Ten years ago today, Colin Powell made the Bush administration's case for going to war against Iraq, and much of what he said was false. Most of the journalists who promoted his justifications for the war paid no price for their failures.
May
14
2012
Newsweek Enables Colin Powell's Iraq War Revisionism
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Right before the United States invaded Iraq, Newsweek magazine published a remarkable story. Reporter John Barry revealed that former Iraqi weapons chief Hussein Kamel had told UN inspectors in 1995 that the country had destroyed its stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. As FAIR pointed out at the time, this was a remarkable discovery, especially considering that Kamel's words had be used so often by U.S. officials to serve the opposite point–that Iraq still posed a dire threat. As FAIR pointed out: According to Newsweek, Kamel told the same story to CIA analysts in August 1995. If that is true, [...]
Sep
29
2009
Richard Cohen's Insults
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Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen writes today of Iran's nuclear program: They then turned themselves in to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna and, as usual, said the site was intended for the peaceful use of nuclear energy. These Persians lie like a rug. Classy. The fact that this appears in a column chastising Barack Obama for not being serious enough only makes it worse ("Sooner or later it is going to occur to Barack Obama that he is the president of the United States."). But it's worth remembering that Cohen also wrote that "only a fool–or possibly a [...]
May
27
2009
Media Still Crushing on Old Flame Colin Powell
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Robert Parry (Consortium News, 5/25/09) thinks that "there is no one, it seems, that the U.S. mainstream news media loves more than Colin Powell," and as proof offers "Powell's disingenuous response" to Bob Schieffer's May 24 CBS Face the Nation "question about the ex-secretary of state's knowledge regarding 'enhanced interrogation techniques,' which the International Committee of the Red Cross and virtually all other objective observers say constituted torture": Powell–whom, Parry recalls, "was a member of President George W. Bush's Principals Committee, which oversaw the interrogation policies"–claimed to an unchallenging Schieffer, "to have been kept mostly out of the loop…. He [...]
