How can you tell when the Bush administration is lying about Iraq? When their lips move.
I have to admit, I found Colin Powell’s February presentation to the United Nations on Iraq pretty persuasive at the time. It was well-argued, thorough, and convincing. Powell didn’t include the most offensive lies from Bush’s State of the Union — the now-infamous 16 words about uranium from Niger, for example, weren’t mentioned — and the Secretary of State’s presentation was instrumental in winning support for Resolution 1441.
Since then, many of Powell’s points have come into question. CBS News is reporting that Greg Thielmann, who was responsible at the State Department for analyzing the Iraqi WMD threat, believes Powell intentionally misled the world.
Thielmann, who will be on 60 Minutes II tonight, said that at the time of Powell’s U.N. presentation, Saddam Hussein did not represent a threat — to the United States, to Iraq’s neighbors, to anyone.
“I think my conclusion [about Powell’s speech] now is that it’s probably one of the low points in his long distinguished service to the nation,” Thielmann said.
The CBS report also notes that Steve Allinson and a dozen other U.N. inspectors in Iraq watched Powell’s speech together. “Various people would laugh at various times [during Powell’s speech] because the information he was presenting was just, you know, didn’t mean anything — had no meaning,” Allinson said.
It’s probably a pretty bad sign when weapons inspectors are literally laughing at your conclusions.
Thielmann told 60 Minutes what most have believed for months — that the decision to go to war was made first and then intelligence was read selectively to bolster that choice.
“They knew what they wanted the intelligence to show,” Thielmann said. “They were really blind and deaf to any kind of countervailing information the intelligence community would produce.”
This isn’t the first time we’ve heard from Mr. Thielmann. In fact, he’s been an invaluable voice on Bush’s foreign policy deceptions for several months.
For example, while Bush’s “uranium from Africa” claim has been discredited, there was also a controversy surrounding Bush’s claim about Hussein’s use of aluminum tubes as part of an alleged nuclear program.
Thielmann, who directed the office of Strategic, Proliferation, and Military Affairs in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research until September 2002, was a key administration voice explaining that the president wasn’t telling the truth about this either.
“This administration has had a faith-based intelligence attitude,” Thielmann told Mother Jones in July. “It’s top-down use of intelligence; ‘We know the answers, give us the intelligence to support those answers.'”
In addition, Thielmann played a role in bringing the “16 words” controversy to the forefront. It was Thielmann who had concluded the forged documents purporting to show African uranium transactions were “garbage” long before Bush was using the information in his SOTU speech and it was also Thielmann who said he is “quite confident” that this conclusion was passed on “all the way to the top of the State Department.”
I can only hope that Thielmann isn’t married to an undercover CIA agent…