a remarkable idiot*...

powell powell

Colin Powell, Who Shaped U.S. National Security, Dies at 84

A former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, secretary of state and national security adviser, Mr. Powell died of complications of Covid-19, his family said.

Colin L. Powell, who in four decades of public life served as the nation’s top soldier, diplomat and national security adviser, and whose speech at the United Nations in 2003 helped pave the way for the United States to go to war in Iraq, died on Monday. He was 84.

The cause was complications of Covid-19, his family said in a statement, adding that he had been vaccinated and was being treated at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, in Bethesda, Md., when he died there.

A spokeswoman said his immune system had been compromised by multiple myeloma, for which he had been undergoing treatment. He had been due to receive a booster shot for his vaccine last week, she said, but had to postpone it when he fell ill. He had also been treated for early stages of Parkinson’s disease, she said.

Mr. Powell was a pathbreaker, serving as the country’s first Black national security adviser, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and secretary of state. Beginning with his 35 years in the Army, Mr. Powell was emblematic of the ability of minorities to use the military as a ladder of opportunity.

His was a classic American success story. Born in Harlem of Jamaican parents, he grew up in the South Bronx and graduated from City College of New York, joining the Army through the R.O.T.C. Starting as a young second lieutenant commissioned in the dawn of a newly desegregated Army, Mr. Powell served two decorated combat tours in Vietnam. He was later national security adviser to President Ronald Reagan at the end of the Cold War, helping to negotiate arms treaties and an era of cooperation with the Soviet president, Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

As chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Mr. Powell was the architect of the invasion of Panama in 1989 and of the Persian Gulf war in 1991, which ousted Saddam Hussein from Kuwait but left him in power in Iraq. Along with Dick Cheney, the defense secretary at the time, Mr. Powell reshaped the American Cold War military that had stood ready at the Iron Curtain for half a century. In doing so he stamped the Powell Doctrine on military operations: Identify clear political objectives, gain public support and use decisive and overwhelming force to defeat enemy forces.

When briefing reporters at the Pentagon at the beginning of the gulf war, Mr. Powell summed up the military’s approach: “Our strategy in going after this army is very simple,” he said. “First, we’re going to cut it off, and then we’re going to kill it.”

It was a concept that seemed less well-suited to the messy conflicts in the Balkans that came later in the 1990s and in combating terrorism in a world transformed after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/18/us/politics/colin-powell-dead.html

* "It takes only one major stupid move for someone to become a glorious remarkable idiot..." — Ma Leonisky.

Condolences to his family and to the families of a million dead from Colin Powell's lies at the United nations...

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By Gus Leonisky at 19 Oct 2021 - 7:32am
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war criminal...

The death of General Colin Powell has drawn an outpouring of sympathy and praise from politicians, but social media users made “war criminal” trend instead, having not forgiven Powell for his role in the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Powell died on Monday of complications from Covid-19, according to his family. He was eulogized in major media outlets as the first black secretary of state and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. President Joe Biden said Powell embodied “the highest ideals of both warrior and diplomat,” while 43rd president George W. Bush called him a “great public servant.”

Another image, however, dominated the social media reactions to his death: that of Powell holding up a vial of fake anthrax in the UN General Assembly in 2003, claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and making the case for the US invasion that followed.

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By Gus Leonisky at 19 Oct 2021 - 5:29pm
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he would have had to know...

A soldier turned statesman: General Colin Powell made history on many fronts.

He was the nation's first African American national security advisor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and secretary of state.

You could argue that by the time of his retirement in 2005 he was one of America's most respected military figures.

But to the world, he was perhaps best known for one of his biggest blunders, towards the end of his career in public life.

He became a household name: General Powell, the man who led the US into war with Iraq, based on bad intelligence.

Please note that the intelligence wasn't "bad"... The "intelligence" had been manufactured by the intelligence agencies, to suit GOING TO WAR.

See: https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/11276 (more than 19,000 read)

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By Gus Leonisky at 19 Oct 2021 - 5:44pm
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my lai remembered...

From the Archive: Colin Powell’s role as a military adviser in Vietnam during the My Lai massacre has continued to elude scrutiny, Robert Parry and Norman Solomon said in 1996.

By Robert Parry and Norman Solomon (first published in 1996)

On March 16, 1968, a bloodied unit of the Americal division stormed into a hamlet known as My Lai 4. With military helicopters circling overhead, revenge-seeking Americal soldiers rousted Vietnamese civilians — mostly old men, women and children — from their thatched huts and herded them into the village’s irrigation ditches.

As the round-up continued, some Americans raped the girls. Then, under orders from junior officers on the ground, soldiers began emptying their M-16s into the terrified peasants. Some parents desperately used their bodies to try to shield their children from the bullets. Soldiers stepped among the corpses to finish off the wounded.

The slaughter raged for four hours. A total of 347 Vietnamese, including babies, died in the carnage that would stain the reputation of the U.S. Army. But there also were American heroes that day in My Lai. Some soldiers refused to obey the direct orders to kill.

A pilot named Hugh Clowers Thompson Jr. from Stone Mountain, Ga., was furious at the killings he saw happening on the ground. He landed his helicopter between one group of fleeing civilians and American soldiers in pursuit. Thompson ordered his helicopter door gunner to shoot the Americans if they tried to harm the Vietnamese. After a tense confrontation, the soldiers backed off. Later, two of Thompson’s men climbed into one ditch filled with corpses and pulled out a three-year-old boy whom they flew to safety.

A Pattern of Brutality

While a horrific example of a Vietnam war crime, the My Lai massacre was not unique. It fit a long pattern of indiscriminate violence against civilians that had marred U.S. participation in the Vietnam War from its earliest days when Americans acted primarily as advisers.

In 1963, Capt. Colin Powell was one of those advisers, serving a first tour with a South Vietnamese army unit. Powell’s detachment sought to discourage support for the Viet Cong by torching villages throughout the A Shau Valley. While other U.S. advisers protested this countrywide strategy as brutal and counter-productive, Powell defended the “drain-the-sea” approach then — and continued that defense in his 1995 memoirs, My American Journey.

After his first one-year tour and a series of successful training assignments in the United States, Maj. Powell returned for his second Vietnam tour on July 27, 1968. This time, he was no longer a junior officer slogging through the jungle, but an up-and-coming staff officer assigned to the Americal division.

By late 1968, Powell had jumped over more senior officers into the important post of G-3, chief of operations for division commander, Maj. Gen. Charles Gettys, at Chu Lai. Powell had been “picked by Gen. Gettys over several lieutenant colonels for the G-3 job itself, making me the only major filling that role in Vietnam,” Powell wrote in his memoirs.

But a test soon confronted Maj. Powell. A letter had been written by a young specialist fourth class named Tom Glen, who had served in an American mortar platoon and was nearing the end of his Army tour. In a letter to Gen. Creighton Abrams, the commander of all U.S. forces in Vietnam, Glen accused the Americal division of routine brutality against civilians. Glen’s letter was forwarded to the American headquarters at Chu Lai where it landed on Maj. Powell’s desk.

“The average GI’s attitude toward and treatment of the Vietnamese people all too often is a complete denial of all our country is attempting to accomplish in the realm of human relations,” Glen wrote. ”Far beyond merely dismissing the Vietnamese as ‘slopes’ or ‘gooks,’ in both deed and thought, too many American soldiers seem to discount their very humanity; and with this attitude inflict upon the Vietnamese citizenry humiliations, both psychological and physical, that can have only a debilitating effect upon efforts to unify the people in loyalty to the Saigon government, particularly when such acts are carried out at unit levels and thereby acquire the aspect of sanctioned policy.”

Glen’s letter contended that many Vietnamese were fleeing from Americans who “for mere pleasure, fire indiscriminately into Vietnamese homes and without provocation or justification shoot at the people themselves.” Gratuitous cruelty was also being inflicted on Viet Cong suspects, Glen reported.

“Fired with an emotionalism that belies unconscionable hatred, and armed with a vocabulary consisting of ‘You VC,’ soldiers commonly ‘interrogate’ by means of torture that has been presented as the particular habit of the enemy. Severe beatings and torture at knife point are usual means of questioning captives or of convincing a suspect that he is, indeed, a Viet Cong…

“It would indeed be terrible to find it necessary to believe that an American soldier that harbors such racial intolerance and disregard for justice and human feeling is a prototype of all American national character; yet the frequency of such soldiers lends credulity to such beliefs. … What has been outlined here I have seen not only in my own unit, but also in others we have worked with, and I fear it is universal. If this is indeed the case, it is a problem which cannot be overlooked, but can through a more firm implementation of the codes of MACV (Military Assistance Command Vietnam) and the Geneva Conventions, perhaps be eradicated.”

Glen’s letter echoed some of the complaints voiced by early advisers, such as Col. John Paul Vann, who protested the self-defeating strategy of treating Vietnamese civilians as the enemy. In 1995, when we questioned Glen about his letter, he said he had heard second-hand about the My Lai massacre, though he did not mention it specifically. The massacre was just one part of the abusive pattern that had become routine in the division, he said.

Maj. Powell’s Response

The letter’s troubling allegations were not well received at American headquarters. Maj. Powell undertook the assignment to review Glen’s letter, but did so without questioning Glen or assigning anyone else to talk with him. Powell simply accepted a claim from Glen’s superior officer that Glen was not close enough to the front lines to know what he was writing about, an assertion Glen denies.

After that cursory investigation, Powell drafted a response on Dec. 13, 1968. He admitted to no pattern of wrongdoing. Powell claimed that U.S. soldiers in Vietnam were taught to treat Vietnamese courteously and respectfully. The American troops also had gone through an hour-long course on how to treat prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions, Powell noted.

“There may be isolated cases of mistreatment of civilians and POWs,” Powell wrote in 1968. But “this by no means reflects the general attitude throughout the Division.” Indeed, Powell’s memo faulted Glen for not complaining earlier and for failing to be more specific in his letter.

Powell reported back exactly what his superiors wanted to hear. “In direct refutation of this [Glen’s] portrayal,” Powell concluded, “is the fact that relations between American soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent.”

Powell’s findings, of course, were false. But it would take another American hero, an infantryman named Ron Ridenhour, to piece together the truth about the atrocity at My Lai. After returning to the United States, Ridenhour interviewed American comrades who had participated in the massacre.

On his own, Ridenhour compiled this shocking information into a report and forwarded it to the Army inspector general. The IG’s office conducted an aggressive official investigation and the Army finally faced the horrible truth. Courts martial were held against officers and enlisted men implicated in the murder of the My Lai civilians.

But Powell’s peripheral role in the My Lai cover-up did not slow his climb up the Army’s ladder. Powell pleaded ignorance about the actual My Lai massacre, which pre-dated his arrival at the American. Glen’s letter disappeared into the National Archives — to be unearthed only years later by British journalists Michael Bilton and Kevin Sims for their book Four Hours in My Lai. In his best-selling memoirs, Powell did not mention his brush-off of Tom Glen’s complaint.

MAM Hunts

Powell did include, however, a troubling recollection that belied his 1968 official denial of Glen’s allegation that American soldiers “without provocation or justification shoot at the people themselves.” After mentioning the My Lai massacre in My American Journey, Powell penned a partial justification of the American’s brutality. In a chilling passage, Powell explained the routine practice of murdering unarmed male Vietnamese.

“I recall a phrase we used in the field, MAM, for military-age male,” Powell wrote.

“If a helo spotted a peasant in black pajamas who looked remotely suspicious, a possible MAM, the pilot would circle and fire in front of him. If he moved, his movement was judged evidence of hostile intent, and the next burst was not in front, but at him. Brutal? Maybe so. But an able battalion commander with whom I had served at Gelnhausen (West Germany), Lt. Col. Walter Pritchard, was killed by enemy sniper fire while observing MAMs from a helicopter. And Pritchard was only one of many. The kill-or-be-killed nature of combat tends to dull fine perceptions of right and wrong.”

While it’s certainly true that combat is brutal, mowing down unarmed civilians is not combat. It is, in fact, a war crime. Neither can the combat death of a fellow soldier be cited as an excuse to murder civilians. Disturbingly, that was precisely the rationalization that the My Lai killers cited in their own defense.

But returning home from Vietnam a second time in 1969, Powell had proved himself the consummate team player.

For more on Colin Powell’s real record, please check out the “Behind Colin Powell’s Legend” series.

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By Gus Leonisky at 23 Oct 2021 - 7:57pm
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why America cracked up?...

WASHINGTON — If we could unlock the puzzle of Colin Powell, maybe we could understand why America cracked up.

General Powell was the best America had to offer. He was the son of Jamaican immigrants in the South Bronx who became a hero in Vietnam and then the first African American secretary of state.

He was smart and charismatic, with an easy laugh and a Corvette Stingray. At Washington parties, even ones where Jack Nicholson dropped in, people gravitated toward Powell.

He could even speak a little Yiddish, from his teenage stint as “a schlepper” at a baby furniture and toy store owned by immigrant Jews and as a Shabbos goy in the neighborhood.

He could have been president. Excitement swirled around him when he published his memoir “My American Journey” on the cusp of the ’96 race.

But like another son of immigrants, Mario Cuomo, Powell shrank from a run at the last minute. It always struck me that Cuomo and Powell seemed to overanalyze whether they were worthy, while the WASPy sons of privilege, like George W. Bush and Dan Quayle, just assumed they were worthy, no matter how little they knew.

Back in 1995, I wrote a column about the needlepoint-pillow rules Powell laid out in his memoir. It is sad to read them now because he broke so many of them when he drove his tank off the cliff known as Iraq. Like Rule No. 7: “You can’t make someone else’s choices. You shouldn’t let someone else make yours.”

Rule No. 1 was: “It ain’t as bad as you think. It will look better in the morning.”

But there will be no morning from here to eternity when the decision to invade Iraq will look better.

Powell even failed to follow the Powell doctrine, which shunned attenuated wars in which our national security interests were not at stake.

The Shakespearean tragedy of Powell is that he knew it was a rotten decision. And, unlike the draft dodgers in the Bush White House, he knew the real cost of war. He knew they weren’t playing with toy soldiers.

But Powell embodied the phrase “soldiering on.”

He did not resign in protest, which might have stiffened the spines of Joe Biden, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, who all voted to authorize the war out of political expediency.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/23/opinion/colin-powell-legacy.html

Maureen Dowd has written for yonks and has learnt nothing much it seems... The My Lai exposé above explains how people like Powell get by, half care-free in their Corvettes, as if the moral decisions are in tune with the rest of America through the happily tuned cylinders of the funny car, even if there is a bit of sputtering sometimes. The system demands that we polish turds, so we'll polish turds with a superior moral exceptionalism. We're American, we can do nothing wrong, because we mean well and we are Americans... It's a beautiful ideal... This was what drove Powell, whether he worked for Bush or for Obama... He was part of the "system" and he loved it, not because he understood the moral value of what he could do, but because he had the power to do whatever, to suit the system, even when he was used to "denounce Trump"... POWELL COULD NEVER HAVE BEEN PRESIDENT, PLEASE.

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By Gus Leonisky at 24 Oct 2021 - 7:27pm
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a soldier for deceit...

Colin Powell, the trailblazing soldier-diplomat who rose from humble beginnings to become the first African-American US secretary of state, has been remembered by family and friends as a principled man of humility for generations to come.

“The example of Colin Powell does not call on us to emulate his resume, which is too formidable for mere mortals,” his son Michael said in a touching tribute at his father’s funeral on Friday at Washington National Cathedral.

“It is to emulate his character and his example as a human being. We can strive to do that.”

The funeral on a sunny and chilly day drew dignitaries and friends from across the political and military spectrum. They included President Joe Biden and former presidents George W Bush and Barack Obama, former secretaries of state James Baker, Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton, former Defence Secretary Robert Gates, and the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Army General Mark Milley.

Donald Trump’s bile

Two recent presidents did not attend – Bill Clinton, who is recovering from a severe infection, and Donald Trump, who publicly disparaged Powell after his death for having been critical of the former president.

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Powell was a soldier working for the deceitful forces of the US military and administration. because of him, many innocent people died — far more than would have otherwise. Read from top.

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By Gus Leonisky at 6 Nov 2021 - 2:33pm
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