Norman Solomon (ZCommunication)
When
Secretary of State Colin Powell spoke to the U.N. Security Council on
February 5, 2003, countless journalists in the United States extolled
him for a masterful performance -- making the case that Saddam Hussein’s
Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The fact that the speech later
became notorious should not obscure how easily truth becomes irrelevant
in the process of going to war.
Ten
years later -- with Powell’s speech a historic testament of shameless
deception leading to vast carnage -- we may not remember the extent of
the fervent accolades. At the time, fawning praise was profuse across
the USA’s mainline media spectrum, including the nation’s reputedly
great newspapers.
The New York Times editorialized
that Powell “was all the more convincing because he dispensed with
apocalyptic invocations of a struggle of good and evil and focused on
shaping a sober, factual case against Mr. Hussein’s regime.” The Washington Post was
more war-crazed, headlining its editorial “Irrefutable” and declaring
that after Powell’s U.N. presentation “it is hard to imagine how anyone
could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction.”
Yet
basic flaws in Powell’s U.N. speech were abundant. Slanted translations
of phone intercepts rendered them sinister. Interpretations of unclear
surveillance photos stretched to concoct the worst. Summaries of
cherry-picked intelligence detoured around evidence that Iraq no longer
had WMDs. Ballyhooed documents about an Iraqi quest for uranium were
forgeries.
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