War Is A Crime .org

Unease grows as war backing falls
Boston Globe
By Susan Milligan, Globe Staff | June 11, 2005

WASHINGTON -- Faced with plummeting public support for the war in Iraq, a growing number of members of Congress from both parties are reevaluating the reasons for the invasion and demanding the Bush administration produce a plan for withdrawing US troops.

A bipartisan group of House members is drafting a resolution that calls on the administration to present a strategy for getting the United States out of Iraq, reflecting an increasing restlessness about the war in a chamber that 2 1/2 years ago voted overwhelmingly to support the use of force in Iraq.

By MediaMatters.org

Nearly six weeks after the disclosure of the Downing Street Memo -- which suggests that the Bush administration decided to go to war in Iraq much earlier than acknowledged, and that it manipulated pre-war intelligence to support that decision -- the memo still has not gotten much serious media coverage.

While many news organizations that ignored the story for weeks have finally touched on it, few have done more than repeating what the British Sunday Times reported on May 1, and much of the coverage has focused on the lack of coverage the memo has gotten, rather than on the content of the memo, its credibility, and what it means.

With a big boost from MoveOn.org, the count of signatures on Congressman Conyers' letter is 478,348 and climbing. Clearly we will pass the goal of 500,000 before the Congressman delivers the letter to the White House on Thursday and we all rally in Lafayette Square Park.

From DAWN -- DC Anti-War Network

WHO: Richard Cheney
WHAT: Will present the "Gerald R. Ford Journalism Awards"
WHERE: National Press Club -- 14 and F, NW -- nearest metro is Metro Center
WHEN: Monday, 11:30 till 2:15

The following chapter is taken from the forthcoming set on the Iraq war, Neo-CONNED! and Neo-CONNED! Again, from Light in the Darkness Publications. The comprehensive two-volume work deals with the run-up to and aftermath of the war with groundbraking and uncompromising analysis from 84 different contributors. Order this one-of-a-kind, must-read collection at order@neoconned.com, or (toll-free) 877-447-7737. To be released August 1, now taking pre-publication orders.

PDF VERSION

IRAQI UNION LEADERS ON 'DEMOCRACY NOW!' (Pacifica Network) MONDAY, JUNE 13

From US Labor Against War

Published in St Louis Post Dispatch
By Edmund Fruchter, supporter of AfterDowningStreet.org
Friday, Jun. 10 2005

It might help if young people saw politicians, including the president, being held accountable for their actions.

While the Downing Street Memo - the "secret and strictly personal" minutes of British Prime Minister Tony Blair's July 23, 2002, staff meeting on Iraq - has enjoyed wide circulation in the British press, it remains virtually unknown to most Americans. Is this a matter of ignorance or choice?

As an undergraduate at Washington University, I do a lot of reading. Having studied the student rebellion in France of May, 1968, the accounts of young Americans pouring blood on Vietnam draft records and the overwhelming activism of my parent's generation, what I wonder is: Who hit the reset button?

Via Dan Froomkin in the Washington Post:

Allegre , who keeps a diary on the liberal Daily Kos blog, reprints the e-mail she got in reply to her note about the Downing Street memo from John Walcott, Washington bureau chief for Knight Ridder newspapers:

by Billmon

Eric Boehlert at Salon did a more thorough and concise job than I did of flaying the corporate media over its mishandling of the Downing Street Memo story -- although personally I think the piece would have benefited from a few scatalogical insults hurled at melon heads like Tim Russert. Truth is a defense, after all.

In my own screed on the subject yesterday, I should have included links to two other organizations that are working to keep the story alive -- afterdowningstreet.com and the Big Brass Alliance, a coalition of lefty bloggers who are also pushing the issue with admirable intensity.

By Anthony Wade, June 10, 2005, www.OpEdNews.com

On September the Eleventh, 2001, our worst fears were realized. I will never forget that day and traveling home by subway in New York City. Looking into the shell-shocked faces of people I never met, would never see again, realizing how truly close we all were. We were bound together by the experience. A collective outrage, a collective understanding that we were in this together. Unfortunately, some took this opportunity to capitalize on our collective fear.

By Lietta Ruger, a member family of MFSO, and supporter of AfterDowningStreet.org
Article posted at Suite 101, Military Families; Impact with Loved Ones Deployed in Iraq


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

By David Michael Green


Hey, here�s a question for you.

There�s a memo floating around out there, with loads of supporting evidence, suggesting
that George Bush wanted a war against Saddam Hussein real, real bad. So bad, in fact,
that he was willing to lie like a rug � nay, like a veritable Carpeteria warehouse � in order
to bring the rest of us along on his imperial superpower joyride. So bad, as well, that he

By Jim Mullins, Member of AfterDowningStreet.org
Also published by South Florida Sun-Sentinel

The rationales the Bush administration used to promote the Iraq war as necesary to counteract an imminent threat from Iraq have fallen by the wayside.

None of the commissions or congressional investigations have gone beyond the facile conclusions that "mistakes were made" or that the intelligence was "dead wrong." No official who gave the orders or held the responsibility has been named. President Bush took his re-election as a referendum on his previous policies, implying that we should move on.

Ekstra Bladet october 26 2003, 1. section, page 7
By Bo Elkj�r

Minister of foreign affairs Per Stig Moeller was told about US plans for war against Saddam Hussein in july last year

Saddam Hussein had to go. The cost and the means didn't matter, but the target was completely in the clear - and the danish minister of foreign affairs Per Stig Moeller (Conservative Party) was personally informed about the target on july 3 last year.

Saddam�s regime was to be removed by either diplomatic, economical or military means.

The Americans were concidering both 'secret operations and an open confrontation'.

By John R. MacArthur, Columbia Journalism Review, May/June 2004.

"[W]here was the American press on September 7, 2002, a day when we sorely needed reporters? It was then that the White House propaganda drive began in earnest, with the appearance before television cameras of George Bush and Tony Blair at Camp David. Between them, the two politicians cited a �new� report from the UN�s International Atomic Energy Agency that allegedly stated that Iraq was �six months away� from building a nuclear weapon. �don�t know what more evidence we need," declared the president.

By the Brattleboro Reformer

Friday, June 10, 2005 - The frenzy over "Deep Throat" is fading. The hosannas over the brief, shining moment in history when reporters did their jobs and brought down a corrupt president are dying down.

Perhaps now, we can return to the present day and the multitude of opportunities that exist for latter-day Woodwards and Bernsteins to shine.

Granted, over the last three decades, journalists have become more timid and deferential to power. We need a few good journalists, ones who don't care what the power-brokers think of them, monitoring both sides of the political fence.

Bush and 'the memo'
Friday, June 10, 2005

PRESIDENT BUSH apparently thinks he can dismiss the damning "Downing Street memo" with a few glib words.

If he is right, it is a sad commentary on the state of American democracy and values.

The memo, recounting the details of a July 23, 2002, meeting at British Prime Minister Tony Blair's official residence on 10 Downing St., strongly suggested that the message had been sent across the Atlantic that the Bush White House had made the decision to wage war on Iraq. The minutes of the meeting indicated that Blair and his top-level intelligence and foreign-policy aides were given clear signals that military action was "inevitable."

PRINT OUT FLYERS, with speakers at rally

PRINT OUT FLYERS two-to-page, about hearings and rally

PRINT OUT FLYERS one-to-page, about hearings and rally

PRINT OUT FLYERS one-to-page, about rally and campaign, with graphics.

PRINT OUT GENERIC LOCAL MEDIA ADVISORY - AND USE IT!

TALKING POINTS FOR LOBBYING CONGRESS

Local Rallies Around Country
Get organized here.

By Grace Reid
June 10, 2005

This morning Sheila, a Corkwoman, asked me why my eyes looked so tired and my face so strained. I explained that I had been staying up all night writing articles about a story that broke in the UK on the 20th of March, but still hadn�t been reported in the US news by the first week in June.

�Sure, there�s censorship of the news in America, isn�t there?� she said. �I mean, everybody knows that there are stories about the war in Iraq that you can�t print in America.� This came as the biggest news of the day to me, that censorship of the news is a state policy. �Can�t you get in trouble with the US government for writing stories like this? Will the FBI be paying us a call?� I told her that I was not too concerned, as the stories came from the BBC and that is about as establishment as you get. All I have been doing, I told her, is finding the news from here and delivering it over there.

By Tony Allen-Mills, Washington correspondent of The Sunday Times, for Times Online

President George W. Bush has finally responded to a question that much of America has been asking: did a secret memo prove that Washington was gearing for war in Iraq months earlier than the White House has admitted?

The Downing Street memo on US preparations for war in Iraq was revealed in The Sunday Times five weeks ago. But it wasn't until Tony Blair's visit to the White House this week that the resulting controversy made waves in Washington, and revived a long-dormant American debate about President Bush�s march to war from the summer of 2002.

Minneapolis Star-Tribune
Published June 9, 2005

On the subject of when, why and how the United States decided to attack Iraq, American citizens' recent seeming lack of interest has been a puzzle to many in the rest of the world.

As the Bush administration's stated reasons for war shifted, ebbed and flowed, many simply went with the flow, finding each succeeding reason -- well, reason enough. Some became more and more skeptical, even cynical; others just didn't know what to believe. But whatever their reasons, Americans have shown much less interest than the British in a bombshell of a memo leaked last month in London.

From the Journal Sentinel
Posted: June 9, 2005
Among the anti-war, anti-Bush crowd, at least, a lot of agitation is being conducted on behalf of what's being called the Downing Street memo, a document that was first brought to light by the Sunday Times of London on May 1, just days before an election in Britain. But the memo raises questions for everyone on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, which deserve more than the brushoff they have received.

The document describes a meeting British Prime Minister Tony Blair held in July 2002 with some of his top military and intelligence advisers, and it reports on a recent visit to Washington by Richard Dearlove, then chief of MI6, Britain's intelligence service.

Here's a transcript. Check out the intro to this segment in which they suggest that a soldier who just died probably didn't think much about how the war got started. Please post if you've ever met an Iraq War vet who didn't think about that.

BROWN: An American soldier died today when a roadside bomb went off near a military convoy outside Tikrit. The soldier, he or she, we don't yet know, was the 16th to die this month in Iraq and the 350th to die this year.

We don't imagine he or she spent much time thinking about how the war came to pass or why. Troops have more important things to worry about. But back home, a memo from Britain's intelligence service is once again raising those long-running questions. Questions also of why the memo isn't getting attention that some, some, believe it deserves.

Although it hasn't actually printed any serious reporting on the Downing Street Minutes, the Washington Post has now taken to criticising other media outlets' lack of coverage. Does that mean there WILL BE coverage coming from the Washington We-Found-Deep-Throat Post?

The Foxnewsified Bush Interview

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Thursday, June 9, 2005; 1:24 PM

Thanks to Fox News's exclusive interview with President Bush yesterday, the leader of the free world is now on the record when it comes to John Kerry's Yale grades, Laura Bush's presidential aspirations and -- yes -- the Michael Jackson trial's effect on public policy discourse.

History will hold Bush and Blair accountable for their lies in the run-up to the Iraq war, even if the D.C. press corps just finds them funny.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Joe Conason, SALON

June 10, 2005 | On Tuesday, more than a month after the "Downing Street memo" first appeared on Britain's front pages, a Reuters correspondent asked George W. Bush and Tony Blair to explain the secret document that says the Bush administration had decided by July 2002 to invade Iraq -- and that the intelligence on Saddam Hussein's arsenal was then being "fixed" to bolster an otherwise exceedingly "thin" justification for war.

Nader on Wisc Public Radio on Impeachment

By William Rivers Pitt
From: http://www.truthout.org/do2005/060905X.shtml
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Thursday 09 June 2005

***********

As to US assertions that Iraq possessed bombs, rockets and shells for poison agents, unmanned aerial vehicles for delivering biological and chemical weapons, nuclear weapon materials, sarin, tabun, mustard agent, precursor chemicals, VX nerve agent, anthrax, aflotoxins, ricin and surface-to-surface Al Hussein missiles, not one has so far been found.

One vial of Strain B Botulinum toxin is found in the domestic refrigerator of an Iraqi scientist. It is ten years old. Hans Blix comments, "They wanted to come to the conclusion that there were weapons. Like the former days of the witch hunt, they are convinced that they exist. And if you see a black cat, well, that's evidence of the witch."

By Philippe Naughton, Times Online

It is not that often, we have to admit, that an item posted one night on Times Online is still getting hundreds of thousands of hits six weeks later, especially when what bloggers like to call 'the mainstream media' have largely ignored its existence.

But that is what happened to the now infamous secret Downing Street memo, posted on the site on May 1 alongside a story by Michael Smith of The Sunday Times. And if the document has taken on a life of its own it is largely because of the bloggers and their web-savvy allies on the US Left.

By John Byrne, Raw Story

The ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee has scheduled hearings on the 2002 minutes between senior British and American officials which asserted that intelligence was "being fixed" to support the case for war in Iraq, RAW STORY has learned.

By Robert Parry

So what�s made the difference?

As George W. Bush�s poll numbers sink to his personal lows and the mainstream news media finally reports on the Downing Street Memo, what political factors should get the credit for these changes? And what are the lessons for the future?

As readers of Consortiumnews.com know, I have long argued that the American liberals/progressives made a historic mistake three decades ago when large funders decided to shift money away from national media outlets. The idea was to concentrate on local grassroots organizing and on direct activism, such as feeding the poor or buying up endangered wetlands.