Rumsfeld: Powell wasn’t duped on WMD

(By Ed Morrissey, Hot Air) - Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld comes out swinging in his new book, 'Known and Unknown: A Memoir', and one of his targets is Colin Powell. Rumsfeld tweaks Powell over his management skills and disputes the notion that Powell somehow got duped into delivering the WMD address to the UN before the invasion of Iraq. The intelligence was wrong, Rumsfeld acknowledges in this interview excerpt from ABC’s Diane Sawyer, but we sent troops into the heat of the Iraqi desert wearing chemical-weapons suits for a reason:

Colin Powell, Bush’s first secretary of state, “did not, in my view, do a good job of managing the people under him,” Rumsfeld said.

“There was a lot of leaking out of the State Department, and the president knew it,” he said. “And it was unhelpful. And most of it ended up making the State Department look good. We didn’t do that in the Pentagon. I insisted we not do it.”

Powell, Rumsfeld said, never spoke up in meetings with the president to raise objections to the Iraq war.

“There’s a lot of stuff [in] the press that say Colin Powell was against it. But I never saw even the slightest hint of that,” he said. … Powell, Rumsfeld said, never spoke up in meetings with the president to raise objections to the Iraq war.