Powell says Wilson was right about Iraq intelligence, and Cheney was wrong

Over at the TruthDig Blog, Editor in Chief Robert Scheer writes about a face-to-face conversation he had this week with former Secretary of State Colin Powell in Los Angeles:

On Monday, former Secretary of State Colin Powell told me that he andhis department’s top experts never believed that Iraq posed an imminentnuclear threat, but that the president followed the misleading adviceof Vice President Dick Cheney and the CIA in making the claim. Now hetells us.

In other words, Powell is defending his former State Department staff, while admitting that Cheney and the top chiefs at the CIA are the ones to blame for bad intelligence.  This is significant because we are learning more and more about the arguments that took place within Bush's war cabinet before the war began.  Later in the column, Scheer said Powell got more specific about the alleged Niger connection:

I queried Powell at a reception following a talk he gave in Los Angeleson Monday. Pointing out that the October 2002 National IntelligenceEstimate showed that his State Department had gotten it right on thenonexistent Iraq nuclear threat, I asked why did the president ignorethat wisdom in his stated case for the invasion?

“The CIA was pushing the aluminum tube argument heavily and Cheneywent with that instead of what our guys wrote,” Powell said. And theNiger reference in Bush’s State of the Union speech? “That was a bigmistake,” he said. “It should never have been in the speech. I didn’tneed Wilson to tell me that there wasn’t a Niger connection. He didn’ttell us anything we didn’t already know. I never believed it.”

Again, what Powell is basically admitting is that Joseph Wilson was right in his 2003 column in the New York Times about there not being a Niger connection to Iraq.  This contradicts what Fox News and all the other conservative pundits have been saying in their attempt to discredit Mr. Wilson and sidestep the issue that Wilson's wife, who worked for the CIA, had her identity leaked by a member of the Administration.