It just keeps getting worse.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said yesterday that at the time he made the case to the United Nations for the invasion of Iraq some US intelligence officials already knew many of the claims about weapons and terrorist ties were suspect, but they had not informed him or other senior policy makers about their doubts.
Powell has previously said that it later became clear some information cited in his February 2003 speech to the UN Security Council was ”not solid.” He went further yesterday, indicating in testimony to Congress that intelligence officials, whom he did not identify, were aware of that beforehand.
”What . . . distressed me is that there were some in the intelligence community who had knowledge that the sourcing was suspect and that was not known to me,” Powell told the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee. ”They knew at the time I was saying it that some of the sourcing was suspect.”
And these are the people we’re supposed to trust to keep us safe and tell us the truth about potential threats.
Of course, don’t believe the spin that Powell was just an incompetent dupe who was taken advantage of, making a presentation to the world that was unknowingly false. The truth is, Powell was warned, but he went ahead with the presentation anyway.
”It’s disingenuous for Powell not to mention the fact that even his own people were doing their best to warn him about categorical statements and warn him about exaggerating the threats, warning him about the reliability of some of the human intelligence reporting,” said Greg Thielmann, formerly Powell’s chief of intelligence on nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.
Thielmann said analysts at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research provided Powell with a report just two days before the speech calling into question many of the claims. Among them were disagreements that Iraq’s acquisition of aluminum tubing was for use in a nuclear weapons program.
The fact that there are those who believe the Bush administration has a shred of credibility left is something I will just never understand.