Powell on his UN speech

Colin Powell speaks on "Meet the Press" about the presentation he made before the UN.

Did the president lie or mislead us?

Powell: "We went to war on the basis that we have a terrible regime . . . it's been terrible forever. What makes it so terrible now -- in the aftermath of 9/11 -- is that they had demonstrated that they will use these weapons. They've used them against their own people, they've used them against the enemy. They had them at the time of the first Gulf War . . . . And the intelligence community said and had every reason to believe that they not only had the capability of having them again, but they have stockpiles. And that was the precipitating cause. . . . I'm glad Saddam Hussein is gone. But the case that we took to the world and the case that we took to the American people rested not just in his human rights abuses or his cheating on the Oil-for-Food program, it rested on the real and present danger of weapons of mass destruction that he could use against his neighbors, or terrorists could use against us."

So you gave your presentation before the United Nations in good faith?

Powell: "I spent five days out at the CIA going over every single piece of information that was going to be in my presentation. There were a lot of other pieces of information that different people . . . wanted me to use, and it was all rejected. Everything in that statement was blessed by the director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet; his deputy, John McLaughlin; and all of their senior officials. . . . And so I went to the UN having dumped a lot of stuff on the side of the road because it wasn't multiple source. It might have been right, but it wasn't multiple source and I wouldn't use it. And the reason you see Director Tenet sitting behind me [at the UN] is because [he and] I wanted to make sure . . . that people understood I was not making a political statement. I was making a statement of the facts as we knew them."

Nevertheless, the "Today" show graphic ran: "Breaking His Silence: Powell Blasts Bush's War Policies." Except he didn't.