Whoa. "Colin Powell's Blot"

[gratuitous]

22. Eight years and 11 months later

Powell finally gets around to saying in public what he said at the time. Naturally, it wasn't reported stateside. You had to go to England to find out what Powell really thought about his Prevaricating Powerpoint Presentation:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/jun/02/usa.iraq

Much of the initial information for Mr Powell's speech to the UN was provided by the Pentagon, where Paul Wolfowitz, the US deputy defence secretary, set up a special unit, the Office of Special Plans, to counter the uncertainty of the CIA's intelligence on Iraq.

Mr Powell's team removed dozens of pages of alleged evidence about Iraq's banned weapons and ties to terrorists from a draft of his speech, US News and World Report says today. At one point, he became so angry at the lack of adequate sourcing to intelligence claims that he declared: "I'm not reading this. This is bullshit," according to the magazine.

Presented with a script for his speech, Mr Powell suspected that Washington hawks were "cherry picking", the US magazine Newsweek also reports today. Greg Theilmann, a recently retired state department intelligence analyst directly involved in assessing the Iraqi threat, says that inside the Bush administration "there is a lot of sorrow and anger at the way intelligence was misused".

So yeah, Colin. You thought it was bullshit in 2003, but you played the good soldier and read every last word. That makes you a war criminal, and in a slightly more just world, you'd be answering for your crimes instead of cashing fat blood-stained consulting checks.