My long-held respect and admiration of Colin Powell is all but gone. It’s not entirely his fault; Powell is in the untenable position of defending a Bush administration foreign policy with which he obviously disagrees. Nevertheless, watching Powell struggle through unpersuasive and half-hearted explanations is painful.<\/p>\n
The latest example of this was yesterday’s concession<\/a> about the lack of evidence tying Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq to Al Queda.<\/p>\n This post isn’t about the about the obvious lack of a connection between the two. If you’re reading this, you know the truth here. Instead, this is about the stark difference between what Powell told us before the war and what Powell is telling us now.<\/p>\n In February 2003, when the administration really wanted the scare the bejeezus out of us, Powell addressed the United Nations<\/a> with a powerful presentation, which emphasized, in part, a “nexus” between Al Queda and Hussein’s regime.<\/p>\n “[W]hat I want to bring to your attention today is the potentially much more sinister nexus between Iraq and the Al Qaida terrorist network, a nexus that combines classic terrorist organizations and modern methods of murder,” Powell said. He added that Saddam’s ties to Al Queda “were forged by secret, high-level intelligence service contacts with… high-level contacts with Al Qaida.”<\/p>\n Perhaps most damningly, Powell insisted that “Al Qaida affiliates, based in Baghdad, now coordinate the movement of people, money and supplies into and throughout Iraq for his network, and they’ve now been operating freely in the capital for more than eight months. Iraqi officials deny accusations of ties with Al Qaida. These denials are simply not credible.” “I have not seen smoking-gun, concrete evidence about the connection, but I think the possibility of such connections did exist and it was prudent to consider them at the time that we did,” Powell said. Then he changed the subject.<\/p>\n Funny, when speaking to the U.N., Powell never raised the “possibility” of a connection, he simply told the world that there was a “sinister nexus between Iraq and the Al Qaida terrorist network.”<\/p>\n How sad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My long-held respect and admiration of Colin Powell is all but gone. It’s not entirely his fault; Powell is in the untenable position of defending a Bush administration foreign policy with which he obviously disagrees. Nevertheless, watching Powell struggle through unpersuasive and half-hearted explanations is painful. The latest example of this was yesterday’s concession about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1064","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1064","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1064"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1064\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nWell, speaking of credibility, here’s what Powell had to say yesterday<\/a> on the same subject:<\/p>\n