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Tuesday, May 18, 2004

With President Bush’s approval rating hitting record lows and worries about the U.S. occupation of Iraq growing, Secretary of State Colin Powell has been carefully distancing himself from the administration.

The decision by Powell to make comments that cast the administration in a poor light could not come at a worse time for the president.

Lost in the hubbub over the abrupt camera change during his appearance on "Meet the Press" Sunday was Secretary Powell’s striking statement about the WMD controversy in the run-up to the Iraq war.

Powell told Tim Russert on "Meet the Press" that he had cited intelligence that was provided to the CIA and which he now believes had been “deliberately” falsified in an effort to win public approval for the war.

Referring to his Feb. 5, 2003 appearance before the U.N.’s Security Council, when he argued that Iraq had or was close to developing WMD, including biological weapons, Powell told Russert the information he offered was not only wrong, but that in some cases the intelligence cited by the administration had been purposefully misleading.

"It turned out that the sourcing was inaccurate and wrong and, in some cases, deliberately misleading," Powell said. "And for that, I am disappointed and I regret it."

The statement marks a major turning point for the administration, which has admitted intelligence was inaccurate, but never that it had “deliberately” offered false intelligence or that such intelligence may have been willfully manipulated.

On Monday, the New York Times’ lead story on Powell’s comments began, “Secretary of State Colin Powell has said for the first time that he now believes that the Central Intelligence Agency was deliberately misled about evidence that Saddam Hussein was developing unconventional weapons.”

Already, critics of the administration have seized on Powell’s admission.

David Corn, a liberal pundit for The Nation magazine, wrote, “Appearing on Meet the Press, Powell acknowledged – finally! – that he and the Bush administration misled the nation about the WMD threat posed by Iraq before the war.”

The Times reported that Powell’s comments were intended to distance himself from President Bush.

"Basically, Powell now believes that the Iraqis had chemical weapons, and that was it," the Times quoted an official close to Powell. "And he is out there publicly saying this now because he doesn't want a legacy as the man who made up stories to provide the president with cover to go to war."

More: See State Dept.'s War with White House

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