Facebook Twitter
  • Home
  • Perspectives
  • Articles
  • Columns
  • Platform
  • Poetry
  • Literature
  • Write for us
Search
Facebook Twitter
87.5 F
Los Angeles
Tuesday, June 17, 2025
Sign in
Welcome! Log into your account
Forgot your password? Get help
Privacy Policy
Password recovery
Recover your password
A password will be e-mailed to you.
Media Monitors Network (MMN)
Advertise with MMN
  • Home
  • Perspectives
    • Jerusalem Israel Palestine Dome of The Rock Golden Dome

      The Abraham Accords undermined much-needed peace with Palestinians

      World Map

      Global disturbing disparities

      Globe Algeria Niger Mali Africa

      There is always a price to pay for befriending the Zionists

      Illegal Israeli Settlements

      Antisemitism claims mask a reign of political and cultural terror across…

      The Flower - Pakistan Monument at Night

      Israel in the vanguard of India’s mounting conflict with Pakistan

  • Articles
    • Man studying religious book

      Ishmael and Isaac: An Essay on the Divergent Moral Economies of…

      Mahmoud Abbas

      May Your Home Be Destroyed

      Netanyahu Lighting Hanukah Candles with His Wife and Sons

      Bibi’s Son or: Three Men in a Car

      The Map of Greater Israel

      The Man Who Jumped

      West Bank - Palestine

      Cry, Beloved Country

  • Columns
    • Progressives Must Fight With -- and In -- the Democratic Party

      Steps Left for Electing Progressives and Defeating Republicans in the Midterms

      Tax Revelations and Corporate Media Won’t Defeat Trump

      Nancy Pelosi Could Get Us All Killed

      Tax Revelations and Corporate Media Won’t Defeat Trump

      ‘Fortress Mentality’ Among U.S. Leaders Has Trapped Us in a Cycle…

      Progressives Must Fight With -- and In -- the Democratic Party

      Grassroots Organizing Should Dump Biden and Clear the Path for a…

      Corporate Media Are Focusing on Race -- and Dodging Class

      Biden Refuses to Mention the Worsening Dangers of Nuclear War. Media…

  • Platform
    • Hanukkah Lights

      Hanukkah is not hypocrisy

      The Washington Post

      “Preemptive war could risk millions of casualties. But….”

      When they shout: "We strongly condemn…"

      68

      Why Iran won’t attack Israel

      Is One Iraqi’s Self-Hatred Newsworthy?

  • Poetry
  • Literature
  • Write for us
Home Columns Colin Powell: Still Craven After All These Years
  • Columns

Colin Powell: Still Craven After All These Years

By
Norman Solomon
-
November 30, 2005
Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest
WhatsApp
Linkedin
ReddIt
Email
Print
Tumblr
Telegram
Mix
VK
Digg
LINE
Viber
Naver

    Newspapers across the United States and beyond told readers Wednesday about sensational new statements by a former top assistant to Colin Powell when he was secretary of state. After interviewing Lawrence Wilkerson, the Associated Press reported he “said that wrongheaded ideas for the handling of foreign detainees after Sept. 11 arose from a coterie of White House and Pentagon aides who argued that ‘the president of the United States is all-powerful,’ and that the Geneva Conventions were irrelevant.”

    AP added: “Wilkerson blamed Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and like-minded aides. Wilkerson said that Cheney must have sincerely believed that Iraq could be a spawning ground for new terror assaults, because ‘otherwise I have to declare him a moron, an idiot or a nefarious bastard.'”

    Such strong words are headline grabbers when they come from someone widely assumed to be speaking Powell’s mind. And as a Powell surrogate, Wilkerson is certainly on a tear this week, speaking some truth about power. But there are a few big problems with his zeal to recast the public record: 1) Wilkerson should have spoken up years ago. 2) His current statements, for the most part, are foggy. 3) The criticisms seem to stem largely from tactical critiques and image concerns rather than moral objections. 4) Powell is still too much of a cagey opportunist to speak out himself.

    Appearing on the BBC’s “Today” program Tuesday, Wilkerson said: “You begin to wonder was this intelligence spun? Was it politicized? Was it cherry-picked? Did, in fact, the American people get fooled? I am beginning to have my concerns.”

    So Wilkerson, who was Powell’s chief of staff from 2002 till early this year, has started to “wonder” whether the intelligence was spun, politicized, cherry-picked. At the end of November 2005, he was “beginning” to have “concerns.”

    “Beginning to have my concerns” is a phrase that aptly describes the Colin Powell approach.

    Overall, appearances remain key. And so, Wilkerson included this anecdote in his AP interview: “Powell raised frequent and loud objections, his former aide said, once yelling into a telephone at Rumsfeld: ‘Donald, don’t you understand what you are doing to our image?'”

    Now there’s a transcendent reason to begin to have concerns: Torturing prisoners is bad for “our image.”

    Rest assured that if the war had gone well by Washington’s lights, we’d be hearing none of this from Powell’s surrogate. The war has gone bad, from elite vantage points, not because of the official lies and the unrelenting carnage but because military victory has eluded the U.S. government in Iraq. And with President Bush’s poll numbers tanking, and Dick Cheney’s even worse, it’s time for some “moderate” sharks to carefully circle for some score-settling and preening.

    In its account of Wilkerson’s BBC appearance, the British Guardian newspaper reported Wednesday: “Asked whether the vice president was guilty of a war crime, Mr. Wilkerson replied: ‘Well, that’s an interesting question — it was certainly a domestic crime to advocate terror and I would suspect that it is … an international crime as well.’ In the context of other remarks it appeared he was using the word ‘terror’ to apply to the systematic abuse of prisoners.”

    Strong stuff, especially since it’s obvious that Wilkerson is channeling Powell with those statements. But Powell was a team player and a very effective front man for the administration that was doing all that politicizing and cherry-picking — and then proceeding with the policies that Wilkerson now seeks to pin on Cheney as possible war crimes.

    White House war makers deftly hyped Powell’s “moderate” credibility while the Washington press corps lauded his supposed integrity. Powell was the crucial point man for giving “diplomatic” cover to the Iraq invasion fixation of Bush and Cheney. So, typically, Powell proclaimed three weeks into 2003: “If the United Nations is going to be relevant, it has to take a firm stand.”

    When Powell made his dramatic presentation to the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003, he fudged, exaggerated and concocted, often presenting deceptions as certainties. Along the way, he played fast and loose with translations of phone intercepts to make them seem more incriminating. And, as researchers at the media watch group FAIR (where I’m an associate) pointed out, “Powell relied heavily on the disclosure of Iraq’s pre-war unconventional weapons programs by defector Hussein Kamel, without noting that Kamel had also said that all those weapons had been destroyed.” But the secretary of state wowed U.S. journalists.

    Powell’s televised U.N. speech exuded great confidence and authoritative judgment. But he owed much of his touted credibility to the fact that he had long functioned inside a media bubble shielding him from direct challenge. It might puzzle an American to read later, in a book compiled by the London-based Guardian, that Powell’s much-ballyhooed speech went over like a lead balloon. “The presentation was long on assertion and muffled taped phone calls, but short on killer facts,” the book said. “It fell flat.”

    Fell flat? Well it did in Britain, where a portion of the mainstream press immediately set about engaging in vigorous journalism that ripped apart many of Powell’s assertions within days. But not on the western side of the Atlantic, where Powell’s star turn at the United Nations elicited an outpouring of media adulation. In the process of deference to Powell, many liberals were among the swooners.

    In her Washington Post column the morning after Powell spoke, Mary McGrory proclaimed that “he persuaded me.” She wrote: “The cumulative effect was stunning.” And McGrory, a seasoned and dovish political observer, concluded: “I’m not ready for war yet. But Colin Powell has convinced me that it might be the only way to stop a fiend, and that if we do go, there is reason.”

    In the same edition, Post columnist Richard Cohen shared his insight that Powell was utterly convincing: “The evidence he presented to the United Nations — some of it circumstantial, some of it absolutely bone-chilling in its detail — had to prove to anyone that Iraq not only hasn’t accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them. Only a fool — or possibly a Frenchman — could conclude otherwise.”

    Inches away, Post readers found Jim Hoagland’s column with this lead: “Colin Powell did more than present the world with a convincing and detailed X-ray of Iraq’s secret weapons and terrorism programs yesterday. He also exposed the enduring bad faith of several key members of the U.N. Security Council when it comes to Iraq and its ‘web of lies,’ in Powell’s phrase.” Hoagland’s closing words sought to banish doubt: “To continue to say that the Bush administration has not made its case, you must now believe that Colin Powell lied in the most serious statement he will ever make, or was taken in by manufactured evidence. I don’t believe that. Today, neither should you.”

    On the opposite page the morning after Powell’s momentous U.N. speech, a Washington Post editorial was figuratively on the same page as the Post columnists. Under the headline “Irrefutable,” the newspaper laid down its line for rationality: “After Secretary of State Colin L. Powell’s presentation to the United Nations Security Council yesterday, it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction.”

    Also smitten was the editorial board of the most influential U.S. newspaper leaning against the push for war. Hours after Powell finished his U.N. snow job, the New York Times published an editorial with a mollified tone — declaring that he “presented the United Nations and a global television audience yesterday with the most powerful case to date that Saddam Hussein stands in defiance of Security Council resolutions and has no intention of revealing or surrendering whatever unconventional weapons he may have.”

    By sending Powell to address the Security Council, the Times claimed, President Bush “showed a wise concern for international opinion.” And the paper contended that “Mr. Powell’s presentation was all the more convincing because he dispensed with apocalyptic invocations of a struggle of good and evil and focused on shaping a sober, factual case against Mr. Hussein’s regime.”

    Later, in mid-September 2003, straining to justify Washington’s refusal to let go of the occupation of Iraq, Colin Powell used the language of a venture capitalist: “Since the United States and its coalition partners have invested a great deal of political capital, as well as financial resources, as well as the lives of our young men and women — and we have a large force there now — we can’t be expected to suddenly just step aside.”

    Now, after so much clear evidence has emerged to discredit the entire U.S. war effort, Colin Powell still can’t bring himself to stand up and account for his crucial role. Instead, he’s leaving it to a former aide to pin blame on those who remain at the top of the Bush administration. But Powell was an integral part of the war propaganda machinery. And we can hardly expect the same media outlets that puffed him up at crucial times to now scrutinize their mutual history.

    • TAGS
    • about
    • absolutely
    • abuse
    • account
    • across
    • address
    • administration
    • advocate
    • after
    • against
    • along
    • American
    • among
    • anyone
    • apart
    • apocalyptic
    • appearing
    • apply
    • approach
    • aside
    • asked
    • assaults
    • Associated Press
    • atlantic
    • balloon
    Facebook
    Twitter
    Pinterest
    WhatsApp
    Linkedin
    ReddIt
    Email
    Print
    Tumblr
    Telegram
    Mix
    VK
    Digg
    LINE
    Viber
    Naver
      Previous articleAdrift and No Substantive Debate
      Next articleMore Myths and Lies about American Withdrawal from Iraq
      Norman Solomon
      Norman Solomon
      Norman Solomon, the national coordinator of the online activist group RootsAction.org, is a member of the task force that wrote "Autopsy: The Democratic Party in Crisis." His books include "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death." He is a regular contributor to Media Monitors Network (MMN).

      RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR

      Progressives Must Fight With -- and In -- the Democratic Party

      Steps Left for Electing Progressives and Defeating Republicans in the Midterms

      Tax Revelations and Corporate Media Won’t Defeat Trump

      Nancy Pelosi Could Get Us All Killed

      Tax Revelations and Corporate Media Won’t Defeat Trump

      ‘Fortress Mentality’ Among U.S. Leaders Has Trapped Us in a Cycle of Militarism

      Google Search

      MMN @ Google Play Store MMN @ Amazon Appstore

      MMN @ TwitterMMN @ FacebookMMN Feed

      EDITOR PICKS

      Progressives Must Fight With -- and In -- the Democratic Party

      Steps Left for Electing Progressives and Defeating Republicans in the Midterms

      August 31, 2022
      Tax Revelations and Corporate Media Won’t Defeat Trump

      Nancy Pelosi Could Get Us All Killed

      August 1, 2022
      Tax Revelations and Corporate Media Won’t Defeat Trump

      ‘Fortress Mentality’ Among U.S. Leaders Has Trapped Us in a Cycle...

      July 25, 2022

      POPULAR POSTS

      Top 6 thủ môn Real nổi tiếng được nhiều người yêu thích

      Top 6 thủ môn Real nổi tiếng được nhiều người yêu...

      May 27, 2023
      167

      The Origin of Freemasonry: The Crusaders & Templars

      April 23, 2003

      Sharon to Peres: We Control America

      November 20, 2001

      POPULAR CATEGORY

      • Perspectives13563
      • News7527
      • World6104
      • Asia4337
      • Africa1648
      • Columns1370
      • Health1068
      • Australasia1016
      • Articles786
      ABOUT US
      Media Monitors Network (MMN) is a non-profit, non-partial and non-political platform for those serious Media Contributors and Observers who crave to know and like to help to prevail the whole truth about current affairs, any disputed issue or any controversial issue by their voluntary contributions with logic, reason and rationality.
      Contact us: [email protected]
      FOLLOW US
      Facebook Twitter
      • About MMN
      • Disclaimer
      • Privacy Policy
      • Terms and Conditions
      • Contact
      Copyright © 2000 - MMN International Inc. All rights reserved.
      Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
      All other brands, logos, and product names are registered
      trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.
      ResponsiveVoice-NonCommercial licensed under 95x15
      MORE STORIES
      Afghan women face near total social, economic and political exclusion

      Afghan women face near total social, economic and political exclusion

      June 17, 2025
      DR Congo: Human rights violations could amount to war crimes, UN experts say

      DR Congo: Human rights violations could amount to war crimes, UN...

      June 16, 2025