The Adventures of Powellocchio

Begins the Wikipedia entry for Pinocchio:

The Adventures of Pinocchio is a story about an animated puppet ...

Which is a good point of departure for the story about a once Secretary of State who went before the world to prove that Saddam Hussein had an active weapons of mass destruction program, was busy reconstituting a nuclear weapons, and was an immediate threat to the rest of the world.



Robert Sheer, in Truthdig:

On Monday, former Secretary of State Colin Powell told me that he and his department's top experts never believed that Iraq posed an imminent nuclear threat, but that the President followed the misleading advice of Vice President Dick Cheney and the CIA in making the claim. ...

"The CIA was pushing the aluminum tube argument heavily and Cheney went with that instead of what our guys wrote," Powell said. And the Niger reference in Bush's State of the Union speech? "That was a big mistake," he said. "It should never have been in the speech. I didn't need Wilson to tell me that there wasn't a Niger connection. He didn't tell us anything we didn't already know. I never believed it." ...

Why was this doubt, on the part of the secretary of state and others, about the salient facts justifying the invasion of Iraq kept from the public until we heard the truth from whistleblower Wilson, whose credibility the President then sought to destroy?