Skip to main content

Knocking Colin Powell off his pedestal

Colin Powell is seen by many as one of America's better and decent military men and politician.     It is misplaced, as a piece on Information Clearing House so clearly articulates in a piece "Colin Powell: Another War Criminal Cashes In", in the light of yet another book by Powell just released. 

"One could be forgiven for thinking there's anything honorable or honest about Colin Powell. For more than two decades now the Washington media has portrayed the former Secretary of State as something of a real life action hero, a reluctant warrior whose greatest fault – should they deign to mention any – was just being too darn loyal to a guy named George and his buddy Dick. What you might have missed is that Powell is a war criminal in his own right, one who in more than four decades of "public service" helped kill people from Vietnam to Panama to Iraq who never posed a threat to America. But don't just take some anti-war activists' word for it: Powell will proudly tell you as much, so long as he can make a buck from doing it in a book."

****

"In other words, according to Powell, the fact that he lied to the American public as well as the international community on the eve of a disastrous war is not his fault – heavens no – but the fault of his anonymous underlings, the allegedly timid State Department staffers who lacked the courage to speak truth to their courageous boss. Like much of Powell's anecdotes, it's a tidy little story about leadership that's about as truthful as his U.N. speech.

The reality is Powell, like most powerful men in Washington, is a well-documented liar. In fact, those State Department employees Powell blames for his repeating thinly sourced lies before the international community did in fact speak up. Powell just ignored them since what they had to say wasn't convenient to the task at hand: selling an unjust war against a third-rate military power.

As writer Jonathan Schwarz notes, State Department staff actually went through all the claims Powell was to make in his U.N. speech – and they found most of them wanting. But Powell ignored them, boasting that "every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."


****

"Blinding obeying authority – always for personal gain – has been a hallmark of Powell's career. As the top deputy to Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger during the Reagan administration, Powell was a party to the transfer of thousands of missiles to Iran as part of an illegal arms-for-hostages swap, with proceeds from the sales used in defiance of Congress and the World Court in support of the right-wing Contra insurgency in Nicaragua, later known as the Iran-Contra scandal. And as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under the first George Bush, Powell led a brutal invasion of Panama in which hundreds of civilians died, an illegal act that was widely condemned by Latin American governments.

Powell's career culminated with the illegal and disastrous invasion of Iraq. Rather than apologize to the victims of that war, however, he has decided to cash in, hawking his latest volume of apologia at a Costco or Sam's Club near you. Since President Barack Obama had decided to let Bush administration war criminals go free – a "look forward, not backward" privilege allowed powerful men in Washington but denied America's 2.3 million mostly non-violent prisoners – it's up to us to remind Powell that while his subservience to deadly state power may have worked for him, it didn't work out so well for the hundreds of thousands of victims that lay in his wake. And not all of us are willing to forget."

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Reading the Chilcot Inquiry Report more closely

Most commentary on the Chilcot Inquiry Report of and associated with the Iraq War, has been "lifted" from the Executive Summary.   The Intercept has actually gone and dug into the Report, with these revelations : "THE CHILCOT REPORT, the U.K.’s official inquiry into its participation in the Iraq War, has finally been released after seven years of investigation. Its executive summary certainly makes former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who led the British push for war, look terrible. According to the report, Blair made statements about Iraq’s nonexistent chemical, biological, and nuclear programs based on “what Mr. Blair believed” rather than the intelligence he had been given. The U.K. went to war despite the fact that “diplomatic options had not been exhausted.” Blair was warned by British intelligence that terrorism would “increase in the event of war, reflecting intensified anti-US/anti-Western sentiment in the Muslim world, including among Muslim communities in the

An unpalatable truth!

Quinoa has for the last years been the "new" food on the block for foodies. Known for its health properties, foodies the world over have taken to it. Many restaurants have added it to their menu. But, as this piece " Can vegans stomach the unpalatable truth about quinoa? " from The Guardian so clearly details, the cost to Bolivians and Peruvians - from where quinoa hails - has been substantial. "Not long ago, quinoa was just an obscure Peruvian grain you could only buy in wholefood shops. We struggled to pronounce it (it's keen-wa, not qui-no-a), yet it was feted by food lovers as a novel addition to the familiar ranks of couscous and rice. Dieticians clucked over quinoa approvingly because it ticked the low-fat box and fitted in with government healthy eating advice to "base your meals on starchy foods". Adventurous eaters liked its slightly bitter taste and the little white curls that formed around the grains. Vegans embraced quinoa as

Climate change: Well-organised hoax?

There are still some - all too sadly people with a voice who are listened to - who assert that climate change is a hoax. Try telling that to the people of Colorado who recently experienced horrendous bushfires, or the people of Croatia suffering with endless days of temps of 40 degrees (and not much less than 30 at night time) some 8-10 degrees above the norm. Bill McKibben, take up the issue of whether climate change is a hoax, on The Daily Beast : Please don’t sweat the 2,132 new high temperature marks in June—remember, climate change is a hoax. The first to figure this out was Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, who in fact called it “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” apparently topping even the staged moon landing. But others have been catching on. Speaker of the House John Boehner pointed out that the idea that carbon dioxide is “harmful to the environment is almost comical.” The always cautious Mitt Romney scoffed at any damage too: “Scientists will fig