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Mar. 31, 2005 According to a Reuters report posted on MSNBC News on March 30, 2005, former US Secretary of State Colin Powell, speaking recently with an unnamed German magazine, still maintains his claim that he was misinformed on the subject of Iraq's mythical WMD. Powell said, “We were sometimes too loud, too direct, perhaps we made too much noise. That certainly shocked the Europeans sometimes...Yes, the insurgency is much bigger than we anticipated. But I’m glad that Saddam is in jail.” Powell went on to say that he was "furious and angry" upon finding out that he had been misinformed about the WMD when he addressed the UN Security Council in February, 2003. He added, “It was information from our security services and from some Europeans, including Germans. Some of this information was wrong. I did not know this at the time. Hundreds of millions followed it on television. I will always be the one who presented it. I have to live with that.” One might almost suppose that Powell was being magnanimous in admitting that he had overdone it, despite the fact that, instead of accepting sole responsibility himself, he seemed to be telling the Germans they were to blame too, which didn't appear to be the case at the time, as far as I can recall. And one might be led to admire Powell's tenacity for continuing nevertheless to believe in the war in spite of his confessed overstatements. But there's an entirely different version of the history of Colin Powell's stance on the WMD. An article appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald on September 23, 2003, with the headline, "Pilger claims White House knew Saddam was no threat." According to the article, a report had been aired on British television the night before in which John Pilger, an Australian investigative reporter, said US Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice confirmed in early 2001 that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had been disarmed and was no threat. Pilger claimed to have in his possession video footage of Colin Powell in Cairo, Egypt on February 24, 2001, two years before the US invasion of Iraq, saying in regards to Saddam Hussein, "He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors." Two months later, according to Pilger, Condoleezza Rice, in unison with Colin Powell, said of Saddam, "We are able to keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt." The article did not say whether Pilger had video footage, a recording or a memorandum of Rice as she made her comments. I recall reading the article about Pilger the day it appeared. It seemed highly unlikely that he could have invented the story, if he had video footage. as he claimed. If he did not have video footage, or if his video footage had been a forgery, nothing could have been easier than to prove him a falsifier. In the following weeks however, I saw numerous references to Pilger's footage on a wide variety of obscure websites, but his comments never seemed to make it to any major newspapers, except the Sydney Morning Herald. I kept checking ProQuest's newspaper database and Altavista's News search. The procedure agreed upon by the major media seemed to be not to contradict or refute Pilger's claims, or even to vilify Pilger, but rather just to ignore him entirely. And apparently it worked. This was a disappointment to me, as I was hoping that iron-clad evidence would appear, giving the lie to the whole WMD hoax. As I know from my own personal experiences in court rooms, iron-clad evidence means nothing if no one will look at it. But it seems to me that Colin Powell has been lying. Another observation I'd like to make is that, with estimates of the cost of the Iraqi war varying from $150 billion to $200 billion and more, Saddam's incarceration, as pleasing as it was to Powell, was pretty expensive. For that amount of money, good housing for all of Iraq's 25,000,000 people might have been built. Even Hussein could have been mollified with that kind of humanitarianism. But I guess butchery is more gleeful to some people. ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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