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December 17, 2006

More Evidence On Whether Powell Is A Liar, Idiot, Or Lying Idiot

UPDATE: Videos here. Some of the sound is a little unclear, so hopefully there will be transcripts soon.

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You may recall Colin Powell saying this during his U.N. speech:

Iraq's record on chemical weapons is replete with lies. It took years for Iraq to finally admit that it had produced four tons of the deadly nerve agent, VX. A single drop of VX on the skin will kill in minutes. Four tons.

The admission only came out after inspectors collected documentation as a result of the defection of Hussein Kamal, Saddam Hussein's late son-in-law.

This was true. However, there's one little thing Powell left out: when Hussein Kamel defected in 1995, he also said ALL IRAQ'S UNDECLARED WMD HAD BEEN SECRETLY DESTROYED IN 1991. In other words, Iraq had been lying about what it had done in the past, not what it possessed in the present.

Of course, to know this you had to have access to supersecret sources of information. For instance, CNN:

SADLER: Can you state here and now -- does Iraq still to this day hold weapons of mass destruction?

KAMEL: No. Iraq does not possess any weapons of mass destruction. I am being completely honest about this.

Or the U.N. notes from the debriefing of Kamel:

All chemical weapons were destroyed. I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons - biological, chemical, missiles, nuclear were destroyed.

This morning Sam Husseini caught Colin Powell as he was leaving an appearance on Face the Nation and asked him whether he was aware of this when he spoke at the U.N. Powell said he wasn't; in other words, he declared that he didn't know the most basic information about what he was saying, and apparently doesn't feel any responsibility for knowing it.

Check back later today for the video and transcript.

Posted at December 17, 2006 12:48 PM | TrackBack
Comments

please, please, please

you gotta post the video and transcript

i wanna play it again and again for those "Powell for Saint-hood" worshippers

~ theDdoubleSstandard

Posted by: theDdoubleSstandard at December 17, 2006 02:19 PM

Speaking of St. Colin, theDdoubleSstandard.

Among the high echelon foreign policy mucky-mucks of Bush/Cheney Inc., wasn't it Powell (and Powell alone) who was 'realistic' about Ariel Sharon AND willing to (publicly) call individual members of the 'Likudnik' faction of the 'neocon' cabal Likudniks?


Posted by: Mike at December 17, 2006 03:17 PM

David Brooks offers his great insight once again. He tells us that we should be optimistic about America's future because "the Sadrs of the world simply do not have a social model that large numbers of people will want to live under."

http://select.nytimes.com/2006/12/17/opinion/17brooks.html?hp

He is right. The 10% of the rich who own 85% of the global assets are "large numbers of people" and they do want to live in countries which share the economic and social success of the US. These are the 13.5 million millioners and 466 billioners who live around the world, mostly in the US. Wouldn't you if you were one of them?

Posted by: Dimitria at December 17, 2006 03:19 PM

Dimitria: st colin is hard to take; st brooks is insufferable.

the good news is that to deal with them is what gave us the toilet plunger.

Posted by: Bernard Chazelle at December 17, 2006 05:50 PM

I don't think he's an idiot. Brooks, maybe.

Posted by: Jonathan Versen at December 17, 2006 07:27 PM

Sam's site, just FYI, is husseini.org, not samhusseini.org.

And, the home of this stuff (which Jon is welcome to, and is going to, and encouraged to by the very nature of how we're sharing it) is going to be washingtonstakeout.com for so long as we can make it happen.

M
A collaborator

Posted by: matt at December 17, 2006 08:33 PM

I vote for lying idiot, because how else could he be stupid enough to think a lie that blatant would work indefinitely?

Great work, Sam and M!

Posted by: Nell at December 17, 2006 09:51 PM

colin powell was for the truth until he spoke up against it

Posted by: almostinfamous at December 18, 2006 07:03 AM

"Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions."

Albert Einstein

Posted by: almostinfamous at December 18, 2006 07:24 AM

...Apart from physics, Einstein then had an astonishing grasp of the obvious

Posted by: Mace Price at December 18, 2006 03:50 PM

Was not Powell a professional liar back in Viet Nam who was brought into the My Lai Massacre investigation in order to insure that no US military big-wigs were charged with ordering the killings?

Posted by: Larry at December 18, 2006 07:06 PM