Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Colin Powell Has Praise for Obama

In an NPR interview today:

"I'm proud of the vote I cast for him in 2008, I think he was absolutely the right choice," Powell says. "I think he's done some very, very positive things to stabilize our financial system, save the auto industry, to bring some regulation into the mix, and we've ended one war — the one in Iraq — we're working on phasing out Afghanistan, and we haven't gotten into any new ones."

But he has plenty of critiques of the Obama administration as well. "We didn't close Guantanamo as I would have hoped, and we still have an unemployment rate that's too high, and the economy has not quite recovered." Powell says. "Whether that's all the fault of the president or not will be up to the people to decide." NPR

Powell has known Romney for many years and says he's a "very distinguished gentleman." Powell is looking forward to hearing what Romney has to say in the coming months.
Colin Powell also talked about the intelligence disaster that was Bush/Cheney:
Powell writes that he now knows that the draft that he and then-CIA Director George Tenet were presented with hadn't actually come through the National Security Council at the White House, but rather from Vice President Dick Cheney's office.

"But I didn't know that at the time," Powell says. "I knew when the president asked me to make the presentation — I knew that the NSC was supposed to have been working on it, and therefore I would get something that was a near-finished document." NPR