Pow! Well?

On April 2, Secretary of State Colin Powell admitted that claims about Iraqi mobile bioweapons labs he made in his UN Security Council speech were based on information that was not "solid." Now he's gone beyond that.

Washington (Reuters, May 16) - The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency was wrong about Iraq's purported pre-war mobile biological weapons laboratories, a key part of the case about suspected weapons of mass destruction, Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Sunday.

"I'm very concerned," he said in reply to a question on the NBC program "Meet the Press" about having used claims in a U.N. Security Council speech now known to have been "inaccurate and discredited."

"It turned out that the sourcing was inaccurate and wrong and, in some cases, deliberately misleading. And for that, I am disappointed, and I regret it," he said.

These are the same non-existent mobile labs that The Big Dick Cheney was pointing to as recently as January as "conclusive" evidence of Iraqi WMD programs.

Add to that the fact that Josh Marshall refers to a Baltimore Sun article in which Powell says that

we kept the president informed of the concerns that were raised by the ICRC and other international organizations [about abuse of prisoners] as part of my regular briefings of the president, and advised him that we had to follow these issues, and when we got notes sent to us or reports sent to us ... we had to respond to them, and the president certainly made it clear that that's what he expected us to do.

That directly contradicts the White House line that ICRC reports never made it up to Cabinet level.

It seems to me, frankly, that Powell might be sensing a sinking ship and is trying to edge slowly away without looking disloyal. But with Powell and Rumsfeld now openly contradicting each other, something will have to give.