Powell: No Imminent Threat

Robert Scheer & TruthDig via The Smirking Chimp:

"On Monday, former Secretary of State Colin Powell told me that he and his department's top experts never believed that Iraq posed an imminent nuclear threat, but that the president followed the misleading advice of Vice President Dick Cheney and the CIA in making the claim. Now he tells us.

The harsh truth is that this president cherry-picked the intelligence data in making his case for invading Iraq and deliberately kept the public in the dark as to the countervailing analysis at the highest level of the intelligence community. While the president and his top Cabinet officials were fear-mongering with stark images of a 'mushroom cloud' over American cities, the leading experts on nuclear weaponry at the Department of Energy (the agency in charge of the U.S. nuclear-weapons program) and the State Department thought the claim of a near-term Iraqi nuclear threat was absurd."

Sometimes being a good soldier means not following orders-- in the 'Nam there were men who were ordered to "My Lai" and didn't; of course, you never hear their stories and some were probably even punished, but they would have been right and were, in fact, serving their country's, if not their conscience's, best interests by not doing what a superior ordered. So, Mr. Powell. . .