Former US Secretary of State Colin Powell is dead. The 84-year-old died of complications from Covid 19, shared his family on Facebook.
The statement said Powell died Monday morning at Walter Reed Military Hospital in Bethesda near Washington DC. “We thank the medical staff for their caring treatment. We are losing an outstanding, loving husband, father, grandfather and a great American,” the letter reads. Powell was fully vaccinated.
The four-star general was National Security Advisor to US President Ronald Reagan in the late 1980s, then served as Chairman of the United Joint Chiefs of Staff under Presidents George HW Bush and Bill Clinton and was Commander of the US Armed Forces during the 1991 Gulf War .
Under President George W. Bush, he was US Secretary of State from 2001 to 2005; he was the youngest Secretary of State up to that point, and he was the first black man to hold this post, which was seen as an important political signal in the United States at the time. As Foreign Minister, at a meeting before the UN Security Council, he justified the war effort in Iraq with false information about alleged weapons of mass destruction that the then Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had at his disposal. An appearance that Powell later assessed as a mistake.
Powell had been a Republican member since the mid-1990s, but has become increasingly estranged from his party in recent years because of the shift to the right. In the 2008 presidential election he supported the Democrat Barack Obama. After January 6 of this year, when a mob of violent Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol, he resigned from the party for good.