Adele Ferguson

It has long been portrayed by many in the media and many politicians that the Iraq war was an unnecessary conflict because the Bush administration lied about the probability there of weapons of mass destruction.

And that Colin Powell’s fallout with Bush was the result of his belief that he was misled about WMD when asked to defend the decision to go to war in a speech to the United Nations.

Whether that affected his decision to endorse Barack Obama for president after a lifetime in the Republican party I don’t know. I am inclined to believe he would have done it anyway because his black ancestry pulled at him to elect the nation’s first black president. Well over 90 percent of blacks in the country did the same.

But according to Donald Rumsfield in his book, “Known and Unknown,”’ Powell was not duped or misled by anybody nor did he lie about Saddam’s suspected stockpiles of WMDs.

“The President did not lie. The Vice President did not lie. (CIA director George) Tenet did not lie (national security adviser Condaleezza) Rice did not lie. I did not lie. The Congress did not lie. The far less dramatic truth is that we were wrong.”

In October 2002, the National Intelligence Council reported that Iraq had continued its WMD programs in defiance of UN resolutions and restrictions and could make a nuclear weapon within several months or a year. It also had mobile facilities for producing bacterial and toxin BW agents that could evade detection and were highly survivable.

Iraq was considered by intelligence services from other nations, Britain, Australia, Spain, Italy, Poland, Russia, China, Germany and France to be an uncontrollable country whose leader might decide to assist Islamic terrorists in a chemical or biological weapon attack against the U.S. as his last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him.

In February 2003, President Bush decided that the U.S. would make a major presentation to the UN Security Council on the threat Iraq posed and its defiance of UN resolutions and the need for military action. The obvious choice to make it was Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Powell conferred with CIA and other top officials and went over his findings with the president. “We have sources for everything,” he said. If he felt duped or misled, writes Rumsfield, there was no sign of it two days before he delivered it.”

Rumsfield was in favor of hitting Iraq during the speech to avoid warning them we were coming, but Powell nixed that. As expected, many terrorists promptly left a city where clear signs of chemical weapons were found, including hazard suits, manuals and traces of toxins. For whatever reason, said Rumsfield, the administration never made this public.

But there were no WMD weapons found and critics of the attack claimed the president knew this all along. Powell said there were people in the intelligence community who knew that some sources were not good and they didn’t speak up. “That devastated me.”

It wasn’t until February 2011 that Iraqi defector Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi , known as “Curveball” to the intelligence communities, confessed to a British newspaper that he was the one who concocted the tale that Iraq was hiding mobile bio weapons laboratories. He did so, he said, in hopes it would lead to the eventual overthrow of the Iraqi ruler.

“I had the chance to fabricate something to topple the regime,” he said. He still believed it was his right to lie, he said. “because it was the only way to rid Iraq of Saddam.”

(Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville,Wa., 98340.)