Powell indoctrination

Think Progress and their horntooters over at HuffPo are heralding Colin Powell's appearance on Sunday's Meet the Press as some kind of vindication of leftist ideology:

This morning on NBC’s Meet the Press, Gen. Colin Powell strongly condemned the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, calling it “a major problem for America’s perception” and charging, “if it was up to me, I would close Guantanamo — not tomorrow, this afternoon.”

He'd close it because he thinks it's a drag on our worldwide image not necessarily because he believes people are locked up unjustly--he'd move the terrorists to US prisons. But that's hardly the whole story. Think Progress parsed the transcript and ignored many goodies, such as this one:

GEN. POWELL: We went to war on the basis that we have a terrible regime and what makes—it’s been terrible forever. What makes it so terrible now, in the aftermath of 9/11, is that they had demonstrated that they will use these weapons. They’ve used them against their own people, they’ve used them against the enemy. They had them at the time of the first Gulf war when I was chairman. And the intelligence community said and had every reason to believe that they not only had the capability of having them again, but they have stockpiles.

In other words, the General may be cool but he's not ready to join the Democrats in their 'Bush lied' club quite yet. Like Hillary:

She says Bush misled Congress

And Joe Biden:

"We were misled and we were, in the case of Mr. Cheney, lied to.

..Chris Dodd:

Our disagreement with the President and his administration is that we believed we were misled in 2002 about the rationale for going to war in Iraq.

Hardly worth mentioning except for the entertainment value, Kucinich not only believes Bush misled about Iraq but blew the towers to get there. As to Johnny Edwards, well in 2003:

So did I get misled? No. I didn’t get misled.

But in 2007:

Edwards says Bush and his policymakers misled the country about whether Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction

Under that backdrop Powell's interview represented a series of thrown hand grenades, and not only for the candidates:

GEN. POWELL: I spent five days out at the CIA going over every single piece of information that was going to be in my presentation. There were a lot of other pieces of information that different people would have wanted me to use and it was all rejected. Everything in that statement was blessed by the director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet; his deputy, John McLaughlin; and all of their senior officials. They believed it, too. George has said he believed it.

That seems to be just as much an indictment against the CIA as anyone else. Surely Tim Russert was disappointed he couldn't get the General to jump on the "I was misled" train rather than saying the CIA believed the aluminum tubes were centrifuge material and making it seem pretty clear that Bush' case for war was the American government's case for war. Powell is no Bush sycophant as evidenced by the Think Progress excerpt so if he's a straight shooter on GTMO he should be thought no differently on the war. Here's one more, for good measure:

He (the Butcher) was continuing to hope that he could escape the boundaries of the UN sanctions and get back to making these kinds of weapons. And if you believe otherwise, I think that would be a naive belief.

The General is now advising Barack Obama on foreign policy, which is quite interesting since the Illinois Senator is carrying virtually no Iraq baggage. Believing Powell on the pre-war intelligence paints Obama's opponents as rank liars on the war, something he could possibly exploit. But there's someone else out there looming whose hands are clean on Iraq and who also seems to have a rock-star following. And he's got that little environmental thing going.