The biological weapons fraud: Colin Powell demands answers over Curveball's WMD lies | The Guardian

Soldiers were ordered to be vaccinated 

against Saddam Hussein''s non-existent smallpox supply.  

Some developed endocarditis.

The Guardian reports that Gen. Colin Powell is mad at "Curveball", the aptly nick-named Iraqi fraudster who claimed - falsely he now admits - that he had personally witnessed Saddam Hussein's mobile biological warfare equipment. Powell went before the world at the U.N. and did "an Adlai Stevenson", as Christ Matthews calls it. Frankly I thought Powell was a willing shill.  The then Secretary of State said from the podium at the United Nations that we have

"firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails … The source was an eyewitness who supervised one of these facilities".

"An eyewitness" is awfully thin ground to launch a war: especially when Hans Blix's WMD hunters had found nothing and said they needed more time. But Powell was on board and there was no stopping the train George W. Bush had put in motion.

It is easy to forget that George W. Bush launched a program of massive smallpox vaccination without any evidence that any risk existed. Public health authorities were compliant with the Presidential command. Even though no risk had been identified. Fortunately few members of the public were sufficiently motivated by the non-existent threat to subject themselves to the low but unnecessary risks of the live virus vaccine. 

 Although almost no one dared to say aloud that the emperor had no clothes - that there was NO evidence of a smallpox threat - the program was the product of intense debate about risk and compensation and safety, as I detail in my interesting but utterly ignored study Reactions and Overreactions: Smallpox Vaccination, Complications and Compensation (2003).

Lincoln's Gettysburg Address read by Johnny Cash, Colin Powell, Sam Waterston, et al.

Today is Lincoln's birthday.  THIS LINK will bring you to great Gettysburg address read by Johnny Cash , Colin Powell, Sam Waterston and others. 

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.