Colin Powell: "Defunding NPR Won't Solve Deficit Problem, Congress Should Look At Cutting Defense" (with video)

Amanda Terkel (HuffPo) with video (01:50):

"As we draw down from Iraq and as over the next several years as we draw down from Afghanistan, I see no reason why the military shouldn't be looked at," he said. "When the Cold War ended 20 years ago, when I was chairman and Mr. Cheney was secretary of Defense, we cut the defense budget by 25 percent. And we reduced the force by 500,000 active duty soldiers, so it can be done. Now, how fast you can do it and what you have to cut out remains to be seen, but I don't think the defense budget can be made, you know, sacrosanct and it can't be touched." MORE...

"CIA Lied to Colin Powell"

Bob Fertig:

Republicans and the Corporate Media are trying to destroy Speaker Pelosi because she dared to accuse the CIA of misleading her during her (only) torture briefing on September 4, 2002.

Of course Pelosi isn't the only one who was misled by the CIA during the march to war in 2002-2003. We were all misled - the Media, Congress, the American people, and the entire world.

As Bush's CIA even misled members of the Bush Administration, including Secretary of State Colin Powell! Powell's CoS Larry Wilkerson shared more details with CIA veteran Ray McGovern:

“Powell and I had a one-on-one — no one else even in the room — about his angst over what was a rather dull recounting of several old stories about Al Qa’ida-Baghdad ties [in the draft speech],” Wilkerson said. “I agreed with him that what we had was bull___t, and Powell decided to eliminate all mention of terrorist contacts between AQ and Baghdad.

“Within an hour, [CIA Director George] Tenet and [CIA Deputy Director John] McLaughlin dropped a bombshell on the table in the [CIA] director’s Conference Room: a high-level AQ detainee had just revealed under interrogation substantive contacts between AQ and Baghdad, including Iraqis training AQ operatives in the use of chemical and biological weapons.”

Though Tenet and McLaughlin wouldn’t give Powell the identity of the al-Qaeda source, Wilkerson said he now understands that it was Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, an al-Qaeda operative who later claimed he gave the CIA false information in the face of actual and threatened torture.

Not realizing that the new intelligence was tainted, “Powell changed his mind and this information was included in his UNSC presentation, along with some more general information from the previous text about Baghdad's terrorist tendencies,” Wilkerson said...

“As you can see, nowhere were we told that the high-level AQ operative had a name, or that he had been interrogated [in Egypt] with no US personnel present or much earlier rather than just recently (the clear implication of Tenet's breathtaking delivery),” Wilkerson said.

“And not a single dissent was mentioned (later we learned of the DIA dissent) … All of this was hidden from us – the specific identity, we were informed, due to the desire to protect sources and methods as well as a cooperative foreign intelligence service. …

“As for me in particular, I learned the identity of al-Libi only in 2004 and of the DIA dissent about the same time, of al-Libi's recanting slightly later, and of the entire affair's probably being a Tenet-McLaughlin fabrication – to at least a certain extent – only after I began to put some things together and to receive reinforcement of the ‘fabrication’ theme from other examples.”

So the CIA lied to Colin Powell and Larry Wilkerson, just as they did to Nancy Pelosi, Jay Rockefeller, Bob Graham, and everyone else who wasn't a card-carrying Neocon.

Why isn't the Corporate Media outraged at Bush's CIA and its overlord Dick Cheney, rather than Pelosi and all the other victims of their lies?

Andy Worthington has much more.

McGovern was interviewed by The Real News.

"Colin Powell Decimates McCain's Rationale" (video)

DailyKosTV, video (06:25):

Video montage of Powell's Obama endorsement and clips supporting his critiques of McCain and Palin.