Colin Powell is suffering, where is the compassion?

It was perhaps the most important motivational speech of the 21st century, but four protesters outside Memorial Coliseum said he never should have made it.

Not the speech former Secretary of State Colin Powell gave Tuesday at the Get Motivated seminar. The one on Feb. 5, 2003, where he made the case before the United Nations for the United States' invasion of Iraq. The one where he held up a fake vial of anthrax and spoke of a “sinister nexus between Iraq and the al-Qaida network.” The one where he showed drawings of mobile biological weapons labs and a picture of an aluminum tube said to be used for building nuclear weapons.

“These are not assertions,” Powell told the U.N. “What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.”

In 2005, he told ABC news that the speech was a “blot” on his record and the aftermath has been “painful.