The Downing Street Memo
A friend of mine sent me an interesting email last night regarding what is referred to as the Downing Street Memo. Essentially, this is a memorandum of an actual document transcribed during the meeting with Mr. Blair on July 23, 2002, which took place eight months prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003. Here is a copy of the memo:http://www.downingstreetmemo.com/. Media coverage of this document has been kept to a minimum, and when the subject is broached, like other issues dealing with Iraq, it is often minimized by this administration.
Mr. Bush's popularity is down to an all time low now in the polls, the last heard was less than 45 percent approval rating of him as President. Moreover, the rest of America is beginning to question the decisions and judgments of Mr. Bush and his administration, including his efforts for judicial and other appointments. No jubilation is going on here, as what is anticipated are more tactics to distract, twist and hide what is true from us, the American public. When forced to confront the Dowing Street Memo, Mr. Bush and his administration downplayed its importance and accuracy.
We trust our leaders will only lead us into a war if in fact absolutely necessary to protect our nation. (the issue of what business we have spreading democracy to other parts of the world is a separate issue.) Here is the question of the day: In hindsight, do you conclude that it was absolutely necessary that we invade Iraq? Has President Bush misled this nation in going to war, and has he concealed some important facts about why we went to Iraq in the first place? Do you believe there should be a congressional investigation into this issue?
Tomorrow, a light fare will be on the menu.
Thank you for your minds.
Mr. Bush's popularity is down to an all time low now in the polls, the last heard was less than 45 percent approval rating of him as President. Moreover, the rest of America is beginning to question the decisions and judgments of Mr. Bush and his administration, including his efforts for judicial and other appointments. No jubilation is going on here, as what is anticipated are more tactics to distract, twist and hide what is true from us, the American public. When forced to confront the Dowing Street Memo, Mr. Bush and his administration downplayed its importance and accuracy.
We trust our leaders will only lead us into a war if in fact absolutely necessary to protect our nation. (the issue of what business we have spreading democracy to other parts of the world is a separate issue.) Here is the question of the day: In hindsight, do you conclude that it was absolutely necessary that we invade Iraq? Has President Bush misled this nation in going to war, and has he concealed some important facts about why we went to Iraq in the first place? Do you believe there should be a congressional investigation into this issue?
Tomorrow, a light fare will be on the menu.
Thank you for your minds.
18 Comments:
Killing people is never the answer.
Shrub has misled us by electing himself president and while in office, he has killed thousands of people, unneccessarily. He should be held on murder, terrorist, and torture charges.
Shrub is not above the law, no one is.
Oh, Barbara, now you've got me all riled up and I'm on my way out the door. I hold Bush personally responsible for every single man, woman, and child who has died as a result of his desire to play war games. I don't buy his "reasons." WMD? What a joke! This morning I heard on the radio that now a majority of Americans think we made a mistake with the war/shouldn't be there. I guess even Americans who think that we should stand by our president are finally realizing what a load of crap this all is. I don't think he will be held accountable in any way, ever. He's screwed up in every job he's had so far in his life, but luckily he has lots of friends in high places and so does his daddy.
I have been against this war from the beginning, no secret there. I don't like being lied to, especially when people die because of it.
Congressman John Conyers, along with 88 other members of Congress sent a letter to Bush asking for answers on this very subject. Thus far they have recieved no response.
Conyers has a website set up where you can sign the letter as a citizen.
www.downingstreetmemo.com
The London Times has great information on this subject.
Juan Cole did an interesting post on the subject yesterday about how bloggers are the ones who aren't letting this go and who are forcing the US media to pay attention. This is big news around the world, yesterday for the first time I saw it mentioned on CNN.com. Hopefully people will stand up and take notice.
Uncensored opinion from an incensed Canadian...Bush is a war mongering bastard.
No, he didn't have the right to do what he did.
It is nice to be surrounded by such passionate women!
Like you, I have been against this war from day one. First of all, I feel it is not our business to 'spread democracy to other countries' (Bush's rationale for being there today) and that we have enough to do here first. This country is not treatened by Iraq, thankfully now, so I do not think we have ever had business to be there in the first place.
My heart breaks for all the service men and women who have gone to Iraq, risked their lives, and have experienced loss to them and their families.
Today is Flag Day. I used to hang an American flag in front of my home, religiously. I stopped doing so a few years ago, as I can say that I am not proud of the direction where this country has been headed.
Latest counts: approaching 1700 dead Americans, countless Iraqis; more than 12,000 American wounded (many with debilitating brain injury from head wounds),countless Iraqis.
You asked several good questions so let me respond to each. Q1, "In hindsight, do you conclude that it was absolutely necessary that we invade Iraq? A1. No, according to Paul O'Neill, former Treasury secretary, it was on both Pres. Bush and VP Cheney's agenda from the day they took over after the first election.
Q2. Has President Bush misled this nation in going to war, and has he concealed some important facts about why we went to Iraq in the first place? These are two questions but in summary, it appears that they used the opportunity provided from the attack on 9/11, to get the war with Iraq on an action footing. The WMD argument, and the faulty "intelligence" just made the actions more justified to the American public. Q3. Do you believe there should be a congressional investigation into this issue? A3. Yes. If we will impeach a President over something involving a sex scandal and natural cover-up, then why wouldn't misleading the country on such a massive deception also warrant an investigation for possible impeachment? I have recently written on the subject on my blog at
http://cdiamico.blogspot.com
Come by and comment.
This war makes me so sad. All the lives wasted. All the money wasted. All the lies and rhetoric. Is the US becoming a dictatorship?
sorry, I think you guys are wrong...When I get home I'll post my reasons... till then...
Oxycotin abusing blow hards with a radio show and pompus asses named BILL on Fox News have done a superb job trivalizing the memo.
You see, anyone who brings up things like the memo, or the lack of WMDs, is just a detractor who hates the servicemen overseas. And nobody needs to listen to people who hate the US troops overseas. So who cares about the memo? Not anyone on Fox!
How dare you question the furhur....errr president? Are you some kind of communist?
PS - my sailboat plan is still on the books. I am going to enroll in a sailing school as soon as I can, where I will learn to pilot a 25 footer. Once I can do this it should not be too hard to upgrade to a 50 - 60 footer.
i'm torn on this issue...and will attempt to explain why
i had and still have serious and deep-seated reservations about this war, particularly the lack of a plan for what to do once they had displaced saddam
but, the alternative in iraq was not peace - the alternative was a brutal dictator who massacred tens possibly hundreds of thousands of his own people
as for the UK position, my own view is that mr blair jumped on bush's bandwagon because he thought bush would go in anyway and thought that being with him might mean he could tame things a little (who knows whether he managed this or not...)
but i also believe blair thought that displacing saddam (a regime change of sorts) would be for the good and that this gave him a sense of the war being morally defensible (i suspect the WMD thing was not a big deal for him)
personally i would have been much more comfortable with UN-backed action, and preferably not military in the first instance
think i might have rambled a little there, but essentially, i don't think the situation was as black and white as we might like to think (i.e. war OR peace)
i'm not myself sure what the alternative was/is but are we really saying that we should sit back and ignore what amnesty int'l describes as "...systematic and widespread abuses of their human rights for decades. Mass killings, “disappearances”, systematic use of torture, political imprisonment and forced removal from communities were used by Saddam Hussain’s government in an attempt to wipe out all opposition."
really interested in everyone's views...
Urban Chick,
You bring up some really good points. I don't dispute that Saddam is a very bad man and he definitely isn't the kind of guy you want running a country. He did have a horrible history of human rights abuse and frankly the world is better off without him at the helm of Iraq. I definitely agree with you on all these points.
I also agree that it would have been wrong to sit back and continue to watch the abuse. A well organized, UN response is what was called for. Even if it ended up being a military response, it needed to be through the world community and not by some cowboy president with his prime minister buddy riding shotgun. (I get a chuckle out of the image of Blair going along to try and rein in Bush.)
However, my biggest problem with this reasoning for the Iraq invasion is that the United States was already at war. We were in the middle of the Afghanistan conflict and still reeling from the September 11 attacks. We as a country were still in a great deal of pain and like a wounded animal we were itching to take a bite out of something. These feelings were exploited by the Bush administration. An exaggeration here, a blatant lie there, a small pinch of psychological manipulation and voila! Instant war support for a policy that the neocons had tried to push through since the Clinton administration.
They took advantage of our weakened emotional state and lied to us. Afghanistan is in a mess because we took our eye off the ball. Iraq is a mess because the entire thing was approached in a completely innappropriate manner without even the breath of a plan for the post-war period. The reputation of the United States is a shambles, it will be decades before the international community will even begin to trust our motives and Britain's rep isn't much better. Thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people have died because of this tragic mistake. I'm glad that Saddam is gone, but it hasn't been worth the price that has been paid by either of our nations. The cost and the fault rests squarely on the shoulders of Bush.
godlessmom: and, equally, i don't have much dispute with your latter two paragraphs
i think both our leaders were dishonest about their reasons for wanting to invade iraq (although in blair's case, i think the dishonesty was with himself iykwim)
the whole thing stinks to high heaven and has cost everyone in lives lost before we even get to talking about the money
but i do think liberals (and i count myself amongst them!) need to ask themselves: what are we prepared to do when we see countries who are presided over by brutal dictators like saddam? i'm afraid i just can't go with the whole 'they're not a direct threat to us/my livelihood so leave it be' line
i am a liberal but i am not a relativist (= an important distinction!)
points:
EVERYONE agreed saddam had wmd's... republicans, dems, the u.n. EVERYONE
saddam killed how many kurds? ...if that poison was not a wmd, i don't know what is...
saddam schmoe has a gun, joe schmoe has a BIG gun... saddam points his asound and shoots whenever the mood strikes him, joe schmoe keeps his locked up in a cabinet... who is the bigger threat?
saddam defied UN sanctions for 12 years, obviously the UN was not going to do anything... oh yeah, Annan is being investigated in the oil for food scandal... but we'll forget about that...
killing is never the answer? wrong... sometimes it's the only answer
our men who joined the service are heroes, not poverty stricken sad-sacks that couldn't get a job so they had to enlist. If they joined without having the guts to actually be a soldier, then they don't deserve to wear the uniform
many have died... 1700?
how many died at normandy? 9,387
iwo jima? 6821 American Marines, Sailors, and Soldiers , along with an estimated 20,000+ Japanese defenders
vietnam...over 50000
ww one...126,000
ww two...300,000
if we allow someone like saddam to continue his tyrannical regime, it would be a slap in the face to the people who died in every war before this. they knew the value of destroying despots... we want to live in peace, but some people will not allow that, so we must fight.
First off (I feel I need to preface this) I am not a Bushie. I find him to be a weak, ineffectual President with terrible self-esteem. I also suspect some brain damage from all the alcohol abuse. I would vastly prefer to see someone else as President, but we will have to wait until the next elections to see what will replace him.
But oddly enough, I read the memo thoroughly and saw that it could be interpreted two different ways.
If you read it carefully, you can see that there is no direct mention of falsifying the evidence, or even slanting it. This site you pointed us to picks out certain words and phrases as being particularly damning. But they are not conclusively so.
For instance,
“But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy”
This doesn't mean they were being falsified. 'Fixed' means secured. The facts and intelligence were being secured. In other words, they wanted to make sure they had all their facts before they acted.
“Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD”
Yes, but we already knew that. After all, he wouldn't have a reason to invade unless he could justify the invasion with that evidence.
“The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record”
Well, we already knew that. And if you remember why there was little patience left, we'd already warned Saddam repeatedly and had sent in hordes of inspectors.
“There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.”
Well, why would there be? It was still in the opening stages of discussion and positioning.
“Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.”
Now here is an objectionable part. Because we do know that Bush was telling everyone to be coy about this, and he was proclaiming that he wanted this resolved peacefully.
Overall, this isn't such a problem that the Bush Administration can't swat it away. However, if anyone is going to build a case against Bush, the last quote is the one that he won't be able to wiggle out of.
Doug,
In any event, let's get people under oath and get more documents and find out. This no Republican wants to do.
This implies you're a Democrat. Don't Dems believe that stereotyping is wrong? So don't put all of us Republicans in one basket.
I, for one, agree that this needs a thorough investigation.
If you've ever read Christin Todd Whitman's new book, you'd understand how many of us moderate Repubs are disenfranchised.
Here's where the scandal starts to fall apart... can anyone say Dan Rather?"
The media and the Leftists have had a field day with the Downing Street memos that they claim imply that the Bush administration lied about the intelligence on WMD in order to justify the attack on Iraq. Despite the fact that none of the memos actually say that, none of them quote any officials or any documents, and that the text of the memos show that the British government worried about the deployment of WMD by Saddam against Coalition troops, Kuwait and/or Israel, the meme continues to survive.
Until tonight, however, no one questioned the authenticity of the documents provided by the Times of London. That has now changed, as Times reporter Michael Smith admitted that the memos he used are not originals, but retyped copies (via LGF and CQ reader Sapper):
The eight memos — all labeled "secret" or "confidential" — were first obtained by British reporter Michael Smith, who has written about them in The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Times.
Smith told AP he protected the identity of the source he had obtained the documents from by typing copies of them on plain paper and destroying the originals.
The AP obtained copies of six of the memos (the other two have circulated widely). A senior British official who reviewed the copies said their content appeared authentic. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of the secret nature of the material.
Readers of this site should recall this set of circumstances from last year. The Killian memos at the center of CBS' 60 Minutes Wednesday report on George Bush' National Guard service supposedly went through the same laundry service as the Downing Street Memos. Bill Burkett, once he'd been outed as the source of the now-disgraced Killian memos, claimed that a woman named Lucy Ramirez provided them to him -- but that he made copies and burned the originals to protect her identity or that of her source.
Why would a reporter do such a thing? While reporters need to protect their sources, at some point stories based on official documents will require authentication -- and as we have seen with the Killian memos, copies make that impossible. The AP gets a "senior British official" to assert that the content "appeared authentic", which only means that the content seems to match what he thinks he knows.
This, in fact, could very well be another case of "fake but accurate", where documents get created after the fact to support preconceived notions about what happened in the past. One fact certainly stands out -- Michael Smith cannot authenticate the copies. And absent that authentication, they lose their value as evidence of anything.
ps, this is not my article... i just found it interesting
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