Colin Powell was a dupe after all. How sad.

I know many MEJ readers will disagree with me, but I have to confess - I always liked Colin Powell. (This, of course, goes back to the days when I was still a registered Republican and was willing to give the benefit of the doubt to any GOP folks who were moderate to progressive.) The General always struck me as likeable, sensible, and having a good head in an emergency. (How much could we have used that quality on 9/11 as opposed to "My Pet Goat", eh?) In fact, had he been convinced to run for President in 2000, I probably would have voted for him over Al Gore. Gore got my vote, of course, because he was light years superior to Bush and the neocon cabal, but I think I would have given Powell a spin had he sought the office.

One of the chief criticisms I hear against Powell, and it certainly has merit, is the fact that he came out so passionately in front of the U.N. to make Dubya's case for the presence of WMDs in Iraq and in support of the invasion. Today in CNN there is a bit of vindication for him, I think. One of his top aides has come out and said that Powell's speech on that subject was "the lowest point in my life." (All emphasis in quotes mine.)

"I wish I had not been involved in it," says Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, a longtime Powell adviser who served as his chief of staff from 2002 through 2005. "I look back on it, and I still say it was the lowest point in my life."

Powell's speech, delivered on February 5, 2003, made the case for the war by presenting U.S. intelligence that purported to prove that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Wilkerson says the information in Powell's presentation initially came from a document he described as "sort of a Chinese menu" that was provided by the White House.

"(Powell) came through the door ... and he had in his hands a sheaf of papers, and he said, 'This is what I've got to present at the United Nations according to the White House, and you need to look at it,'" Wilkerson says in the program. "It was anything but an intelligence document. It was, as some people characterized it later, sort of a Chinese menu from which you could pick and choose."

The aide goes on to describe how Powell, while having misgivings of his own, took the "intelligence" he had been given at face value, made the case the White House convinced him was correct, and presented it to the U.N. The only reason I think this is a sort of vindication for him is how seriously he took the news of the intelligence being grossly incorrect and the effect it had on his relationship with the administration's neocon hawks. (e.g. Tenet, Wolfowitz and company.)

"There was no way the Secretary of State was going to read off a script about serious matters of intelligence that could lead to war when the script was basically un-sourced," Wilkerson says.

"In fact, Secretary Powell was not told that one of the sources he was given as a source of this information had indeed been flagged by the Defense Intelligence Agency as a liar, a fabricator," says David Kay, who served as the CIA's chief weapons inspector in Iraq after the fall of Saddam. That source, an Iraqi defector who had never been debriefed by the CIA, was known within the intelligence community as "Curveball."

When they finally did inform Powell of the "mistakes" it had a chilling effect on his views of those people.

"George [Tenet] actually did call the Secretary, and said, 'I'm really sorry to have to tell you. We don't believe there were any mobile labs for making biological weapons,'" Wilkerson says in the documentary. "This was the third or fourth telephone call. And I think it's fair to say the Secretary and Mr. Tenet, at that point, ceased being close. I mean, you can be sincere and you can be honest and you can believe what you're telling the Secretary. But three or four times on substantive issues like that? It's difficult to maintain any warm feelings."

Say what you will about Powell, but I think he served his country admirably in the military for most of his life. Unfortunately, when he attempted to go on in public service after retiring, by entering the political field, he fell in with the wrong crowd. They never intended to allow him to rise to the presidency under the GOP banner, and only used him as an icon of the GOP's supposed diversity, and a credible mouthpiece to trick into selling their war. In the end, they ruined him and drove him from public life. I think it's sad.