Media

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."

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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."

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.

Charles Goyette (www.charlesgoyette.com), the radio host who was fired by ClearChannel for reporting facts about Iraq in the buildup to the war, today interviewed Noam Chomsky about the Bush Administration's militarism and David Swanson about www.AfterDowningStreet.org.

Here's Chomsky:
http://www.charlesgoyette.com/archive/media/2005-06-08-Charles-02.mp3

Here's Swanson:
http://www

'USA Today' Defends Lack of Coverage for Downing Street Memo
Edior and Publisher
By E&P Staff
Published: June 08, 2005 1:05 PM ET

NEW YORK In a report on President Bush's joint press conference late yesterday afternoon with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, USA Today for the first time mentioned the so-called Downing Street Memo, first reported in London's Sunday Times on May 1, and explained why the Gannett flagship had not previously covered the memo story.

The Downing Street Memo is reported to be minutes of a July 2002 meeting among Blair and some of his top intelligence and national-security aides. One of the aides reportedly told Blair at the meeting that the Bush administration has already decided to go to war with Iraq and was looking for justification. "Intelligence and facts were being fixed" to make war appear inevitable, the memo reportedly stated. Its veracity has not been contested by No. 10 Downing Street.

Wednesday, June 08, 2005
Jonathan Riskind
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

WASHINGTON � Addressing what has been a simmering issue for some Democrats and liberal activists, President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair yesterday dismissed a British government memo that asserts the Bush administration essentially cooked the facts to justify the Iraq war.

"Somebody said we had made up our mind to use military force," Bush said at a White House news conference.

"There�s nothing farther from the truth. Both of us didn�t want to use our military. It was our last option."

Seldom-Discussed Elephant Moves Into Public's View
By Dana Milbank
Washington Post
Wednesday, June 8, 2005; A14

Yesterday's East Room meeting of President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair was worth a cool $1,000 to Steve Holland, Reuters' chief White House correspondent, if he cares to collect it.

Earlier in the day, Democrats.com, a group of left-wing activists, sent out an e-mail offering a "reward" to anyone who could get an answer from Bush about whether a recently leaked British government memo from 2002 was correct in saying the Bush administration had "fixed" the intelligence about Iraq's weapons to justify war.

World Opinion Roundup: Blair and The Downing Street Memo
Jefferson Morley
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 7, 2005; 1:00 PM

In his weekly discussion, washingtonpost.com staff writer Jefferson Morley conducts a freewheeling tour of the best of Internet news sites from Afghanistan to Beijing to Mexico City to Paris to Zimbabwe.
Jefferson Morley was online Tuesday, June 7, at 1 p.m. ET to discuss the Downing Street Memo and Prime Minister Tony Blair 's visit to the White House.

Read today's World Opinion Roundup: The Downing Street Memo Story Won't Die.

By Salon.com

Tony Blair is in Washington today to talk with George W. Bush about aid for Africa, but it might be an opportune moment for the White House press corps to talk about something else: The 2002 Downing Street memo which shows that Blair was told that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed" to support Bush's plan to depose Saddam Hussein through military force.

Bush held a press conference last week, but no one in the White House press corps bothered to ask him about the memo then. Reporters will probably get another chance to ask today, this time with Blair sitting right there in the room, too. They can even get paid for asking. Democrats.com has posted a $1,000 reward for any reporter who gets Bush to give a "yes or no" answer to the question, "In July 2002, did you and your administration 'fix' the intelligence and facts about non-existent Iraqi WMD's and ties to terrorism -- which were disputed by U.S. intelligence officials -- to sell your decision to invade Iraq to Congress, the American people, and the world -- as quoted in the Downing Street Minutes?" Hell, they'll get a hundred bucks if they just ask the question without getting an answer.

By Mark Memmott, USA TODAY

A simmering controversy over whether American media have ignored a secret British memo about how President Bush built his case for war with Iraq bubbled over into the White House on Tuesday.

At a late afternoon news conference, Reuters correspondent Steve Holland asked Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair about a memo that's been widely written about and discussed in Europe but less so in the USA.

It was the most attention paid by the media in the USA so far to the "Downing Street memo," first reported on May 1 by The Sunday Times of London. The memo is said by some of the president's sharpest critics, such as Democratic Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, to be strong evidence that Bush decided to go to war and then looked for evidence to support his decision.

Joint statements follow criticism by Iraq war foes
By Farah Stockman, Globe Staff | June 8, 2005

WASHINGTON -- President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain for the first time yesterday jointly addressed a question that has persisted for the past month: What was the truth about a leaked 2002 memo written by a British official suggesting that the United States had ''fixed" intelligence to justify an impending invasion of Iraq?

Both leaders denied that the July 23 memo, written as a description of a meeting between Britain's top intelligence official and members of the Bush administration, accurately reflected events.

Two leaders deny that intelligence was manipulated to justify war on Iraq
By JULIE MASON, Houston Chronicle Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON - President Bush denied on Tuesday the substance of a 2002 memo in which a top British intelligence official claimed the administration manipulated facts and intelligence to justify the war in Iraq.
In a brief appearance with British Prime Minister Tony Blair at the White House, Bush said "there's nothing farther from the truth."

"We worked hard to see if we could figure out how to do this peacefully," Bush said. "Nobody wants to commit military into combat. It's the last option."

(Published Tuesday, June 7, 2005 10:58:27 AM CDT)
Gazette Extra
By Mike DuPre', Gazette Staff

CLINTON-The Iraq War is a mess that's only getting messier, Sen. Russ Feingold said before and during a listening session Monday.

"The mantra for Fox News is that we only hear the bad news," Feingold, a Democrat, said of the media outlet thought by many observers to be right wing.

"I was over there (in February), and we don't hear enough bad news," Feingold said before the session.

He traveled with four other senators, including Republican John McCain and Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton. The other four voted in support of the Iraq War, while Feingold opposed it.

Jefferson Morley of the Washington Post discussed the Downing Street Minutes as part of the Post's Live Online feature.

Morley is one of the reporters at the Post taking this issue the most seriously. See his article here

Byron Williams writes a twice weekly column for the Oakland Tribune and other media outlets. Below are columns he's written on the Downing Street Memo on May 12, 20, 23, June 1, 3, and 7. Six pieces, exactly six more than we've seen on, say, ABC News.

Bush attempts to tarnish FDR's foreign policy image
May 12, 2005
Byron Williams

IF President Bush would attempt to systematically dismantle Franklin D. Roosevelt's prize domestic policy in Social Security, logic would suggest that any criticism of the former president's foreign policy is almost a given.

While in Europe commemorating the 60th anniversary of V-E Day, the president publicly embraced one of the long-held historical positions of far-right conservatism � that the Yalta Agreement was the betrayal of freedom and Roosevelt is the culprit.