The pathetic thing is that Colin Powell heard these tapes and he KNEW too, but chose to distance himself from President Bush.
Where'd you get that from? Source, please?
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I clearly remember Powell playing a recording of an Iraqi General recorded a few days before we went in. The subject at hand was a truck loaded with Chem weapons that had slipped thru the cracks and was still in a location it should not have been at that late date.
Powell aslo notified the UN that many Iraqi officers were communicating with us re defection, post-invasion actions, etc.......some of them were quite willing to cooperate with info and actions, and some were denying everything. I recall very clearly that Powell said that they (US DoD, probably NSA, too) had the cellphone numbers of most of the Iraqt commans structure, and had been calling them regularly for some time by that point.
Surely there is a transcript of Powells presentation to the UN if you want to convince yourself. The NSA program was in full bloom and fruitful that early!
I'm very familiar with Sec. Powell's presentation to the U.N. (which BTW had nothing to do with the infamous NSA program). I'm talking about these new tapes.
Not the same tapes. The tapes Powell used were (hostile) intercepts of Iraqi army communications. These new tapes are office recordings made BY the Iraqis of their own meetings.
"The NSA program was in full bloom and fruitful that early!"
What does the NSA program have to do with this? If we were in contact with the command structure, we probably got their cellphone numbers because the gave them to us.
I see no need to have had NSA working to intercept phone calls that were made between other US officials and Iraqi command structure before the war. I also do not see this as Powell somehow distancing himself from the President.