The Lowest Point

In a CNN documentary "Dead Wrong: Inside the Intelligence Meltdown," a key player to the Powell's WMD speech claims that things went awfully awry, and that it was the "lowest point in his life."

Ladies and gentlemen, the AntiCentenarian presents to you Friday, August 19th's biggest official Kill Story:

"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."

Wilkerson is one of several insiders interviewed for the CNN Presents documentary "Dead Wrong -- Inside an Intelligence Meltdown." The program, which airs Sunday at 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. ET, pieces together the events leading up to the mistaken WMD intelligence that was presented to the public. A presidential commission that investigated the pre-war WMD intelligence found much of it to be "dead wrong."

Powell's speech, delivered on February 14, 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."

Wilkerson and Powell spent four days and nights in a CIA conference room with then-Director George Tenet and other top officials trying to ensure the accuracy of the presentation, Wilkerson says.

"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.

Wilkerson was directly responsible for assisting Powell's speech to the UN. In that speech, Powell railed off a list of fraudulent, misleading, or simply non-extant supposed evidence directly linking Saddam Hussein to a an active WMD program aimed at America and its allies.

This is the primary reason we went to war, or were told we were going to war.

Simultaneously [eight days earlier, in fact], the President was stating that Iraq was seeking yellowcake uranium from Africa, refering to Niger. When Ambassador Wilson spoke out and said that, no, there was no contact in Niger, The Administration leaked his wife's name and occupation, leading to what has become the legal hunt of the Plame Affair.

Wilkerson now states that he knew what he was doing in presenting this extreme information without having it properly sourced, fettered, and disseminated. He knew that he was giving potentially bad information to the UN as a reason to go to war. And moreso, that Powell knew what he was doing; and by extension, every faculty of The Administration was culpable in this incident. Powell has had very few interviews relating to this, but on a relatively tame Daily Show set with friendly John Stewart, he approached the subject tenderly:

Powell: You know I’ve been in a number of administrations. I’ve been in four different administrations. And the issues that a president has to deal with with his top team, are difficult. And they’re not simple. And so you have a variety of opinions, you look at alternatives, you examine options, and you see what support you have in the international community. But ultimately it comes down to the president deciding what’s best for the country, what’s in the best interests of the country, and he’s the one who was elected to make that decision...

Powell: They may not be able to graduate… The intelligence picture that the president was given over that period of time, that was given to congress, that President Clinton received in the late 90s, all pointed to this kind of capability and stockpiles existing in Iraq. President Clinton acted on that in 1998, and bombed Iraq for four days specifically on that kind of intelligence. It was very difficult to follow after that 1998 bombing with the kind of intelligence collection that we would have liked to have seen, because the inspectors had to come out. But intelligence is never perfect.

Powell brings forward the system of thought that Clinton made strikes on the same information. Which is true.

Clinton, however, did not attempt to goad the country into starting a war; present that information to the UN in an attempt to build legitimacy for the war when Hussein was not goaded, perhaps the single most important moment in the build up to the war; inflate the information in the most important speech to the US population with aims to go to war when the international committe at the UN does not endorse your bad information; commit possible treason when your inflations were pointed out; and invade the country with no meaningful concept of closure, trapping US troops in a 3+ year, spiraling sand-trap with no visible way out, with tensions and extremes that inspired the worst in us. Nor did he make any bullheaded PR attempts when he bombed.

That would be called: The Bush Administration.

Nor was any of this manipulated under the guise of the War on Terror, a move that ultimately has fed terrorism and its international cause; and that has distracted indefiinitely from finding the true culprits of massive international terrorism.

Today's Kill Story. Not just Wilkerson's Lowest Point.

America's.