 100 tons of agent would enable Saddam Hussein to cause mass casualties across more than 100 square miles of territory, an area nearly 5 times the size of Manhattan.
Saddam Hussein has chemical weapons. Saddam Hussein has used such weapons. And Saddam Hussein has no compunction about using them again, against his neighbors and against his own people.And remember he said that they are "facts and conclusions."
A year and a half later he said this of the speech:
Former Secretary of State Colin Powell said Thursday his prewar speech to the United Nations accusing Iraq of harboring weapons of mass destruction was a "blot" on his record.And now we all know that there were no WMD - it was all a lie.
Happy Colin Powell Day.
David. How often are you going to "look back?" How often you going to smear this Administration's war on terror?
ReplyDeleteOh wait....you hate Bush. He stole the 2000 election. Nothing else matters. Nothing.
Nevermind.
WMDs were found and you know damn well.
You are the liar.
Still nothing out of your mouth condemning your kook friends on their defacing the US Capital, I see.
Of course not.
WMD were found? When? Where?
ReplyDeleteSo the tons of material Powell described were found somewhere? If that's the case, then why did he say the speech he gave was a "blot" on his record?
And if they did find WMD, then why hasn't the administration blasted the news across the airwaves?
And are you really equating the illegal spray painting of a few anarchists (no-liberals there) with a wholesale deception of the US Congress that led to the deaths of 3,000 American heroes?
What universe do you live in that you can find the moral equivalence between those two acts?
Colin Powell has constructed a bit of a third career: Confessing to the sins of the Bush administration.
ReplyDeleteRe: His WMDs in Iraq speech to the UN:
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 a part of my record. It was painful. It's painful now
Re: The infamous Sixteen Words about Nigerian yellowcake:
...once we used the statement, and after further analysis, and 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
I wish the General/Secretary well with this career change inasmuch as his first two careers are now defunct.