Colin Powell has dropped a water balloon on his friends of the Left and their "Bush Lied, People Died!" cri du coeur during a BBC interview due to be aired within hours. Mark in Mexico caught this early report of Powell's revelation that the American intelligence agencies never gave the White House any contradictory intelligence to the prevailing wisdom that Saddam Hussein had retained and hidden his WMD stocks and capability throughout the twelve-year quagmire of UN impotence, corruption, and failing containment:

THE US administration was never told of doubts about the secret intelligence used to justify war with Iraq, former secretary of state Colin Powell told the BBC in an interview to be broadcast on Sunday night.

Mr Powell, who argued the case for military action against Saddam Hussein in the UN in 2003, told BBC News 24 television he was "deeply disappointed in what the intelligence community had presented to me and to the rest of us."

"What really upset me more than anything else was that there were people in the intelligence community that had doubts about some of this sourcing, but those doubts never surfaced to us," he said.

This, of course, brings up the question as to whether those doubts actually existed at the time -- or more accurately, whether any evidence had developed counter to the existing intelligence before the invasion at all. Later, of course, the CIA came up with information that cast doubt on the Bush administration's interpretation of the intelligence both he and Congress reviewed -- the same intelligence Powell saw in both administrations and the same conclusions reached by all Western nations before Bush took office in 2001.

It sounds like the notion that the CIA has decided to conduct its own war against Bush and the elected government isn't quite as far-fetched as one might imagine. Powell's accusation will put quite a different take on the presumed narrative and start people wondering what the hell Langley has been doing since 9/11. It's starting to look like they have hung the CYA sign in front of the facility to replace their old logo.

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