Ten years ago this week, a defining moment occurred in the Bush
administration’s push to invade Iraq. On February 5, 2003, then
Secretary of State General Colin Powell addressed the United Nations
Security Council. His message was clear: Iraq possessed extremely
dangerous weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein was
systematically trying to deceive U.N. inspectors by hiding prohibited
weapons. A decade late, we host a debate between Powell’s former aide,
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson — who prepared the UN speech, only to later
renounce it — and media critic Norman Solomon, author of "War Made
Easy." "I don’t believe the hype about that having been the ultimate
presentation that led us to war with Iraq," Wilkerson says of Powell’s
speech. "George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and others had decided to go to
war with Iraq long before Colin Powell gave the presentation. It added
to the momentum of the war. ... Frankly, we were all wrong. Was the
intelligence politicized in addition to being wrong at its roots?
Absolutely." In response, Solomon says, "We were not all wrong. Many
experts and activists and researchers from the get go in 2002 were
saying that the administration case for weapons of mass destruction in
Iraq was full of holes. … So now to say, ‘Well it wasn’t just us at the
administration, other people believed it’ — people believed it because
they were propagandized by the administration with massive assistance
from the mass media."Video
Source: Democracy Now!
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