Reliable Cover-up Artist (see My Lai, Iran-Contra, Iraq, etc.) Gets Unreliable:
Telling the Truth Feels Kind of Good, Doesn't It?

[The Honorable Colin Powell has cheerfully cooperated with a grand jury investigation into the Valerie Plame affair. That case and its potentially explosive political consequences were the subject of FTW's June 4th story, "COUP D'ETAT: The Real Reason Tenet and Pavitt Resigned from the CIA on June 3rd and 4th; Bush, Cheney Indictments in Plame Case Looming," by Michael C. Ruppert with additional reporting by Wayne Madsen. The case seemed to vanish from the news while its wheels quietly ground onward and the prosecution did its work. Now the media smell blood and the story is coming back into the news. So we learn that the middle of June saw the formidable-but-humiliated Colin Powell helping out on the side of glasnost.

This is the same Secretary of State who told the United Nations and the world that Iraq was percolating with WMD's, when he clearly knew that to be false. In today's America, even that may not have completely destroyed Powell's presidential hopes, but it sure put a crack right up the middle. After that sickening experience of lying for the wrong people, to the wrong people, about the wrong thing, with other men's death and maiming as the consequences, perhaps the Secretary is enjoying his new (off camera) candor. Let's hope it's genuine this time. -JAH]

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Grand Jury Hears Testimony From Powell
By The Associated Press
The New York Times
Sunday 01 August 2004

Warsaw, Poland - The U.S. grand jury investigating the leak of an undercover CIA operative's name has interviewed Secretary of State Colin Powell, but he is not a subject of the inquiry, the State Department said Sunday.

Department spokesman Richard Boucher, traveling with Powell on a diplomatic visit to Poland, said Powell appeared on July 16 at the grand jury's invitation. "The secretary is not a subject of inquiry," Boucher said. "He was pleased to cooperate with the grand jury."

Powell is the latest official from the Bush administration to be called before the grand jury in Washington.

White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and spokesman Scott McClellan have been summoned, and grand jury investigators have interviewed President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney in their offices.

Powell's appearance was first reported Sunday by Newsweek.

The grand jury investigation is to determine who leaked the name of Valerie Plame to syndicated columnist Robert Novak last July. Disclosure of an undercover officer's identity can be a federal crime.

Novak revealed Plame's work for the CIA a week after her husband, Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador, criticized Bush's claim in the 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq had tried to obtain uranium from Niger, a major uranium-exporting nation in Africa.

The CIA had sent Wilson to Niger in mid-1992 to check the allegation, and he concluded it was unfounded. The administration has acknowledged that its inclusion in the State of the Union address was a mistake.

In printing Plame's name, Novak wrote that two administration officials said Wilson's wife suggested that he be sent to Niger.

Boucher referred questions about Powell's testimony to the Justice Department because grand jury operations are secret.

Asked whether Powell called or talked to Novak about Wilson's wife, Boucher said: "Of course not!"