Former Secretary of State Colin Powell previewed his infamous February 5, 2003 U.N. Security Council presentation on Iraq before the elite international finance community at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on January 26, 2003.
His big message was "trust." We all know where he put that.
One fascinating aspect of Powell's February 5 presentation is that it did not contain the same language about alleged Iraqi attempts to import uranium from the African nation of Niger that President Bush used in his State of the Union address on January 28, 2003. This claim has been proven fraudulent and its absence from Powell’s February 5 remarks is what is truly interesting.
Later, in the spring of 2005, the so-called Silberman-Robb Commission report, for the most part a White House whitewash of political use of intelligence in the run-up to the war, tells of how "CIA officers sent urgent e-mails and cables describing grave doubts" about the charges former Secretary of State Colin Powell was to make before the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003, but that former CIA director Tenet "relayed no such concerns to Powell." Obviously, someone knew Powell was about to tell some giant boners to the world, and at least a few of the most egregious items ended up being deleted from Powell's speech, even though they were not deleted from the president's message on January 28, two days after Powell spoke in Davos.
However, let’s not completely let Powell off the hook for the uranium fraud. He was willing to pimp the Iraq threat, including a nuclear threat, before a somewhat reluctant audience in Davos. The transcript of his remarks contains the following quote:
Powell: Why is Iraq still trying to procure uranium and the special equipment needed to transform it into material for nuclear weapons? These questions are not academic. They are not trivial. They are questions of life and death, and they must be answered.Powell will then go on to discuss Iraq's "revived nuclear program" and effort to enrich uranium in some detail on February 5, alluding to magnets and the famous aluminum tubes to prove his case. It is now clear that these tubes and magnets were useless for uranium enrichment, and the entire case Powell presented is now widely known to be a fraud.
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