Notice how Zeusaphone changes the subject when pressed or gives information that takes up space but is inappropriate or misleading? That’s treading water when you can’t swim anymore

For sure he was a careerist – like Tenet, and like Petraeus. “My career uber alles, and if it requires people to die, and entire countries to be destroyed, I can live with that as long as I continue to advance.”

Also little liar Zeussy…explain the import of the damning Downing Street Memos.

I would put it slightly differently. I would say he is desperately trying to reclaim the ILLUSION of a shred of integrity he once had. I don’t believe he ever actually had integrity, just that he managed to make a lot of people think he did.

And his indignant cries of “I was deceeeeiiiiiived!” do not ring true – not even remotely.

Now Powell is desperately trying to reclaim a shred of integrity he once had.

I would dispute that. The whiner Colin (I was deceiiiiiiiiiiiiived!) Powell was a toady when he participated in the My Lai coverup, and he remained a toady when he KNOWINGLY took his bosses’ pack of lies in front of the world and lent his (completely unearned) good name to that patently ludicrous dog an pony show in front of the UN.

Who besides the US via talk by Condi of mushroom clouds, aluminum tubes that “could only be used for centrifuges”( a huge lie that she knew was a lie, being told that by our own bomb makers), fraudulent Niger documents, Cheney being certain that Saddam had “reconstituted” his nuclear program, who else claimed there was evidence that Saddam was making a nuclear bomb…so we had to act. It was a blatant lie, and I knew it then. Go ahead you collossal idiot….give us a copy and paste quote from another intel agency, or some democratic politician that proves that “everyone believed” what the whig group of war criminals put out as propaganda. And thus we have the treasonous exposure of a CIA spy so as to protect these lies that led to this disaster. Wilson was correct..he told the truth….and Tenet..your hero initiated the criminal investigation that led to the conviction of Scooter.

Glad you mentioned Scott Ritter — he turned out to be amazingly prescient regarding Saddam’s WMD and the course the war has taken. A smart president, realizing Ritter had been right all along, would bring him into the White House for advice instead of continuing to ignore him.

If the CIA had full confidence in the intelligence Bush was using to support the case for his invasion, why did he have to quote British intel in his 2003 SOTU? You might also answer why the Bushies ignored both George Tenet and his own counter-terorism chief, Richard Clarke, when they were trying to warn him pre-9/11 of terrorist attacks. That, and the CIA PDB “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” that the vacationing Bush accepted with the strange comment, “Okay, you’ve covered your ass now.”

“Decisions about war and peace cannot be based on the views of a single individual, nor can the views of a few retrospectively render a decision inappropriate.”

The decision to invade Iraq was made by the Project for a New American Century before Bush ever took office. A letter from PNAC was sent to Bill Clinton in 1998 urging him to invade and remove Saddam from power. Among the signators to the letter were Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, James Woolsey, Elliott Abrams, Richard Armitage, John Bolton, Zalmay Khalilzad and Bill Kristol.

The plan to invade Iraq was in the works, and it had nothing to do with terrorism, Al-Qaeda or 9/11. It was intended to create an American imperial presence in the Middle East, similar to the one the British Empire enjoyed in the 1920s. The purpose was to secure the oil reserves and make money for GOP campaign contributors, such as Halliburton and Blackwater.

So stop trying to kid people that there was any other goal to this needless war than to enhance the profits of the Bush family, Dick Cheney, and their wealthy cronies.

That is a lie. One of the purposes of the sanctions, as explicitly stated in 1990-91 was to inflict harm on the Iraqi people. The idiotic notion was that this would spur the people to act against Saddam Hussein (as if the sanctions did not put the Iraqi people into survival mode, thus disabling them from revolting, and as if Bush’s first urging the people to rise up against Saddam, and subsequently enabling the brutal squashing of the revolt did not teach the Iraqi people that it was useless to try to overthrow the regime).

“we are always willing to review them to make sure that they are being carried out in a way that does not affect the Iraqi people”

Another flat lie. That the sanctions had a devastating effect on the Iraqi people and at the same time strengthened Saddam Hussein was obvious even to the likes of Colin Powell.

Whether he was actually guilty or not, the treatment he received, and the probably irreversible consequences are simply inexcusable. All humans have certain rights, whether they are good, bad, guilty, or innocent.

At a press briefing February 24, 2001, Former Secretary of State Colin Powell said, “We will always try to consult with our friends in the region so that they are not surprised and do everything we can to explain the purpose of our responses. We had a good discussion, the Foreign Minister [Amre Moussa, Egypt] and I and the President and I, had a good discussion about the nature of the sanctions — the fact that the sanctions exist — not for the purpose of hurting the Iraqi people, but for the purpose of keeping in check Saddam Hussein’s ambitions toward developing weapons of mass destruction. We should constantly be reviewing our policies, constantly be looking at those sanctions to make sure that they are directed toward that purpose. That purpose is every bit as important now as it was ten years ago when we began it. And frankly they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors. So in effect, our policies have strengthened the security of the neighbors of Iraq, and these are policies that we are going to keep in place, but we are always willing to review them to make sure that they are being carried out in a way that does not affect the Iraqi people but does affect the Iraqi regime’s ambitions and the ability to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and we had a good conversation on this issue.”