Friday, February 06, 2004
What a Difference Eight Months Make
Does anybody else remember Colin Powell's "This is bullshit" temper tantrum over the intelligence backing up the claims he was going to make before the UN? Here's an article about it from The Guardian. Powell actually put together his own team to try to verify some of the stuff he was about to assert as fact:
Mr Powell's team removed dozens of pages of alleged evidence about Iraq's banned weapons and ties to terrorists from a draft of his speech, US News and World Report says today. At one point, he became so angry at the lack of adequate sourcing to intelligence claims that he declared: "I'm not reading this. This is bullshit," according to the magazine. Presented with a script for his speech, Mr Powell suspected that Washington hawks were "cherry picking", the US magazine Newsweek also reports today. Greg Theilmann, a recently retired state department intelligence analyst directly involved in assessing the Iraqi threat, says that inside the Bush administration "there is a lot of sorrow and anger at the way intelligence was misused".
which is interesting given his recent statement that he may not have supported the invasion had he known Iraq did not possess WMD's:
I don't know, because it was the stockpile that presented the final little piece that made it more of a real and present danger and threat to the region and to the world. The absence of a stockpile changes the political calculus; it changes the answer you get.*
Um, Colin, you did know.
