The Downing Street Memo and Bush's Hot Potato.

I have said privately to a conservative friend who thinks Bush is laughable but still the better choice, that I believe #43 will end his presidency in disgrace as a failed president.

Why? Because my assessment of him is that he is a two faced liar from the beginning and that the run up to the war was contrived and unnecessary, and that something is bound to catch up with him. God, my faith tells me, sooner or later, brings down the proud and arrogant. Karma. It is beginning to look as if #43 might be impeachable, if only the major media, heretofore ignoring the story, speaks to the evidence emerging.

Turns out there seems to be real evidence suggesting the deliberate deceit of the American People in the matter of the Iraqi war, which is certainly treasonable. Starting yesterday Congress is beginning to examine it and ask for an investigation. Up to recently, the American public have not been willing to examine much in this arena, but with American soldiers being killed daily and no apparent exit strategy, the hoi polloi are becoming disillusioned.

What's the Deal with the Downing Street Memo?
Village Voice, Patrick Mulvany, June 16
Getting a Grip on the Blair -Bush war scandal.

A group of congressional Democrats held a public forum Thursday in the Capitol to investigate the so-called Downing Street Memo—an account of a British leadership meeting that suggests the Bush administration lied about its intentions and manipulated evidence in the run-up to the war in Iraq. Lawmakers gathered testimony from several witnesses, including former intelligence officials, with the hope of gaining a better understanding of the key decisions that preceded the 2003 invasion.

Representative John Conyers of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, called the Bush administration to task for deceiving the American public during the march to war. The president’s statements in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq contradict the accounts of British intelligence officials as detailed in the Memo, Conyers said. “The veracity of those statements has—to put it mildly—come into question,” he told the assembly.

The Memo has been big, big news in Britain, but had, at least until Thursday, received little attention in the U.S. What follows is a primer on the Memo and its implications.
_____

On July 23, 2002, British prime minister Tony Blair met with several of his top advisers to discuss plans for the future concerning the United States, Iraq, and the United Nations. The minutes from that meeting were marked “secret and strictly confidential.” But on May 1, in the heat of Blair’s campaign for re-election, those minutes—which have come to be known as the Downing Street Memo—surfaced in The Times of London.

The Memo confirmed what many progressives had long suspected: that the Bush administration first decided to start a war in Iraq and then rigged a case to justify it. According to the Memo, Britain’s intelligence chief reported the following assessment with regard to his then recent trip to Washington: “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

The British media, from the Guardian to the BBC News, quickly explored the Memo and its implications and subsequently unearthed more documents that cast further doubt on the official Bush-Blair version of the run-up to the war (as well as the preparations for its aftermath). In the meantime, however, the titans of the U.S. press largely dodged the Downing Street bullet. As Media Matters for America noted in a study released June 15, the editorial pages of four of the nation's five largest newspapers - USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times—remained “conspicuously silent about the controversy surrounding the document” in the first six weeks after its publication.

Nonetheless, reactions to the Memo have slowly and quietly gathered steam across the United States. Progressive media outlets including The Village Voice (The Bush Beat, Power Plays), TomPaine.com, Democracy Now!, and The Nation have covered the story on a regular basis, and smaller newspapers from Tennessee to Wisconsin have also taken up the issue. As for blogs, Daily Kos launched a campaign to “lift the virtual news blackout” on the story.

On the advocacy front, more than 500,000 people signed a letter to President Bush earlier this month demanding an explanation for the latest revelations, and groups of veterans and peace activists have formed a coalition to push for a formal congressional investigation. Moreover, Ralph Nader and Kevin Zeese, among others, have actually raised the prospect of impeachment for President Bush.

With the issue clearly gaining momentum, the key question now is whether the Memo has the muscle to sway not only those who opposed the war in the first place, but also those who at some point supported it.

Neither testimony from Joseph Wilson and Richard Clarke nor the enduring absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has unsettled the American public enough to reopen the debate over the war. Controversy with regard to the Downing Street Memo may also wither away.

But there is a real possibility the issue could gain serious traction in the days and weeks ahead. The people of the United States have become increasingly frustrated with the Iraq war; a recent Washington Post poll found that for the first time since major combat operations began in March 2003, more than half of all Americans feel the war has not made the nation safer. And perhaps even more importantly, the Memo is strikingly concrete; beyond its commentary on intelligence-fiddling and fact-tweaking, it notes quite plainly that “the case was thin” for military intervention in Iraq.

Story by Patrick Mulvaney
What's the Deal With the Downing Street Memo?
Getting a grip on that Bush/Blair war scandal