few pics of Thursday C. Powell Protest

Powell's answer to the question, "why did you lie?" was that he didn't lie, did the best he could with what he had, and that basically everything went as it should have. Until the interruption, he avoided The Subject entirely - his speech was part of a "Celebrity Forum" speaker series and his performance was a Leno-like stand up act.

Anecdotes included helping a motorist fix a flat tire (what a regular guy he is), the self-denial of giving up travel by Air Force jet for the indignities of commercial flying, indulging in a new Corvette, comparing himself to Robert Redford and Paul Newman, leadership lessons from the military such as putting the ideology above the individual (leadership means never having to say you're sorry), and sappy story of asking visiting Brazilians in his State Dept. office what they thought of America. Turns out that some of our people were nice to them, and this constitutes our former Secretary of State's entire assessment of our image in this world (no thanks to him) and his reasons for wanting to "protect" "us" from terrorism. Heartwarming, but made him sound completely incompetent as head of the State Dept who may someday be indicted in Brazil, and many of our young underprivileged nice Americans are being used as cannon fodder to protect Powell from "terrorism" and to promote his freedom of investment...

It was a complete snoozer like a glass of warm milk, punctuated by jokes that tried to identify himself in his retirement (joining a Palo Alto Venture Capital firm) with his audience of elderly upper class white folk who were much too happy to be lulled into serenity behind locked doors while the suffering Powell kicked off escalates outside just beyond their point of view. Now he's walked away from the disaster, like failed FEMA chief, Michael Brown, and leaves us with the wreckage.

The day Colin Powell made his case before the United Nations, there was no doubt in my mind as I looked and listened to him that obsequiousness to those for whom War was a greater goal than the Truth was his chief motivator.

Thanks to Robert Parry's dogged analysis of the facts-- one can now base one's judgement about Powell on much more than intuition:

READ:

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2003/020603a.html