Powell’s shame

From Think Progress

Today marks the fifth anniversary of Colin Powell’s presentation on Iraqi WMD before the United Nations. “The gravity of this moment is matched by the gravity of the threat that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction pose to the world,” Powell said in his speech. Saad Tawfiq, one of Iraq’s engineers who tried to warn the U.S. that Saddam had shut down his weapons programs, recalls crying as he listened:

As one of Saddam Hussein’s most gifted engineers, Tawfiq knew that the Iraqi dictator had shut down his nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programmes in 1995 — and he had told his handlers in US intelligence just that. […]

“When I saw Colin Powell I started crying. Immediately. I knew I had tried and lost,” Tawfiq told AFP five years later in the Jordanian capital Amman.

UPDATE: Jonathan Schwarz does a line-by-line debunk of Powell’s speech.