Remembering Colin Powell's Lies

I noticed a couple of days ago that it was the anniversary of Colin Powell's disingenuous speech to the United Nations, laying out the Bush Administration's grounds for "believing" that Saddam Hussein was engaged in producing biological weapons.

I can still remember the point at which I realized that the content of this speech could not be trusted.  Actually, it isn't hard for me to remember, because it was during the speech itself.  Here are a couple of things that tipped me off, and which should have tipped off anyone with an IQ above 60:

First, let's look at a graphic which Mr. Powell presented:

Yes, this is a cartoon.  The Bush administration, via Powell, claimed the right to attack another country based on a cartoon.  This particular cartoon shows how, allegedly, a biological weapons production facility could be fitted inside a truck or a railroad car, if the facility consisted of a few featureless tanks and not much else. What in the name of God was this supposed to prove?  It does not provide one reason on earth to believe that a real biological weapons factory could fit inside a truck or railroad car.  All it does is allow Powell to make the absurd assertion that any large vehicle he has a picture of is some sort of diabolical weapons factory.  And that is what he did.  Here are a couple of pictures he showed to the U.N.:

Here we have two aerial photos of what appear to be industrial buildings, with some trucks outside.  One of the buildings is labeled "missile assembly building," and one "chemical munitions bunker."  Not one shred of evidence was presented to lead us to believe that these buildings, which could just as easily be diaper manufacturing plants, were actually what Powell claimed they were.  And we see a truck labeled "decontamination vehicle," with absolutely no reason to believe it is anything but an ordinary truck.  Other trucks are labeled "cargo truck," which we could have figured out for ourselves, and which are not really that sinister.

These photos were, in fact, obviously intended to remind people of the photos that President Kennedy presented, during the Cuban missile crisis.  Here's an example of one of those:

This photo at least has the advantage that you can clearly see things shaped like missiles.  And in fact they turned out to be missiles.  That's because Kennedy was telling the truth.  The things labelled "cargo truck" in Powell's presentation were, admittedly, cargo trucks.  But that's all we knew then, and it's all that we have ever known.  Creating an international incident over missiles eighty miles from our border was one thing; starting a war of aggression because the Iraqis posessed some cargo trucks is, really, not quite the same.

If Powell and the Bush administration had found any real evidence that Saddam was building biological weapons, they would have presented it to the U.N.  Their laughable collection of cartoons and utterly meaningless photos should have immediately tipped people off that they had no such evidence, and that their claims were deliberate falsehoods.

That's what I thought when I heard the speech.  Apparently, virtually no one in the country agreed with me, so Bush and Cheney were free to go and kill a million or so people, and involve our country in one of the biggest military disasters in history.

Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld and all the rest.  They went to war over this nonsense.  They murdered over it, they tortured over it, and they squandered the nation's wealth and destroyed its moral standing over it.  And not one of them has ever been held accountable.