(Newser) – Colin Powell’s former chief of staff says he thinks the secretary of state was deliberately lied to and manipulated by the vice president’s office in the lead-up to the Iraq war. “I think there was some manipulation of this material and there was some outright lying,” Lawrence Wilkerson told MSNBC’s Cenk Uygur last night. “The secretary of state was not told the complete truth.”

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When Uygur asked if Wilkerson thought Powell had been manipulated by Dick Cheney’s office, Wilkerson replied, “Absolutely. Absolutely.” His comments follow a bombshell admission from “Curveball,” a source cited heavily by Powell in his 2003 UN speech, that he’d made up all his evidence—and that his German interrogators knew it. (Read more Curveball stories.)

