War Is A Crime .org

For Immediate Release: June 9, 2005

Congressman John Conyers (D.

THE SAD AND CONTINUING SAGA OF THE DOWNING STREET MEMO'S 'COVERAGE' IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

By David Michael Green

George Bush�s poodle, as he�s known at home in the UK, came from across the Atlantic
for a visit the other day. Master and hound were both asked at a press conference about
the Downing Street Minutes, and both gave preposterously duplicitous answers to the
question.

The good news is that Bush�s American poodle � the New York Times � gave the issue
coverage, and it has moved over the last month from Page Zero to Page 10 to Page 7.

By John Prados, TomPaine.com
June 09, 2005
John Prados is a senior fellow with the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C. He is author of Hoodwinked: The Documents That Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War (The New Press).

As the Bush administration pushes to secure confirmation by the United States Senate of John R. Bolton in his appointment as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, controversy continues to simmer�over failure to provide materials requested by the Foreign Relations Committee, over Bolton�s efforts to have intelligence officers fired for their views, over his arrogant management style.

SIGN THE LETTER TO BUSH HERE:

http://www.johnconyers.com/

From left i on the news, http://lefti.blogspot.com

Last night's Daily Show featured Jon Stewart doing his usual fawning over the levers of power, in this case Colin Powell (video here at Crooks and Liars).

By Dan Cring

After the events of 9/11 when it was patently clear that Bush wanted to invade Iraq, I decided to do some research by investigating the hawks promoting war in Iraq- hawks like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz-- and I found the following:

Politely, peacefully, and nonviolently inquire when you see them as to what sort of imbeciles they take us for.

Thursday, June 9, 2005

*NEW DETAILS: BUSH in Columbus, OH, 9:35am: THE PRESIDENT makes remarks on the PATRIOT Act, Ohio State Highway Patrol Academy | Columbus, OH, OPEN PRESS [Washington Post, 6/9/05; White House 6/9/05]

*NEW: MEHLMAN in Pennsylvania, 5:30pm: Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Ken Mehlman takes his "Conversations With The Community" outreach series to Jewish business and community leaders in Pennsylvania, Thursday, June 9, 2005. What: "Conversations With The Community" Town Hall When: Thursday, June 9, 2005 5:30 - 6:30 pm (EDT) Where: The Duquense Club, 325 Sixth Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA [RNC, 6/8/05]

Here is audio of Ben Merens

From US Labor Against War

Tour of United States planned for June 10-26:

Six Iraqi labor leaders will be touring the US to speak with the labor movement to both educate US trade unionists about the conditions faced by Iraqi workers and their struggles and to build direct worker-to-worker, union-to-union solidarity and support for Iraqi trade unionists in their effort to build a progressive secular Iraq.

LEARN MORE.

From the September 2003 issue of Washingtonian

If President Bush suffers because it turns out he took the country to war on false pretenses, he might look back on stories by Walter Pincus for drawing first blood.

On March 16, the eve of war, Pincus wrote in the Post that �U.S. intelligence agencies have been unable to give Congress or the Pentagon specific information� about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

At the time, the Bush White House was telling the world that America had to invade Iraq to root out weapons of mass destruction. Pincus quoted sources saying that there was �a lack of hard evidence.� And they also said the White House had �exaggerated intelligence� to back up its drive toward war.

Published on Wednesday, October 27, 2004 by the lndependent/UK
by Colin Brown

Secret plans for the war in Iraq were passed to British Army chiefs by US defense planners five months before the invasion was launched, a court martial heard yesterday.

The revelation strengthened suspicions that Tony Blair gave his agreement to President George Bush to go to war while the diplomatic efforts to force Saddam Hussein to comply with UN resolutions were continuing.

Alan Simpson, the leader of Labour Against the War, said the documents were "dynamite", if genuine, and showed that Clare Short was right to assert in her book, serialized in The Independent, that Mr Blair had "knowingly misled" Parliament.

The Associated Press appears to have errantly revised a question asked by a Reuters reporter about the Downing Street minutes, RAW STORY has discovered.

By Grace Reid

Reasons Why DSM should be called DSMinutes

By Juan Cole, SALON

Bush's ludicrous statements about Iraq are increasingly reminiscent of the propaganda spouted by the former spokesman for the Iraqi regime -- except that they're not funny.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

June 9, 2005 | The sheer dishonesty of the Bush administration whenever it speaks about the situation in Iraq was on display again during Bush's Tuesday press conference with visiting British Prime Minister Tony Blair. In recent weeks Bush has repeatedly expressed wild optimism, utterly unfounded in reality, about the political process in Iraq and about the ability of the new Iraqi government and army to win the guerrilla war. He has if anything been outdone in this rhetoric by Vice President Dick Cheney. This pie-in-the-sky attitude, which increasingly few believe, degrades our civic discourse, and it endangers the national security of the United States.

From phxnews.com:

Read it before CBS takes it down.

By Eric Boehlert, SALON.com

Why did it take more than a month for the U.S. press to report on the serious revelations in the Downing Street memo?

LINK TO ORIGINAL

June 9, 2005 | Halfway through Sunday's "Meet the Press," host Tim Russert, interviewing Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman, asked about a secret, top-level British government memorandum. Consisting of minutes from a July 23, 2002, meeting attended by Prime Minister Tony Blair and his closest advisors, the memo revealed their impression that the Bush administration, eight months before the start of the Iraq war in 2003, had already decided to invade and that Washington seemed more concerned with justifying a war than preventing one.

By Margaret Kimberley, The Black Commentator

Deep Throat was the anonymous source who helped Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein break the Watergate story. For the past 30 years the identity and in some cases the very existence of Deep Throat has been called into question until Mark Felt recently revealed himself to be the mystery man.

There have been many opportunities for eager reporters to bring down the current White House occupant, but no one in the corporate media seems to want the job. At the end of 2000 Greg Palast, an American reporter working for the British press, revealed that Florida Governor Jeb Bush had removed thousands of eligible voters, most of them black, from the voter registration rolls, thereby stealing the state for his brother George W.

Next best thing to actual journalism!

Watch the Video!

In a statement e-mailed to the Phoenix on Tuesday, Kerry spokesman Setti Warren said,

"Senator Kerry believes every American deserves a thorough explanation of the Downing Street memo. The Administration and the Washington Republicans who control Congress insult Americans by refusing to answer even the most basic questions raised in this memo about pre-war intelligence and planning for the aftermath of war. That�s unacceptable, especially with the lives of America�s sons and daughters on the line. John Kerry will demand answers in the Senate. Stay tuned."

Published on Thursday, October 28, 2004 by GNN.tv
Two Years Before 9/11, Candidate Bush was Already Talking Privately About Attacking Iraq, According to His Former Ghost Writer
by Russ Baker

HOUSTON -- Two years before the September 11 attacks, presidential candidate George W. Bush was already talking privately about the political benefits of attacking Iraq, according to his former ghost writer, who held many conversations with then-Texas Governor Bush in preparation for a planned autobiography.

"He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999," said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. "It was on his mind. He said to me: 'One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.' And he said, 'My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.' He said, 'If I have a chance to invade�.if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency." Herskowitz said that Bush expressed frustration at a lifetime as an underachiever in the shadow of an accomplished father. In aggressive military action, he saw the opportunity to emerge from his father's shadow. The moment, Herskowitz said, came in the wake of the September 11 attacks. "Suddenly, he's at 91 percent in the polls, and he'd barely crawled out of the bunker."

Stop the War is planning a major presence at the Edinburgh summit. We will be holding a rally on the Saturday evening, after the Make Poverty History demo, which we want all anti-war activists to support. We will also hold a Naming of the Dead ceremony in Edinburgh on the Sunday. Please do all you can to mobilise a massive turnout to greet Bush and the other warmongers.

There's something very democratic about the ability of any ordinary schmuck with a computer to set up a blog and loudly defend dictatorship. Here's a dissection of wixbangblog.com's confusions of the moment.

The Freeway Blogger is with us! Courtesy of The Brad Blog where he'll be a guest this weekend on the Brad Show.

Please don't try this at home without democratic supervision and eternal vigilance.

By Institute for Public Accuracy

Yesterday, President Bush, in an appearance with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, addressed the Downing Street Memo -- minutes from a July 23, 2002, meeting of British foreign policy leadership -- for the first time.

If Bush was still seeking to peacefully persuade Saddam Hussein to eliminate his nonexistent weapons of mass destruction during the period when Bush's own public statements, those of his staff, and official minutes of secret meetings say otherwise, how does he justify having been so disloyal to the 2000 Republican Party Platform?

Excerpted from the Republican party platform for the 2000 election, available at
http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2000/conventions/republican/features/platform.00/#53

BUZZFLASH NEWS ALERT

News from the offices of Congressman John Conyers, Jr.:

Representative John Conyers, Jr., (D-MI) House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member, issued the following statement in response to the joint Bush- Blair press conference and President Bush's and evasive answers to inquiries about the Downing Street Minutes:

"We have moved from silence to stonewalling on the issue of the Downing Street Minutes. The President's contention that he had not made up his mind to go to war on or before the summer of 2002 is now contradicted by the Downing Street Minutes, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, former National Security Adviser Richard Clarke, former Ambassador Joe Wilson and a number of former Blair Administration official.

His public assertions on Iraq were at odds with what he was told in private

John Ware
Saturday March 26, 2005
The Guardian

I was recently speaking to a former senior civil servant about the prime minister's relationship with the truth. "Has he got one?" he asked. He was deadly serious.

Because of the way Tony Blair made the case for war with Iraq, quite a lot of people have begun to think the relationship is tenuous. The suggestion that he found in the attorney general a lawyer who fortuitously told him that what he wanted to do was legal adds to the perception. Blair himself denies anyone was deceived.

Congressman John Conyers Talks About Bush Lying America Into War and His Campaign to Hold Bush Accountable: The Downing Street Memo and More

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

Congressman John Conyers is the first recipient of the BuzzFlash.com "Wings of Justice Award". "This guy's a Rocky for Constitutional Rights," we note in out citation. "When it comes to champions of democracy, Congressman John Conyers, ranking minority member of the House Judiciary Committee, flies like a butterfly and stings like a bee.... If Representative Conyers had subpoena powers, by now he would have had Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney and DeLay slinging mash potatoes in a federal prison."

The following is a Spanish translation of the Downing Street Minutes contributed by volunteer Debra R. Smith. This is tentative and we are interested in hearing suggested changes from those able to make them. Please post your suggestions as comments below.

Como apareci� originalmente en The Times of London, el 1 de mayo 2005

CONFIDENCIAL- SOLAMENTE PARA OJOS BRIT�NICOS

DAVID MANNING
De: Matthew Rycroft
Fecha: 23 July 2002
S 195 /02

copia: Secretario de defensa, Secretario de asuntos extranjeros, Fiscal general del estado, Don Richard Wilson, John Scarlett, Francis Richards, CDS, C, Jonathan Powell, Sally Morgan, Alastair Campbell

By Bob Olsen, Toronto

On June 7, the Toronto Coalition to Stop the War ( www.nowar.ca ) adopted my suggestion that we start an Indict Bush campaign here in Canada.

Here is the text of a handbill that we will print next week, to be handed out at local events.

Indict: to charge with a criminal offense.

George Bush should be charged with war crimes under Canada's "Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act".

"This act was passed in 2000 to bring Canada's ineffectual laws in line