His entire career must have been one of looking the other way and saying next to nothing - like when they supposedly tricked him into making the case for invading 2003 Iraq by presenting a pack of lies to the UN. Anyone within such a corrupt system would have been required to routinely look the other way to a very considerable and significant degree, or they would have been forced out or silenced one way or another.
Unless a total robot programmed not to question anything, anyone rising up in the US military or intelligence agencies would have witnessed plenty of crimes committed by people in the upper echelons, especially over recent decades where it’s been blatantly out in the open. Not speaking up against crimes against the US public is as good as helping exploit us when participating in and profiting off taxpayer funded war crimes that created more problems and expense for US citizens and the world, while illegally serving the interests of globalist bankers and the multinational corporations they’re invested in as part of the globalization/NWO/corporate fascist police state that’s being pushed on the world’s public.
Many, like Colin Powell, simply shut up and do as they’re told - to get promoted within the corrupt system - it’s shut up and move up. Some of these people aren’t intellectually honest enough, or intelligent enough, to understand they’ve been used as tools by the globalization schemers to exploit the US and world’s public.
Look where we are now. Instead of protecting “we the people” that are the true substance of this country, the corrupt military is helping “our” predominantly corrupt politicians in both parties exploit us and worldwide humanity on behalf of the globalization scheme that’s now using Covid-19 as the excuse to impose “The Great (fake) Reset”.
If the Western establishment consistently acted as a matter of moral, ethical and legal principles, they wouldn’t wait centuries to denounce Colin Powell for participating in war crimes as an unwitting or otherwise globalist puppet.