Covid still killing

I don't remember hearing he had Covid.

Powell should pay in hell for his sins of the Iraq invasion.

Colin Powell, the former US secretary of state who played a pivotal role in attempting to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq, has died from complications from Covid-19 aged 84, it was announced on Monday.

[...]

He was the face of the Bush administration’s aggressive attempt to get the world community to back the invasion, based on false claims of Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction.

[...]

Powell, a retired four-star general who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the early 1990s, had been treated for Covid at Walter Reed national medical center in Bethesda, Maryland. He was fully vaccinated against coronavirus.

  Guardian

Well, that's not encouraging. And it's not going to help convince anti-Covid-vax-ers to get vaccinated.

In 2008, despite party rivalries, he endorsed Barack Obama for president. When Donald Trump launched his bid for the White House, Powell became one of his leading critics.

He voted against Trump in both 2016 and 2020 and was scathing about leading Republicans who remained silent or actively embraced Trump’s lies. His excoriating criticism of Trump continued until months before he died – in January he said he was so disgusted by the insurrection of Trump supporters at the US Capitol that he no longer considered himself to be a Republican.

The insurrectionists at least believed their lie. Powell didn't believe the lie about WMD, but he supported it all the same.

UPDATE:

UPDATE:

Powell resigned from the Bush administration in 2004 and never really owned up to what he had done. He recognized that his U.N. speech was inaccurate and described it, in an interview with celebrity journalist Barbara Walters, as “painful” and a “blot” on his career. Those comments, not long after he left office, were pretty much as far as he would ever go in terms of introspection or criticism. He was unable to admit the truth that his chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson now acknowledges. “I participated in a hoax on the American people, the international community, and the United Nations Security Council,” Wilkerson has said.

[...]

“At the personal level, Colin Powell was a nice man,” [ journalist Marc Lamont] Hill wrote. “He was also a trailblazer. But he was also a military leader and key strategist of an empire that killed countless people and undermined the sovereignty of multiple nations. In our memorials, we must be honest about all of this.”

  The Intercept