Operation Northwoods, Downing Street and Peak Oil

RICHARD BABB
6/26/2005 1:07:50
AMDaily Journal

It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government. – Thomas Paine

Back in 1963, as a well-scoured six-year-old preacher's kid, I spent much time playing in the dirt at the ramshackle home of my friend, Gary Lloyd. There I was introduced not only to the fine art of cussing, but also to Gary's sisters who somehow managed to freely frolic outside sans clothing. All of this occurred under the approving and watchful eye of Mrs. Loyd who always sat placidly and Buddha-like on the front porch with an unbuddha-like cigarette and drink.

At the same time that Gary and his sisters seemed intent on leading me down the road to a Mississippi Methodist Hell, the military leaders of the United States were planning to unleash another kind of hell, an attack on a country: it's own, the United States of America. According to released classified documents, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had concocted a plan in which the military would attack its own citizens and then fix the blame on Cuba and Fidel Castro. The plan, Operation Northwoods, included the indiscriminate killing of American citizens, hijacking of airliners, and even sabotaging the flight of Astronaut John Glenn as he rocketed into space.

Invasion pretext

The plan was presented to the Secretary of Defense and President Kennedy, both of whom rejected the operation as a bit too hare-brained, even though all of the medal-larded, and ribbon-befitted Joint Chiefs had signed off on it.

I thought about Operation Northwoods when I read of the recent death of Col. David Hackworth, the most decorated veteran of Vietnam, and in my opinion, a great American. Hackworth was laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery on May 31, having died of bladder cancer which some believe was caused by a chemical defoliant sprayed during the Vietnam daze.

I didn't know of Hackworth until I saw him a few years ago on a news show. He was being interviewed the same night a peopled airliner had mysteriously dropped from the sky into the ocean outside New York. Several witnesses claimed they had seen a ground-to-air missile strike the plane, a proposition that had been immediately rejected by a government apparatchik. In response to the official's position, the bluntly-spoken Hackworth rejoined, "Well I haven't trusted the United States government since 1963," meaning of course that the colonel was stating on national television he was more likely to believe anonymous witnesses on the ground, rather than the mouthpiece for the government.

Honest skepticism

As a child of the 50's, 60's and 70's, I have come honestly to my dark scepticism about governments and maybe that is the reason I liked Col. Hackworth. He wasn't afraid to tell unpleasant truths even about the most sacrosanct of institutions. And it is a shame that he is no longer among the quick, because it appears that we now are headed once again into a collision with more governmental unpleasantness: questions about the war in Iraq.

A top secret document, leaked in England and known as the Downing Street Memo, maintains that the case for military action against Iraqi Dictator Saddam Hussein was "thin." The memo, which is actually minutes of a July 23, 2002 meeting with Great Britain's Prime Minister Blair, shows that the U.S. didn't believe that the threat from Iraq was greater than other nations, and therefore the intelligence had to be "fixed" in order to sell the war to the American people.

Of course, if the memo be true, and Bush knew there was not enough reason to justify the war, we are left with the numbing question: Why then did we go to Iraq? To that question, there has been presented more than one answer. Polls show that 40 percent of the people believe Saddam Hussein was behind 911. Another idea is that we invaded Iraq because Saddam Hussein had threatened to kill President Bush's father. Some argue that Bush went to Iraq not so much to avenge his father, but to complete the unfinished business of the first Gulf War. Most of these theories have been be rebutted if not outright, at least by common sense.

Occam's Razor is a theorem which holds that among the many plausible answers to a vexing question, the best answer is usually the simplest. Perhaps the simplest explanation for the war is to be found in a little-noted news release from the Exxon Corporation in which it has estimated that in five years cheap available oil production will have peaked in non-OPEC oil sites. Obviously, that would mean an increased emphasis on oil production in OPEC sites in the Middle East. Since America consumes 20 million barrels a day, and China is now demanding more oil, then staking out the second largest oil reserves in the world in Iraq might have been considered essential. Or to ask the hard, hard question: Would we have gone to war if Iraq possessed the world's second largest reserve of figs, rather than oil?

Richard Babb is an attorney in Ripley. Hemay be reached at rjbabb56 at yahoo dot com.

Investigation of Downing Street Minutes

By Political Affairs
6-25-05, 9:06 am


The AfterDowningStreet.org coalition welcomed yesterday’s letter signed by 10 Senators. The coalition described the move as "another major step forward" in learning the truth about the Bush administration’s drive for war. "

The senators’ letter is another major step forward in our demand for the truth," said John Bonifaz, Co-Founder of AfterDowningStreet.org, a coalition of organizations lobbying for an investigation of the build-up to the war. "

Has the President of the United States engaged in a deliberate conspiracy to deceive and mislead the United States Congress and the American people about the basis for going to war against Iraq?" Bonifaz asked. "The United States Constitution demands that we investigate fully this question, wherever it may lead."

Senator Kerry (D - MA) sent a letter yesterday to the Senate Intelligence Committee pressing for answers on the Downing Street Minutes and related documents. The letter, obtained by RawStory.com, is also signed by Senators Johnson, Corzine, Reed, Lautenberg, Boxer, Kennedy, Harkin, Bingaman, and Durbin. The text of the letter is below.

June 22, 2005
The Honorable Pat Roberts, Chairman
The Honorable John D. Rockefeller, IV, Vice Chairman
United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
SH-211 Washington, DC 20510

Dear Senator Roberts and Senator Rockefeller:

We write concerning your committee’s vital examination of pre-war Iraq intelligence failures. In particular, we urge you to accelerate to completion the work of the so-called "Phase II" effort to assess how policy makers used the intelligence they received.

Last year your committee completed the first phase of a two-phased effort to review the pre-war intelligence on Iraq. Phase I-begun in the summer of 2003 and completed in the summer of 2004-examined the performance of the American intelligence community in the collection and analysis of intelligence prior to the war, including an examination of the quantity and quality of U.S. intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and the intelligence on ties between Saddam Hussein’s regime and terrorist groups. At the conclusion of Phase I, your committee issued an unclassified report that made an important contribution to the American public’s understanding of the issues involved.

In February 2004-well over a year ago-the committee agreed to expand the scope of inquiry to include a second phase which would examine the use of intelligence by policy makers, the comparison of pre-war assessments and post-war findings, the activities of the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group (PCTEG) and the Office of Special Plans in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, and the use of information provided by the Iraqi National Congress.

The committee’s efforts have taken on renewed urgency given recent revelations in the United Kingdom regarding the apparent minutes of a July 23, 2002, meeting between Prime Minister Tony Blair and his senior national security advisors. These minutes-known as the "Downing Street Memo"-raise troubling questions about the use of intelligence by American policy makers-questions that your committee is uniquely situated to address.

The memo indicates that in the summer of 2002, at a time the White House was promising Congress and the American people that war would be their last resort, that they believed military action against Iraq was "inevitable."

The minutes reveal that President "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 American people took the warnings that the administration sounded seriously-warnings that were echoed at the United Nations and here in Congress as we voted to give the president the authority to go to war. For the sake of our democracy and our future national security, the public must know whether such warnings were driven by facts and responsible intelligence, or by political calculation.

These issues need to be addressed with urgency. This remains a dangerous world, with American forces engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan, and other challenges looming in Iran and North Korea. In this environment, the American public should have the highest confidence that policy makers are using intelligence objectively-never manipulating it to justify war, but always to protect the United States. The contents of the Downing Street Memo undermine this faith and only rigorous Congressional oversight can determine the truth.

We urge the committee to complete the second phase of its investigation with the maximum speed and transparency possible, producing, as it did at the end of Phase I, a comprehensive, unclassified report from which the American people can benefit directly. Contact your Senators to let them know what you think about the President's failure to be honest with the public about his drive to war. --

Signed,


AfterDowningStreet.org is a rapidly growing coalition of veterans’ groups, peace groups, and political activist groups, which launched on May 26, 2005, a campaign to urge the U.S. Congress to begin a formal investigation into whether President Bush has committed impeachable offenses in connection with the Iraq war

Sibel Edmonds–an appeal to the Internet community

By W. David Jenkins III
Online Journal Contributing Writer

June 25, 2005—There has been much activity on the Internet the last few weeks regarding the Downing Street Minutes—and rightfully so. Documentation proving the Bush administration manufactured intelligence in order to invade Iraq should be on the front page of every newspaper and should be the lead story on every newscast—but we all know how things work (or don't work) these days.

However, the strength and determination of the Internet community has managed to keep this story from disappearing while, at the same time, applying pressure to the corporate media.
In one instance, it seems that the Washington Post felt enough pressure from angry readers who were outraged by the paper's burying the Downing Street story on page 18 two weeks after the news broke in Britain. On Sunday, June 12, the Post featured a follow-up story on yet another document proving the Bush administration was ignoring any suggestions for post-invasion Iraq–which helps to explain the bloody chaos wrought upon that country, thanks to us—but this time the Post put the story on Page One.

And of course there was Representative John Conyers' forum on June 16 that set the foundation for an ongoing look into those documents, which now total nine. All due to the relentless work of the Internet community.

Nice work, gang.

As important as the Downing Street Minutes and continued pressure on the mainstream media are to revealing the truth to the nation, there is another critically important story that requires our attention and our action—and the clock is ticking away on this one. We have only until the end of July to make a difference and perhaps turn the course of history. Of course, I'm referring to Sibel Edmonds and, after my conversations with her, I felt I should make an effort before time runs out and her witness to significant governmental chicanery is suppressed by the government forever.

On May 14, Edmonds published "Gagged, But Not Dead" which can still be read on herwebsite where she updates the reader on the status of her case and the subsequent gag order placed not only on her but also on members of Congress forbidding even discussing matters relating to her case!

Many of you may still be nauseous after being lectured to by the likes of criminals such as G. Gordon Liddy and Chuck Coleson in the wake of Mark Felt outing himself as "Deep Throat." These ex-convicts, along with former Nixonians like Pat Buchanan, ranted repeatedly that Felt should have followed the "proper channels of authority" if he had had a problem with the Watergate scandal rather than sneaking off to the Washington Post.

Sibel Edmonds is the perfect example of why Felt did the right thing when he leaked to the Post: those "proper channels of authority" in the Nixon administration were corrupt. Those "proper channels" were active co-conspirators themselves.

However, the Nixon administration's activities were simple child's play compared to the practiced corruption that rules the Bush II administration—and whistleblowers like Edmonds, Colleen Rowley and others now know that. Hopefully for them and all of us, there's still time to correct the dismaying non-results their adherence to following "proper channels" have produced.

Edmonds testified for more than three hours behind closed doors to the 9/11 Commission about, assumedly, her concerns over breaches of security from within the FBI, specifically those of fellow linguist Melek Can Dickerson, wife of USAF Major Douglas Dickerson. There were also concerns of the FBI withholding valuable information from field agents specializing in terrorism investigations by unit supervisor Mike Feghali. The usual reasoning behind this practice is that the information also contains references to "certain countries" or "lucrative or political connections with this country [U.S.]" In other words, if exposing a targeted terrorist cell's illegal activities would prove embarrassing to either the "interests" of the United States or one of our allies, then the matter is tucked away.

These and other concerns raised by Edmonds have been confirmed by the FBI—as stated openly by Senators Patrick Leahy and Charles Grassley—and they were also supported by documentation and corroborating witnesses. Yet, after more than three hours of testimony before the commission, Sibel Edmonds is barely a footnote in the official 9/11 report. Edmonds submitted an open letter to the commission co-chairman, Thomas Kean, concerning the previously mentioned and other omissions regarding the information she provided them. She noted how these omissions are an ominous reflection on the final report, which in turn raises questions of bias and inaccuracy in the report as a whole.

Edmonds diligently pursued all the proper channels. She notified the FBI, the inspector general at the Department of Defense, members of the Senate, and former White House Council Alberto Gonzales of her documented allegations only to be subsequently gagged by former Attorney General John Ashcroft. Why? In the interests of "protecting certain diplomatic relations and to protect certain United States foreign business relations."

How does suppressing information that people within our own intelligence agencies have continued connections with organizations currently targeted by FBI investigations do anything to help strengthen our national security? Exactly what are these high level officials so afraid of coming out?

Unfortunately, the unprecedented actions of the zealot turned-attorney general will keep all those secrets locked away—unless we raise enough noise to change that.

One other thing that Edmonds is fighting is the gutting of HR 1317, better known as the Whistleblowers Bill. Passage of this bill would allow federal employees certain rights and protections. It would permit sensitive information of wrongful acts within their departments to be reported to members of Congress who have proper clearance to receive information of internal wrong-doing. In an overt display of shameful servitude to the Bush administration and those they desire to protect, Tom Davis (R-Va.) and the despicable James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisc.) removed nine provisions that would have protected from retaliation any federal employee who provides information of illegal activities within our own government institutions.
As in the case of the Downing Street Documents, the majority of lawmakers and the corporate media choose to divert the attention of the American people from the lies and cover-ups that pass for "business as usual" in the Bush administration. It is only through the efforts of concerned Americans, in conjunction with the Internet community, that our leaders and the media will finally be forced to take notice and assume their responsibilities to those they purport to serve.

As those of us who make up this cyber grassroots community have witnessed, leaders such as Rep. John Conyers have expressed their gratitude for the efforts of bloggers and others who kept the pressure on lawmakers and media members long enough for them to take serious notice of the documentation showing the lies used by this White House to devise and construct today's disaster in Iraq.

But we need to remember that more unreported information is out there concerning the alleged war on terror and revealing the subversive actions by members of our own government to undermine that conflict in order to protect business and diplomatic relations. And those who would wish to expose this domestic threat to our national security are gagged and/or threatened, while the media ignore the whole world-shattering situation because somebody disappeared on spring break in Aruba and because Michael Jackson threw a party and Tom Cruise and what's-her-name got engaged.

One of the things Sibel expressed to me was the need for people to contact their representatives regarding her case. As we have seen in the case of the Downing Street Documents, they can and do respond. Positive results can happen. It does take time and effort, I know, but we have seen it's not always in vain.

I don't normally do "calls for action" in this venue but, with the clock ticking on legal recourse in the case of Sibel Edmonds and the ramifications should her gag order remain in effect indefinitely, I feel a responsibility to speak up.

I urge everyone to take the time to contact members of Congress and the media–before time runs out and the administration gets away with silencing a very important voice.
Please, please take the time and do it now.

Additional information and government contact numbers can be obtained from Sibel Edmonds' website.
Media contact numbers and addresses can be found at FAIR's website.
http://www.onlinejournal.com/Commentary/062505Jenkins/062505jenkins.html

John D. Conyers Jr.: Story offered ridicule instead of fact

John D. Conyers Jr.
June 25, 2005

Editor's note: Rep. John D. Conyers Jr. sent this letter to the Washington Post in response to Dana Milbank's article on hearings held by House Democrats on the Downing Street memo. The Star Tribune ran Milbank's piece on June 17.

I write to express my profound disappointment with Dana Milbank's June 17 report ... which purports to describe a Democratic hearing I chaired in the Capitol. In sum, the piece cherry-picks some facts, manufactures others out of whole cloth, and does a disservice to some 30 members of Congress who persevered under difficult circumstances, not of our own making, to examine a very serious subject: whether the American people were deliberately misled in the leadup to war. The fact that this was the Post's only coverage of this event makes the journalistic shortcomings in this piece even more egregious.

In an inaccurate piece of reporting that typifies the article, Milbank implies that one of the obstacles the members in the meeting have is that "only one" member has mentioned the Downing Street Minutes on the floor of either the House or Senate.

This is not only incorrect but misleading. In fact, just yesterday, the Senate Democratic Leader, Harry Reid, mentioned it on the Senate floor. Sen. [Barbara] Boxer talked at some length about it at the recent confirmation hearing for the ambassador to Iraq. The House Democratic leader, Nancy Pelosi, recently signed on to my letter, along with 121 other Democrats asking for answers about the memo. This information is not difficult to find either. For example, the Reid speech was the subject of an AP wire service report posted on the Washington Post website with the headline "Democrats Cite Downing Street Memo in Bolton Fight." Other similar mistakes, mischaracterizations and cheap shots are littered throughout the article.

The article begins with an especially mean and nasty tone, claiming that House Democrats "pretended" a small conference was the Judiciary Committee hearing room and deriding the decor of the room. Milbank fails to share with his readers one essential fact: The reason the hearing was held in that room, an important piece of context. Despite the fact that a number of other suitable rooms were available in the Capitol and House office buildings, Republicans declined my request for each and every one of them. Milbank could have written about the perseverance of many of my colleagues in the face of such adverse circumstances, but declined to do so. Milbank also ignores the critical fact picked up by the AP, CNN and other newsletters that at the very moment the hearing was scheduled to begin, the Republican Leadership scheduled an almost unprecedented number of 11 consecutive floor votes, making it next to impossible for most members to participate in the first hour and one half of the hearing.

In what can only be described as a deliberate effort to discredit the entire hearing, Milbank quotes one of the witnesses as making an anti-Semitic assertion and further describes anti-Semitic literature that was being handed out in the overflow room for the event. First, let me be clear: I consider myself to be friend and supporter of Israel and there were a number of other staunchly pro-Israel members who were in attendance at the hearing. I do not agree with, support or condone any comments asserting Israeli control over U.S. policy, and I find any allegation that Israel is trying to dominate the world or had anything to do with the 9/11 tragedy disgusting and offensive.

That said, to give such emphasis to 100 seconds of a 3 hour and five minute hearing that included the powerful and sad testimony (hardly mentioned by Milbank) of a woman who lost her son in the Iraq war and now feels lied to as a result of the Downing Street Minutes, is incredibly misleading. Many, many different pamphlets were being passed out at the overflow room, including pamphlets about getting out of the Iraq war and anti-Central American Free Trade Agreement, and it is puzzling why Milbank saw fit to only mention the one he did
In a typically derisive and uninformed passage, Milbank makes much of other lawmakers calling me "Mr. Chairman" and says I liked it so much that I used "chairmanly phrases." Milbank may not know that I was the chairman of the House Government Operations Committee from 1988 to 1994. By protocol and tradition in the House, once you have been a chairman you are always referred to as such. Thus, there was nothing unusual about my being referred to as Mr. Chairman.

To administer his coup de grace, Milbank literally makes up another cheap shot that I "was having so much fun that [I] ignored aides' entreaties to end the session." This did not occur. None of my aides offered entreaties to end the session, and I have no idea where Milbank gets that information. The hearing certainly ran longer than expected, but that was because so many members of Congress persevered under very difficult circumstances to attend, and I thought -- given that -- the least I could do was allow them to say their piece. That is called courtesy, not "fun."

By the way, the "Downing Street Memo" is actually the minutes of a British cabinet meeting. In the meeting, British officials -- having just met with their American counterparts -- describe their discussions with such counterparts. I mention this because that basic piece of context, a simple description of the memo, is found nowhere in Milbank's article.

The fact that I and my fellow Democrats had to stuff a hearing into a room the size of a large closet to hold a hearing on an important issue shouldn't make us the object of ridicule.

In my opinion, the ridicule should be placed in two places: first, at the feet of Republicans who are so afraid to discuss ideas and facts that they try to sabotage our efforts to do so; and second, on Dana Milbank and the Washington Post, who do not feel the need to give serious coverage on a serious hearing about a serious matter -- whether more than 1,700 Americans have died because of a deliberate lie. Milbank may disagree, but the Post certainly owed its readers some coverage of that viewpoint.

John D. Conyers Jr., D-Mich., is a member of the U.S. House of Representatives and the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee.
http://www.startribune.com/stories/1519/5475084.html

Anatomy of a Cover-Up

Anatomy of a Coverup
by Sanjoy Mahajan
June 23, 2005


On May 1 the London Sunday Times published leaked minutes -- the Downing Street Memo -- of a high-level British cabinet meeting held on 23 July 2002 that discussed contingencies, political and military, for invading Iraq.

In the Cabinet meeting, C [the head of MI6, Richard Dearlove] 'reported on his recent talks in Washington', where 'military action was now seen as inevitable' and 'the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.' In other words, the books were being cooked to give Bush his war.

The planners assumed 'that the UK would take part in any military action.' So they had to consider the illegality of the war. Unfortunately, 'the Attorney-General said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action.' The Attorney-General dismissed the three possible excuses: 'self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC authorisation'. Self-defense couldn't work partly because, the British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said: 'the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.' How could the government overcome the illegality? The memo, and the _Sunday Times_, quotes this puzzle-solving contribution from Jack Straw:
We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force.

Going to the UN, therefore, was about growing a legal fig leaf. The foliage was merely for the British government, since the planners believe that the Americans do not care about legality: The US National Security Council 'had no patience with the UN route' and 'many in the US did not think it worth going down the ultimatum route'.

The UK Defence Secretary thought that the 'timeline' for military action would begin '30 days before the US Congressional elections' [in November 2002]. So the US government's closest ally expects it to murder Iraqis in order to win elections, what many antiwar critics said years ago.

1. COVERAGE IN THE UK

Here are the Sunday Times headlines:

20 March : MI6 chief told PM: Americans 'fixed' case for war 01 May : Blair planned Iraq war from start [with full text of the memo] 22 May : Blair faces US probe over secret Iraq invasion plan

The articles are thorough. The May 1st article discusses the memo in great detail. Along with that article, the _Sunday Times_ published the full memo, so readers can find out for themselves what it says.

2. WAITING FOR GODOT

Beginning two months after the first Sunday Times article, the New York Times published several articles (other than opinion pieces) on the Downing Street Memo and on its cousin, a briefing paper prepared for the cabinet meeting.

A thought experiment helps explain the delay (seven weeks since the publication of the full memo). Imagine a symmetrical situation: An Iraq government memo, detailing plans to hide chemical weapons from UN inspectors, is leaked to and reported in the _Sunday Times_. How long before the _NYT_ reports the story? We can answer with data from a real experiment. On 22 April 2003 the London _Daily Telegraph_ reported 'Galloway Was in Saddam's Pay, Say Secret Iraqi Documents'. The (forged) documents were found by the _Telegraph_ reporter David Blair -- what an unfortunate name -- in a 'burned-out building' in Baghdad. The _NYT_ headline 'A Briton Who Hailed Hussein Is Said to Have Been in His Pay' showed up on 23 April, as quick as a daily newspaper could be. The memo and briefing paper, however, being critical of the war, were unfit for American consumption for many weeks.

3. COMPARING THE HEADLINES

Compare the London headlines with these _NYT_ headlines, all the non-opinion pieces that mention the memo:

1. 20 May : British Memo On U.S. Plans For Iraq War Fuels Critics
2. 07 June : Blair, Due to Meet Bush, Will Push 2 Issues
3. 08 June : Bush and Blair Deny 'Fixed' Iraq Reports
4. 13 June : Prewar British Memo Says War Decision Wasn't Made
5. 14 June : A Peephole to the War Room: British Documents Shed Light on Bush Team's State of Mind
6. 16 June : 'Exit Strategy' Is More Than a Whisper in Washington, With Lawmakers Speaking Out 7. 17 June : Memo Shows Bush Misled Public, Antiwar Group Says

I discuss each headline in turn.

* 1. 20 May : British Memo On U.S. Plans For Iraq War Fuels Critics
The headline reports the effect of the memo rather than the important news, the content of the memo. By interposing war critics, who are otherwise rarely quoted in the _NYT_, the headline distances the reader from what the memo says and from what happened in the meeting. The reader will think, 'Those critics, like a machine needing fuel, are always hungry and trawling for evidence. So what?' If a mysterious journalistic credo forbids discussing the memo's contents and headlines must only discuss effects, it could have read: 'British Memo On U.S. Plans For Iraq War Multiplies Critics.' An undecided reader would wonder, 'Undecided people are changing their mind. Maybe I should read the memo and see what happens to my opinion.'

* 2. 07 June : Blair, Due to Meet Bush, Will Push 2 Issues
This headline does not mention the memo.

* 3. 08 June : Bush and Blair Deny 'Fixed' Iraq Reports
This headline reports that Bush and Blair deny an important point of the memo, that Bush first decided to go to war and then made up lies to get public support. No president accused of lying has admitted it, and I do not expect Blair or Bush to tamper with precedent. If, how quaint, one expects news to mean _unexpected_ information -- man bites dog rather than dog bites man -- then the headline contains no news.

* 4. 13 June : Prewar British Memo Says War Decision Wasn't Made
This headline, which contradicts the point of the memo, is anti-news. The article itself talks about a different document, the briefing paper, but the headline leads readers to think that the memo says the opposite of what everyone else says it means. The briefing paper, as I discuss later, belies what the article says about it.

* 5. 14 June : A Peephole to the War Room: British Documents Shed Light on Bush Team's State of Mind
Here the memo becomes a dispassionate historical tool shedding light into great mysteries. The headline offers readers vicarious power via access to the mind of the 'team', a word evoking the home team that we are trained to support in American high school (the only learning that happens there). When the light glinted on the documents, what did it reveal? The reader does not learn.

* 6. 16 June : 'Exit Strategy' Is More Than a Whisper in Washington, With Lawmakers Speaking Out
This headline does not mention the memo.

* 7. 17 June : Memo Shows Bush Misled Public, Antiwar Group Says
This headline begins promisingly by stating the memo's contents, and then undermines the statement as merely the opinion of an antiwar group. As in headline 1 (`British Memo On U.S. Plans For Iraq War Fuels Critics'), the _NYT_ has found a role for war critics: to downplay news that undermines trust in our wars. Readers will think, 'Antiwar groups have been saying Bush misled us since long before the war started. What is new here?' The headline's message is, 'Nothing to see here, keep moving.'

4. SUMMARY OF THE HEADLINES

The _NYT_ headlines either ignore the memo [2,6]; deny its main point [4], quote others denying it [3], quote war critics or describe the memo's effect on them [1,7], or report the memo as being of mere clinical interest [5]. No headline states what was said in the meeting, a feat the _Sunday Times_ managed back on March 20: 'MI6 chief told PM: Americans 'fixed' case for war'. One _Sunday Times_ headline (22 May), like the _NYT_, mentions the effect of the memo, but it also reveals important information from the memo, the 'secret Iraq invasion plan'.

5. THE _NYT_ ARTICLES
I discuss each articles in turn.

* 1. 20 May : British Memo On U.S. Plans For Iraq War Fuels Critics
The _NYT_ downplays the significance of the memo with 'It has long been known that American military planning for the Iraq war began as early as Nov. 21, 2001' [1]. By using the impersonal passive 'It has long been known', the article omits who knew, who told them, or when they found out. It also leads to unanswered questions, such as why, while invading Afghanistan, the alleged source of the World Trade Center attackers, the US government planned to invade Iraq.

Military planning differs from deciding to invade. As mathematicians say, the first is necessary but not sufficient for the second. The United States has detailed military plans, developed over decades, to launch nuclear weapons at Russian cities, but it has not decided to use them (or so we hope). In obscuring this difference, the article constructs a _fake rebuttal_. The 'long-known' information, while accurate, seems to discredit the memo, only slow, careful thought exposes its irrelevance. Without that pause, the reader picks up a vague feeling that the memo is indeed old news.

On the subject of Bush deciding to invade in 2002, the memo 'provide[s] some contemporaneous validation...though only through secondhand observations.' It provides merely 'some' validation and that validation is at best secondhand. Yet one cannot find more authoritative sources of intelligence information: the head of MI6 talking probably to his counterpart in Washington, the head of the CIA. Did the _NYT_ treat so gingerly the prewar reports of Iraq's (invisible) WMD's?

* 3. 08 June : Bush and Blair Deny 'Fixed' Iraq Reports

Article [3] quotes the White House denials:

The White House has always insisted that Mr. Bush did not make the decision to invade Iraq until after Secretary of State Colin L. Powell presented the administration's case to the United Nations Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003...

The only useful information in this denial is the date, 5 Feb 2003, around which the White House is building its story. Then the article repeats the fake rebuttal:

But as early as Nov. 21, 2001, Mr. Bush directed Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to begin a review of what could be done to oust Mr. Hussein.

When the article reveals the crucial information, that the 'intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy', it downplays their import by appending a 'Sir Richard was reported in the memo to have told his colleagues.' The reader may think that we have the word of the memo, of unknown authenticity. But as the earlier article [1] admits, 'The British government has not disputed the authenticity of the British memorandum.' Nor has any participant denied any quote in the memo.

The headline -- 'Bush and Blair Deny 'Fixed' Iraq Reports' -- reveals the theme. Their denials fill the article:

'There's nothing farther from the truth,' Mr. Bush said...

'Look, both of us [him and Blair] didn't want to use our military,' Mr. Bush added. 'Nobody wants to commit military into combat. It's the last option.'

Mr. Blair...said, 'No, the facts were not being fixed in any shape or form at all.'

The article allows that 'The statements contradicted assertions in the memorandum...', but it spends most of its remaining space discussing merely the effect of the memo. Its contents have 'dogged Mr. Blair...', and he was 'generally unsmiling through the 25-minute news conference'. The first paragraph, again focusing on the effect over the content, says that the memo upset critics who 'see it as evidence that the president was intent to go to war with Iraq earlier than the White House has said.' Like the statement in [1] that military planning began in November 2001, the statement is true but irrelevant: irrelevant because it is not intrinsically terrible to go to war earlier than said. If it were only a week earlier, for example, who cares? The reporting obscures how Bush first decided to invade, then, to grow legal fig leaves for Blair, cooked up a UN ultimatum designed to fail. As reported on the front page of the London _Guardian_:
A US state department official said he thought it very unlikely that the Iraqi regime would be prepared to accept the stringent programme of inspections the US will demand.

As the American intelligence source put it, the White House "will not take yes for an answer", suggesting that Washington would provoke a crisis. ['US targets Saddam: Pentagon and CIA making plans for war against Iraq this year', 14 Feb 2002, p. 1, ]:

The _NYT_ article, continues with more information about the effect of the memo, '89 Democrats in the House of Representatives have written to the White House', and the White House sees 'no need' to respond to the letter. Then comes another fake rebuttal:

Mr. Bush noted of the memorandum that 'they dropped it out in the middle of his race,' indicating that he thought it had been made public last month to hurt Mr. Blair's chances for re-election.

The memo had been leaked to hurt Blair, which is irrelevant: The circumstance does not invalidate the memo, especially when, as reported in the _NYT_ [1], its authors and subjects do not dispute its authenticity.

Then come more Bush/Blair fake rebuttals:

'Now, no one knows more intimately the discussions that we were conducting as two countries at the time than me,' Mr. Blair said.

That statement, true almost by definition, is as newsworthy as 2+2=4 or dog bites man. The newsworthy question is whether Blair is lying about the memo. This article was written by Elisabeth Bumiller. In a panel discussion she protested:

You can say Mr. Bush's statement was not factually accurate. You can't say the president is lying... [_Extra!_, January/February 2005, ]

The reader should not expect Bumiller to conduct a searching investigation of Blair or Bush's veracity. Empirically Bumiller is right: A mainstream article saying that the president lied so rarely appears that one suspects a taboo on the subject. Where from and why, Bumiller does not say and may not know herself.

* 4. 13 June : Prewar British Memo Says War Decision Wasn't Made
In the memo, Dearlove (head of MI6) says that the decision had been made and the facts 'were being fixed' around the decision. The headline [4] claims the opposite. Who are you going to believe: your eyes or the _NYT_? The article's first paragraph restates its theme:

A memorandum written by Prime Minister Tony Blair's cabinet office in late July 2002 explicitly states that the Bush administration had made 'no political decisions' to invade Iraq,
Careful reading reveals that the article is discussing another document: not the memo but rather the briefing paper prepared for the Cabinet meeting. The briefing paper does explicitly say: 'no political decisions have been taken'. However, the complete sentence is:

Although no political decisions have been taken, US military planners have drafted options for the US Government to undertake an invasion of Iraq. ['Cabinet Office paper: Conditions for military action', 21 July 2002, para. 6, published in the _Sunday Times_ (London), 12 July 2005, and at]

So, contrary to the _NYT_ fake rebuttal enabled by selective quoting, invasion planning is underway. The briefing paper says that 'military planning for action against Iraq is proceeding apace', however 'it lacks a political framework' [para. 1]. Translated from Foreign Office speak, the US planners had not sold the war to the US public, i.e. had not developed the political framework. That sale would come later because, 'From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August' [White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card in September 2003].

The _NYT_ article emphasizes that the briefing paper 'appeared to take as a given the presence of illicit weapons in Iraq', and criticizes its foolishness ('an assumption that later proved almost entirely wrong'). This imperial disdain, cruder than a fake rebuttal, also obscures the truth. Readers must drag out the full document and pore over it. Who except a fanatic has time for that? After doing so, you find that briefing paper might not accept the presence of 'illicit weapons'. WMD are key to the 'information campaign...that will need to give full coverage to the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, including his WMD, and the legal justification for action.' In other words, talk of WMD is for selling the war, not necessarily because they exist.

Then the article produces a fake rebuttal: 'the central fact reported -- that the American military was in the midst of advanced planning for an invasion of Iraq -- was no secret.' Advanced planning is not the same as deciding to go to war. The British minutes and briefing paper reveal the additional news that the war decision had been made, news that the _NYT_ avoids by juxtaposing an irrelevant fact.

Just to make sure we understand that everyone accepted that Iraq had WMD's, the article continues: 'On unconventional weapons, the memorandum also discloses doubts -- but not that they existed.'

* 5. 14 June : A Peephole to the War Room: British Documents Shed Light on Bush Team's State of Mind
Article [5] leads with the 'political stir' from the disclosures, putting it down to the 'opponents' of Bush and Blair -- not opponents of invading and killing (pro-life people, in a more honest era) -- but as Blair and Bush's personal antagonists. The article shifts the debate from policies to personalities. The article then states its theme early: 'But the documents are not quite so shocking' [as the political opponents claim]. The article has already stated a banal thesis to refute, that Bush and Blair misled their countries into war; and even that claim shall be downplayed.

The article contains this rich paragraph:

What no one knew then for certain (though some lonely voices did predict it) is that American forces would find none of the lethal chemical or biological weapons that Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair said made Iraq so dangerous, or that the anti-American insurgency would be so durable and deadly.

It does name the lonely voices. They include George Galloway MP, whose May 2005 drubbing of the US Senate made huge headlines in Britain (but not in America where they happened); they include Scott Ritter, former chief UN weapons inspector in Iraq. They felt lonely only in the _NYT_ and the rest of the mainstream media, which hardly reported their views except to dismiss them.

What makes the insurgency anti-American? The 'insurgents' could be called Iraqi 'freedom fighters'. An insurgent is 'a person who revolts against civil authority or an established government' (Merriam-Webster); by postulating an insurgency rather than a freedom struggle, the _NYT_ covertly asserts the legitimacy of the American occupation.

Then we learn that 'the memos are not the Dead Sea Scrolls', a highbrow expression of disdain, because 'There has been ample evidence for many months, and even years, that top Bush administration figures saw war as inevitable by the summer of 2002.' War, in this view, is like a hurricane, and the Bush administration passively awaited its approach. Accepting that misleading metaphor for the moment, the evidence adduced for it, a quote from the _New Yorker_, is weak. Richard Haass supposedly asked Condoleezza Rice 'whether it made sense to put Iraq at the center of the agenda, with a global campaign against terrorism already under way.' She said 'that that decision's been made...' Putting Iraq at the center of the agenda is almost certainly necessary to invading Iraq, but it is not sufficient: a difference that the article obscures.

Then the article downplays the memo for not 'put[ting] forward specific proof that Mr. Bush had taken any particular action'. Instead it merely gave, in the _NYT_ words, 'a general sense' from 'the impressions of Britain's chief of the Secret Intelligence Service'. The article does not explain for American readers that this chief is the counterpart of the CIA director, a post not usually given to people who comment on their vague impressions. The memo is further deficient because it 'does not elaborate' on the statement that 'the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy': another fake rebuttal. The lack of elaboration is true and irrelevant. As Michael Smith, the reporter who broke the stories, said in an online Q&A:

...as for the reports that said this was one British official. Pleeeaaassee! This was the head of MI6. How much authority do you want the man to have? He has just been to Washington, he has just talked to George Tenet. [16 June 2005, _Washington Post_ online]

After the fake rebuttal, the article then whitewashes the abuse of the United Nations:
Rather, what the memo seems to emphasize is that the United States could build greater support for any military action -- especially from Britain -- by first confronting Iraq through the United Nations,

Jack Straw's puzzle solution, quoted in the memo, explains what the UN route was about: creating an ultimatum that Iraq couldn't accept and using their refusal as the legal fig leaf.
The article finishes with a quote from oil itself, Senator John D. Rockefeller, who said we need '...a full and complete accounting of the mistakes leading up to the war in Iraq and what changes are necessary to fix them.' The base metal of aggressive war has transmuted into the silver of a mistake. Like the Vietnam war, soon it will become the gold of an American tragedy.

* 6. 16 June : 'Exit Strategy' Is More Than a Whisper in Washington, With Lawmakers Speaking Out

Article [6] first mentions the memo deep in the text:

On Thursday, Representative John Conyers Jr., a Michigan Democrat, will convene a forum on the so-called Downing Street Memo, a leaked document that appeared to suggest the White House had made a decision to go to war in the summer of 2002.

The convener is a Democrat, so he is probably already antiwar; his forum -- not the more official sounding 'hearing' -- is just antiwar organizing. Furthermore, the reader learns mostly the effect of the memo with its contents bashfully peeking out from the veils. The memo merely 'appeared to suggest' that the White House 'had made a decision' to go to war. The 'appeared' is one indirection, and the memo only 'suggests', a second indirection separating the reader from the content of the memo. Even minor sentence constructions contribute distance: The White House 'had made a decision', a noun phrase rather than the more active and direct verb 'decided'. The article spends many words creating space between the reader and the memo, and no words explaining the the memo's significance: that after the summer of 2002, Bush and Blair's talk of peace and working with the UN was just marketing (i.e. lies) to build public support and legal cover.

* 7. 17 June : Memo Shows Bush Misled Public, Antiwar Group Says

The most recent _NYT_ coverage [7] leads with:

Opponents of the war in Iraq held an unofficial hearing on Capitol Hill...to draw attention to a leaked British government document that they say proves that President Bush misled the public about his war plans in 2002...

Its hearing is downplayed as 'unofficial', and besides it is held by opponents of the war, so it is another antiwar event: No news here, keep moving. The article does not explain that the hearing was unofficial because Republicans refused to allow it to take place in the Congressional chambers.

Here is the well-designed second paragraph:

In a jammed room in the basement of the Capitol, Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan...presided as witnesses asserted that the 'Downing Street memo'...vindicated their view that Mr. Bush made the decision to topple Saddam Hussein long before he has admitted.
It distances the reader with 'witnesses asserted' that the memo 'vindicated their view', rather than the direct 'the memo says...' The article eventually explains one of the memo's revelations: that Dearlove says Bush has decided on war. But the article omits the evidence for Dearlove's statement: a high-level trip to Washington, probably talking to George Tenet, head of the CIA. As far as the reader knows, Dearlove could just be sounding off.

The fourth paragraph quotes a mother who damns the war as an 'illegal invasion of another sovereign country on prefabricated and cherry-picked intelligence'. The reader learns that her son had been killed in Iraq, and is invited to think that she is hysterical and too involved to be objective.

The article then reprints Bush's denials without comment:

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

Without pausing to comment, let alone to refute, the report continues with Mr. Conyers and colleagues delivering 'bundles they said contained the names of more than 560,000 Americans gathered on the Internet who had endorsed his letter to the president demanding answers to questions raised by the memo.' The 'they said' casts doubt on the list, but the reporter gives no evidence that Conyers fabricated the names or did not gather them on the Internet. If the count is doubted, he could have inspected the bundles himself, counted the names on one page, estimated the number of pages, and then multiplied the figures to arrive at his own estimate.

The White House's fake rebuttal, that Conyers voted against the war, is quoted verbatim. Conyers probably voted against the war, but -- making the rebuttal fake -- his vote is irrelevant to what the memo says or whether Bush lied. Even granting the fake rebuttal a comment, the reporter could have refuted it by stating how many of the 122 Congressional co-signers voted for the war.

The article explains nothing more of the memo's contents. The last paragraph mentions that another document -- the briefing paper -- warned of a long 'nation-building exercise'. Careful, America, do not let your helping impulse (building nations) put you into the soup!

6. SUMMARY

The _NYT_ articles -- masterpieces of delay, indirection, distraction, fake rebuttals, and elegant omission -- keep readers ignorant of the lies and the lying liars who tell them. No wonder so many Americans still support this gangster war.

No _NYT_ article comments on perhaps the most revolting revelation of the memo. The UK Defence Secretary thought that the US military 'timeline [would begin] 30 days before the US Congressional elections.' Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi die so that Americans elect a crowd of pirates perched on the rotting platform of the war of terror.

Copyright 2005 Sanjoy Mahajan . This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. To view a copy of this license, visit or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA.

Downing Street Memos vs. Lies of New York Times

by NEWSCLIPAUTOPSY.COM

A brilliant article by Sanjoy Mahajan in ZNET analyzes with crystalline clarity and exposes the shameless cover-up tactics used by The New York Times when dealing with the Downing Street Memos (minutes) and briefings.

In Mahajan's words:"The NYT articles -- masterpieces of delay, indirection, distraction, fake rebuttals, and elegant omission -- keep readers ignorant of the lies and the lying liars who tell them. No wonder so many Americans still support this gangster war."

In Mahajan's article he first compares headlines from the British media with the NYT.British Headlines:
* MI6 chief told PM: Americans 'fixed' case for war
* Blair planned Iraq war from start
* Blair faces US probe over secret Iraq invasion planNYT Headlines:
* British Memo On U.S. Plans For Iraq War Fuels Critics
* Prewar British Memo Says War Decision Wasn't Made
* Memo Shows Bush Misled Public, Antiwar Group Says

He points out that the NYT headlines -- unlike the British headlines -- glaringly omitts what was actually said in the meeting with the MI6 director, among other things:"The NYT headlines either ignore the memo [2,6]; deny its main point [4], quote others denying it [3], quote war critics or describe the memo's effect on them [1,7], or report the memo as being of mere clinical interest [5].No headline states what was said in the meeting, a feat the Sunday Times managed back on March 20: 'MI6 chief told PM: Americans 'fixed' case for war'.

One Sunday Times headline (22 May), like the NYT, mentions the effect of the memo, but it also reveals important information from the memo, the 'secret Iraq invasion plan'. (numbers in square brackets refer to the headlines listed in his article)In each New York Times article, Mahajan does a masterful critique on how the writers fake, dodge and shift the focus of the articles from the important and damning facts found within The Downing Street Memos (minutes).

Here are some NYT headlines with excerpts of Mahajan's analyses of each article:
* Bush and Blair Deny 'Fixed' Iraq Reports
The article allows that 'The statements contradicted assertions in the memorandum...', but it spends most of its remaining space discussing merely the effect of the memo. Its contents have 'dogged Mr. Blair...', and he was 'generally unsmiling through the 25-minute news conference'.

The first paragraph, again focusing on the effect over the content, says that the memo upset critics who 'see it as evidence that the president was intent to go to war with Iraq earlier than the White House has said.'

Like the statement in [1] that military planning began in November 2001, the statement is true but irrelevant: irrelevant because it is not intrinsically terrible to go to war earlier than said. If it were only a week earlier, for example, who cares?

The reporting obscures how Bush first decided to invade, then, to grow legal fig leaves for Blair, cooked up a UN ultimatum designed to fail. As reported on the front page of the London Guardian:* Prewar British Memo Says War Decision Wasn't MadeCareful reading reveals that the article is discussing another document: not the memo but rather the briefing paper prepared for the Cabinet meeting.

The briefing paper does explicitly say: 'no political decisions have been taken'. However, the complete sentence is:Although no political decisions have been taken, US military planners have drafted options for the US Government to undertake an invasion of Iraq. ['Cabinet Office paper: Conditions for military action', 21 July 2002, para. 6, published in the Sunday Times (London), 12 July 2005, and at]

So, contrary to the NYT fake rebuttal enabled by selective quoting, invasion planning is underway. The briefing paper says that 'military planning for action against Iraq is proceeding apace', however 'it lacks a political framework' [para. 1]. Translated from Foreign Office speak, the US planners had not sold the war to the US public, i.e. had not developed the political framework. That sale would come later because, 'From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August' [White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card in September 2003].

* Memo Shows Bush Misled Public, Antiwar Group Says

The most recent NYT coverage [7] leads with:"Opponents of the war in Iraq held an unofficial hearing on Capitol Hill...to draw attention to a leaked British government document that they say proves that President Bush misled the public about his war plans in 2002..."Its hearing is downplayed as 'unofficial', and besides it is held by opponents of the war, so it is another antiwar event: No news here, keep moving.

The article does not explain that the hearing was unofficial because Republicans refused to allow it to take place in the Congressional chambers.Here is the well-designed second paragraph:"In a jammed room in the basement of the Capitol, Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan...presided as witnesses asserted that the 'Downing Street memo'...vindicated their view that Mr. Bush made the decision to topple Saddam Hussein long before he has admitted.It distances the reader with 'witnesses asserted' that the memo 'vindicated their view', rather than the direct 'the memo says...'

The article eventually explains one of the memo's revelations: that Dearlove says Bush has decided on war. But the article omits the evidence for Dearlove's statement: a high-level trip to Washington, probably talking to George Tenet, head of the CIA. As far as the reader knows, Dearlove could just be sounding off.Sanjoy Mahajan's Anatomy of a Coverup may be foundhere.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=8141
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHEDhttp://newsclipautopsy.blogspot.com/2005/06/truth-revealed-new-york-times-is.html
http://www.conspiracyplanet.com/channel.cfm?channelid=97&contentid=2352&page=2

The Washington Post and the Downing Street memo

The Washington Post and the Downing Street memo
By Joseph Kay and Barry Grey

June 22, 2005 -- On June 16, Representative John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, held a hearing in the Capitol on what has become known as the Downing Street memo.

The “memo” consists of minutes of a British cabinet meeting held in July 2002 in which the chief of Britain’s intelligence service MI6 reported on his recent discussions with Bush administration officials in Washington. The intelligence head, Sir Richard Dearlove, said that in Washington war “was now seen as inevitable” and that “intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” of removing Saddam Hussein “through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD.”

The document, labeled “secret and strictly personal,” first came to light in the May 1 issue of the British Sunday Times. It ignited a political firestorm in Britain and played a significant role in the May 5 election, fueling anti-war sentiment and contributing to a sharp reduction in Prime Minister Tony Blair’s parliamentary majority.

The enormous publicity given the memo in Britain stood in the sharpest contrast to the virtual silence it evoked in the American media—a silence for which there is no innocent explanation. The “mainstream” media made a calculated political decision to bury the memo and keep the American people in the dark.

The memo provides irrefutable evidence, from the highest levels of the British state, that the March 2003 invasion of Iraq was launched on the basis of lies concocted to justify a predetermined policy. Among the lies were the repeated assurances of Bush and other top US government officials in the months and weeks preceding the war that no decision had been made to go to war and the US was exhaustively pursuing all peaceful alternatives.

It would seem that a senior congressman holding a hearing on such a document—more than two years after the US invasion, with US troop deaths topping 1,700, tens of thousands of Iraqis killed, some $200 billion already expended on the war and occupation, and the primary pretext for the war, Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, exposed as a fiction—would be considered the minimum, if long-delayed, response in a democracy. All the more so under conditions where a raft of opinion polls show that a large majority of the US population is now opposed to the war.

But the Washington Post, the capital’s leading “liberal” newspaper, not only relegated Conyers’s hearing to its inside pages, it published a sneering and derogatory account that did not seek to conceal the newspaper’s fury over the congressman’s attempt to break through the wall of silence on the memo.

The World Socialist Web Site is no political supporter of Conyers, a Democratic politician who has worked for decades to maintain the subordination of American workers to the two-party system. Nevertheless, his treatment at the hands of the Post is quite extraordinary. The newspaper casts Conyers, one of the most senior members of Congress, as a buffoon, in order to denigrate the anti-war and anti-Bush sentiments expressed by the participants at his hearing.

To underline its attitude to both the hearing and the Downing Street memo itself, the Post published its account in its June 17 “Washington Sketch” column—a feature usually devoted to lighthearted commentary on the peccadilloes and curiosities of political life in the nation’s capital. Written by veteran Post journalist Dana Milbank, the column was headlined “Democrats Play House to Rally Against the War.”

The derisive headline captured the flavor of the text. Conyers and a number of other House Democrats, Milbank wrote, “took a trip to the land of make-believe.” The “dress-up game looked realistic enough,” he continued, for “two dozen more Democrats to come downstairs and play along.” The “hearty band of playmates” indulged themselves, according to Milbank, in a “fantasy.”

Milbank found it particularly uproarious that Conyers was forced to hold the hearing in a small room in the basement of the Capitol, and that he lacked the power to issue subpoenas: “...subpoena power and other perks of a real committee are but a fantasy unless Democrats can regain the majority in the House,” he chortled.

As Conyers subsequently pointed out in a letter to the Post, “Despite the fact that a number of other suitable rooms were available in the Capitol and House office buildings, Republicans declined my request for each and every one of them.” Conyers added that the Republican leadership in Congress took other measures to derail the hearing, including the scheduling of “an almost unprecedented number of 11 consecutive floor votes, making it next to impossible for most Members to participate in the first hour and one half of the hearing.”

Such anti-democratic practices by a majority party determined to deny any minority rights and block any discussion of the administration’s war policies are evidently of no concern to Milbank and his superiors at the Post. On the contrary, they seem to find it amusing that such methods are used to silence anti-war sentiment and suppress public discussion of the British memo.

Milbank continued: “But that’s only one of the obstacles they’re up against as they try to convince America that the ‘Downing Street Memo’ is important.” In making the case that the memo is of no importance, Milbank introduced as exhibit one: “A search of the congressional record yesterday found that of the 535 members of Congress, only one—Conyers—had mentioned the memo on the floor of either chamber. House Democratic leaders did not join in Conyers’s session, and Senate Democrats, who have the power to hold such events in real committee rooms, have not troubled themselves.”

That such an argument should even be adduced to “prove” the insignificance of the memo bespeaks not the political import of the memo, but the miserable level of what passes for journalism in today’s “mainstream” American press. The virtual silence of the Democrats on the memo is an indictment of the Democratic Party. If anything, it proves the opposite of Milbank’s cynical assertion. The conspiracy of silence speaks to the enormously damaging and explosive political implications of the memo not only for the Bush administration, but also for the Democratic Party, which has fully backed the Iraq war.

Milbank attempted to further discredit the hearing by associating it with anti-Semitism. He cited the testimony of one witness, Ray McGovern, a former intelligence analyst, who, in Milbank’s words, “declared that the United States went to war in Iraq for oil, Israel and military bases craved by administration ‘neocons’ so ‘the United States and Israel could dominate that part of the world.’ ” Whatever McGovern’s political agenda might be, there are no grounds, simply on the basis of this summation of Washington’s real war aims, to brand him an anti-Semite.

Milbank then employed the tactic of the political amalgam to bolster his “anti-Semitic” smear, citing flyers suggesting Israeli involvement in 9/11 that were handed out to people gathered at Democratic headquarters to watch the Conyers hearing on CSPAN.

There was one obstacle to explaining the Downing Street memo to the American people that Milbank chose not to mention: the refusal of the Washington Post and the rest of the US media to give the story the extensive and prominent coverage it merits.

The unstated political agenda behind Milbank’s June 17 piece was spelled out more openly in a Post editorial published two days earlier, entitled “Iraq, Then and Now.” In that commentary, the Post resorted to a combination of absurdities and outright lies to dismiss the significance of the Downing Street memo.

The editors declared that the original memo, together with a subsequent memo made public earlier this month, “add not a single fact to what was previously known about the administration’s prewar deliberations. Not only that: They add nothing new to what was publicly known in July 2002.”

Really? The fact that intelligence was being “fixed” to provide a pretext for war is something everyone knew? And it was “publicly known” in July 2002—eight months before the invasion?

Here the Post seems to be confusing what it knew with what was known by the public at large. Certainly the Post did nothing to blow the whistle on what constitutes one of the most monstrous violations of democratic rights in US history!

The Post editorial continued: “It was argued even then, and has since become conventional wisdom, that Mr. Bush, Vice President Cheney and other administration spokesmen exaggerated the threat from Iraq to justify the elimination of a noxious regime.”

Exaggerated? Here the choice of words is exquisitely cynical and dishonest. The US weapons inspectors who combed Iraq after the invasion did not find 20,000 liters of anthrax instead of the 30,000 alleged by Bush and his co-conspirators. They did not find 10,000, or 1,000, or one. They found, in round numbers, zero weapons of mass destruction!

This is not “exaggeration.” It is fabrication—on a massive scale, and for the filthy purpose of launching an unprovoked war of conquest.

The Post went on to state that the memos “provide no information that would alter the conclusions of multiple independent investigations on both sides of the Atlantic, which were that US and British intelligence agencies genuinely believed Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and that they were not led to that judgment by the Bush administration.”

More lies! Every one of these “multiple independent investigations” were government-organized whitewashes—something that is well understood by many millions in the US and around the world.

No pressure from the Bush administration on the intelligence agencies? What about Vice President Dick Cheney’s numerous visits to CIA headquarters, where, according to documented accounts, he attempted to strong-arm analysts into altering their assessments of Iraqi WMD in order to scare the American people and make a stronger case for war?

What about the Pentagon’s infamous Office of Special Plans, which was set up to bypass the CIA and other intelligence agencies and publicize bogus reports of Iraqi chemical, biological and nuclear programs that were supplied by Ahmed Chalabi, a paid agent of the US government?

What prompts the Post to publish such drivel? There is, in the first instance, the broad consensus within the American political and media establishment in support of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the general policy of militarism and US global hegemony being pursued by the Bush administration.

There is, as well, a considerable element of self-interest. The Post has reason to fear the Downing Street memo, because it is an indictment not only of the Bush administration, but also the government’s accomplices in the media, who promoted uncritically the administration’s lies and war propaganda.

But there is something else—namely, fear. The Post’s rabid response to the Downing Street memo reflects mounting concern, even panic, within American ruling circles over the growth of popular opposition to the war.

This is an adventure to which the entire ruling elite is committed, and in which both parties and the whole media establishment are implicated. The opinion polls, the disastrous fall-off in military recruitment, the military and political quagmire in Iraq itself, the increasingly fragile and untenable financial situation—taken together they point to the emergence of enormous political shocks and social upheavals within the US.

Interestingly, Milbank, in his column, called Conyers’s hearing a “mock impeachment inquiry over the Iraq war.” It was, as far as Conyers and other Democratic politicians who took part were concerned, nothing of the kind. They did not raise the “I” word. But others who testified, including the mother of a solider killed in Iraq, are calling for Bush’s impeachment.

Will the sclerotic two-party system be able to withstand such convulsions? Will a movement of protest against war and social reaction assume anti-capitalist and revolutionary forms? These are the questions that plague the more thoughtful elements within the ruling elite.

It is a measure of their crisis that they can for the present respond only with more lies, combined with attempts to defame and intimidate. Other measures are being prepared, from the promotion of left-talking demagogues to divert discontent into safe channels to the use of state violence and terror.

In the meantime, the Washington Post will continue to grind out its dishonest and absurd rationales for a criminal war, and do its best to conceal the truth from the American people.

See Also:
Bush faces growing opposition to Iraq war
[18 June 2005]
Wall Street Journal alibis for Nazi-style crimes in Iraq
[25 May 2005]
Washington Post glorifies US military "ruthlessness" in Iraq
[20 April 2005]

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/jun2005/post-j22.shtml http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_18668.shtml

Rush Joins Debate on Downing Street

Rush Joins Debate on Downing Street
Think Progress
June 21, 2005

Rush Limbaugh has decided to start covering the Downing Street Minutes. He wasn’t interested in the memos when they were first revealed and contained damaging allegations about the pre-war intelligence on Iraq. But since right-wing rumor mongers have recently decided to take a shot at destroying the reputation of the British journalist (Michael Smith) who reported on the memos, he thought it would be a good time to weigh in.

Limbaugh: “I purposely haven’t talked about this Downing Street memo much because, frankly, it didn’t interest me. And, you know, if it doesn’t interest me I’m not going to talk about it. And the reason it didn’t interest me is because it was just another one of these ginned up things by the libs, and it looks like it’s got some similarities to Bill Burkett and the forged documents of CBS and Rathergate… It seems to me this name Michael Smith, seems to me that there was a guy by the same name who worked with Mary Mapes at CBS during this whole Rathergate.”

As reported on ThinkProgress yesterday, CBS has denied that this is the same Michael Smith who worked for Mapes. But the right feels they are entitled to spread whatever rumors they want based on scant evidence. The good news is that Rush seems to be joining the call for the White House to be asked whether they in fact dispute the authenticity of the memos.
Posted by Faiz June 21, 2005 11:28 am

http://thinkprogress.org/index.php?p=1132

Limbaugh Suggests Memo Fake

Limbaugh baselessly suggested Downing Street memo "may be a fake"
By JS & JW
MEDIA MATTERS
June 21, 2005

Syndicated radio host Rush Limbaugh suggested that the Downing Street memo "may be a fake" and compared it to the disputed memos used by CBS in its controversial story about President Bush's National Guard service.

From the June 20 broadcast of The Rush Limbaugh Show:

LIMBAUGH: I purposely haven't talked about this Downing Street memo much because, frankly, a) it didn't interest me and, you know, if it doesn't interest me, I'm not going to talk about it. And the reason it didn't interest me is because it was just another one of these ginned up things by the libs, and it looks like it's got some similarities to Bill Burkett and the forged documents of CBS and Rathergate.

Later in the program, Limbaugh responded to a caller's question about the Downing Street memo by saying, "What is it? The Downing Street memo doesn't say anything, and it may be a fake. It may be a forgery."

In fact, multiple news organizations have authenticated the document, which London's Sunday Times first published on May 1. The memo records the minutes of a July 23, 2002, British Cabinet meeting, including British intelligence chief Richard Dearlove's statement that in Washington, "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." Since the Downing Street memo's publication, several related British documents have been published, which multiple news outlets have also authenticated.

Limbaugh's assertion appears to be based on claims circulating on the Internet following a June 18 post on the conservative weblog Little Green Footballs. The claims -- which were repeated on another conservative blog, Captain's Quarters, and subsequently linked to by National Review Online's blog, The Corner, and by the Drudge Report -- arose from a June 18 Associated Press article reporting that "[Michael] Smith [the Times reporter who first revealed the memo] 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."

But contrary to AP's assertion, Smith has stated publicly that he destroyed copies of the documents and returned the originals. In a June 14 interview with Rawstory.com, Smith described how he first obtained, photocopied, and returned the originals in September 2004. Then, working off of the copies, he reproduced the documents with a typewriter and then destroyed the photocopies (not the originals as the AP reported):

"The copying and re-typing were necessary because markings on the originals might have identified his source, Smith said. ... "The situation in Britain is very difficult but with regard to leaked documents the police Special Branch are obliged to investigate such leaks and would have come to the newspaper's office and or my home to confiscate them," he explained. "We did destroy them because the Police Special Branch were ordered to investigate."

Captain's Quarters concluded that based on this apparently inaccurate AP account, "One fact certainly stands out -- Michael Smith cannot authenticate the copies. And absent that authentication, they lose their value as evidence of anything" (emphasis in original). But the suggestion by conservatives that the documents were forged is baseless, given the multiple news outlets that have authenticated the existence of the memo and related documents.
The Associated Press released excerpts from the memos, including the July 23 memo, on June 18. "The following are excerpts from material in secret Downing Street memos written in 2002. The information, authenticated by a senior British government official, was transcribed from the original documents," the AP wrote.

Similarly, NBC chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell reported June 14 on NBC's Nightly News that "war critics have come up with seven more memos verified by NBC News." A June 13 article by Mitchell on MSNBC.com, published before her report aired on the Nightly News, also noted that the memos were "verified by NBC News."

— J.S. & J.W.
Posted to the web on Tuesday June 21, 2005 at 7:31 PM EST
http://mediamatters.org/items/200506210007

IMPORTANT ! MEDIA TRACKING -- Need Help

MEDIA TRACKING TO BRING END TO WAR IN IRAQ


Dear Friends,

I need your help with US media tracking on some very important issues:

1. RAF Bombing to Goad Saddam Into War. This was first reported to dKos by Welshman on the 29th of May. That was Michael Smith. Today we have another article on the same subject by Norton Taylor RAF bombing raids on Iraq no-fly zone defied Foreign Office legal advice, say Lib Dems It has been 30 days and this story has NEVER been reported in the US media. (I do mean mainstream, and not blogs, and not alternative news like Alternet, Common Dreams, or Iraq Occupation Watch.



2. The operative term to articles to track US media is "illegal""war""Iraq" in that order. Google your little hearts out and try to find US media coverage of the story of the day. If you get tired of looking, try contrasting UK articles on the same terms. You could try, if you're really ambitious from May 1, 2005, when the Downing Street Minutes were first published in the UK Sunday Times.

3. I need articles, especially op-eds from US mainstream media in three categories:

• Top Notch -- This would be Bob Herbert's Truth & Deceit"
  
• Middle of the Road -- These would be articles that say, "We knew the war was illegal, so what?" "Is there any substance to the allegations contained in the Downing Street Minutes?" along those lines.
  
• Outrageous Bushthink. This would be Dana Milbank's June 17, Democrats Play House to Rally Against War."

PURPOSE OF THIS PROJECT

To break through media blackout. To bring the news to the US, (via the UK, if necessary) To counterattack falsehood with fact, to expose the illegal war as it was developing and reported in the US. Ultimately the goal of this project is to bring a speedy end to the war in Iraq through the public becoming more aware of the insidious origins of the illegal war of aggression against Iraq.

Pick a target area, and dates to work within (Google lets you search between certain dates) when you get your list, find US sources for stories, then a list of UK stories.

For op-eds bring them right back here.

E MAIL ME YOUR LISTS, PLEASE. (itsgrimm at hotmail.com)

An idea of how this media blackout has been working is given in the following diary:

DEARLOVE'S BRIEFING By Booman23.

"The reason the New York Times and the Washington Post don't want to investigate the DSM leaks is because they were fully complicit in 'fixing' the intelligence."Dearlove's Briefing, Booman23; June 18, 2005.

Once to Every Man and Nation

Comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth with falsehood,
for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, some great decision,
offering each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever,
'twixt that darkness and that light.

Then to side with truth is noble,
when we share her wretched crust,
Ere her cause bring fame and profit,
and 'tis prosperous to be just;
Then it is the brave man chooses
while the coward stands aside,
Till the multitude make virtue
of the faith they had denied.

Though the cause of evil prosper,
yet the truth alone is strong;
Though her portion be the scaffold,
and upon the throne be wrong;
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
and behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow,
keeping watch above His own.

-- James R. Lowell
Published on Decem­ber 11, 1845
in protest of America's war against Mexico

Thanks to DulceDecorum who gave me courage when I was worn out.

Memo is Opinion; MINUTES ARE FACTS

THE DOWNING STREET MINUTES CONSIDERED

Press Release

Minutes are the real-time record of a meeting, whose veracity is checked by all members attending, and are given to all members attending, and must be kept by all attending. Minutes are the true and accurate statement of what transpired during a meeting. If a conspiracy to commit a crime happened during a meeting, and those minutes were made public, and the criminals were government ministers, and the crime was an illegal war -- there SHOULD BE HELL TO PAY.

CHICAGO TRIB: WH DENIALS, MEDIA BLACKOUT; PUBLIC INDIFFERENCE
The Chicago Tribune (5/17/05) named several factors that had caused a "less than robust discussion" of the smoking gun memo: Aside from the White House's denials, and the media's slow reaction, the paper asserted that "the public generally seems indifferent to the issue or unwilling to rehash the bitter prewar debate over the reasons for the war." Of course, it's hard to judge the public's interest in a story the media have largely shielded them from.

DOWNING STREET DOSSIER

• BBC Transcript; Panorama: March 20, 2005; Tony Iraq & The Truth; This is a transcript that includes direct quotations from highly classified and recently declassified documents -- the Downing Street Minutes are included, as are memorandum from defense, intelligence and foreign relations staff; C. Rice, John Bolton, Jack Straw, Jaques Chirac, and other key players in the leadup to an illegal war. On the night of March 20, 2005 3.4 million British homes watched this program. Yet no one in America knows about it. Why? BBC TRANSCRIPT
  
• Wilmshurst Resignation Letter;Foreign Office Minister's Statement on Illegal Iraq Invasion; March 16, 2003; Wilmshurst Letter
  
• Goldsmith Legal Opinion; March 7, 2003; Goldsmith Opinion
  
• Downing Street Minutes; July 23, 2002; Downing Street Minutes
  
• RAF Bombing; Times Online, UK - May 29, 2005; RAF and US aircraft doubled the rate at which they were dropping bombs on Iraq in 2002 in an attempt to provoke Saddam Hussein into giving the allies... RAF BOMBING RAIDS TRIED TO GOAD SADDAM INTO WAR
  
  US TESTIMONY BACKED UP BY MINUTES
  
  1. Richard Clarke relates that as soon as Bush returned to the White House on September 11th, Rumsfeld stated "we needed to bomb Iraq and we all said, 'No no, al Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan.'" Clarke also reports Bush demanded that Clarke find a reason to attack Iraq as well.
  SLATE: RICHARD CLARK 20/03/04
  CLARKE TRANSCRIPT; CBS 60 Minutes;
  
  2. Paul O'Neill, who was Secretary of the Treasury until Bush replaced him, was very clear when he stated that invading Iraq was on the table from the first day Bush took office. PAUL O'NEILL; JAN 2004;
  
  MEMO: THIRD OR FOURTH HAND OPINION?
  
  McCain:
  While the memo has begun to get wider coverage in print, broadcasters have maintained a near silence on the issue. The story has turned up in a few short CNN segments (Crossfire, 5/13/05; Live Sunday, 5/15/05; Wolf Blitzer Reports, 5/16/05), but the only mention of the memo FAIR found on the major broadcast networks came on ABC's Sunday morning show This Week (5/15/05), in which host George Stephanopoulos questioned Sen. John McCain about its contents. When McCain declared that he didn't "agree with it" and defended the Bush administration's decision to go to war, Stephanopoulos didn't question him further. A look at the nightly news reveals not a single story aired about the memo and its implications
  See Also NewYorker, May 23, 2005; The McCain Way
  
  McClellan
  When finally questioned by CNN (5/16/05), White House press secretary Scott McClellan claimed he hadn't seen the memo, but that "the reports" about it were "flat-out wrong." British government officials, however, did not dispute the contents of the memo--which can be read in full online at and a former senior American official called it "an absolutely accurate description of what transpired" (Knight Ridder, 5/6/05).
  "And in terms of the intelligence, it was wrong, and we are taking steps to correct that and make sure that in the future we have the best possible intelligence, because it's critical in this post-September 11th age, that the executive branch has the best intelligence possible".
  McCLELLAN: MEMO FLAT OUT WRONG
  
  MEMO: WHICH ONE?
  RICE & STRAW DENY SIGNIFICANCE
  Condoleeza Rice aware of Downing Street Minutes/Memo but ignores reporter’s questions; Monday 30th May 2005;
  SECRETARY RICE: Which one is that? Andrea, which one is that?
  FOREIGN SECRETARY STRAW: Which one is that?
  QUESTION: On Iraq. That came out about 10 days ago, 12 days ago. Are you not aware of this memo?
  SECRETARY RICE: Well, a lot of them are, unfortunately, out. (Laughter.)
  RICE & STRAW DENY SIGNIFICANCE OF MINUTES
  
  Whizbang
  As a smoking gun it leaves a lot to be desired," said Kevin Aylward, a northern Virginia-based technology consultant who runs the conservative-leaning blog, Wizbangblog.com. "It's interesting, but it's probably fourth- or fifth-hand information."; WHIZBANG: Third or Fourth Hand Information:
  
  MINUTES: "INTELLIGENCE WAS NOT FIXED"
  Bush and Blair Press Conference; June 8, 2005
  
  MINUTES: JOURNALISTICALLY MANDATORY
  
  Lead Up To War; by Mark Danner, New York Review of Books, June 9, 2005
  With a close reading of the Downing Street Minutes, which documents a closed-door meeting of senior British officials in July 2002, an essay suggests that appeals to the United Nations in the buildup to the Iraq war were intended to legalize military action, not avert it. The conversion of the administration to the "U.N. route" was not, the essay argues, Colin Powell's chief political accomplishment or his most costly credibility gamble, but the predictable product of British unwillingness to cooperate in what would otherwise have been an extralegal offensive. Efforts to discredit the empty-handed inspectors, the essay suggests, were right out of Joseph Goebbels' playbook; LEADUP TO WAR
  
  "Journalitically Mandatory"; Michael Getler, Washington Post ombudsman: Getler called investigation of the memo's conclusions "journalistically mandatory" and suggested that the Post story should have been placed on the front page
  Network Viewers Still in the Dark on "Smoking Gun Memo"; FAIR - May 20, 2005
  Getler called investigation of the memo's conclusions "journalistically mandatory" and suggested that the Post story should have been placed on the front page. FAIR: VIEWERS STILL IN THE DARK
  
  "Minutes of High Powered Meeting - Life and Death Issue"; Byron Calame, NYT;
  New 'NYT' Public Editor Jumps the Gun with First Critique; Editor & Publisher - May 21, 2005; Calame concluded that "it appears that key editors simply were slow to recognize that the minutes of a high-powered meeting on a life-and-death issue” MINUTES OF A MEETING ON LIFE AND DEATH ISSUE
  
  Even as Bush vowed diplomacy, he toiled for war; by BILLIE STANTON;Tucson Citizen; May 17, 2005; Prime Minister Tony Blair, known in the British press as Bush's poodle, had signed on to the effort early on, and his Downing Street staff does not deny the authenticity of the secret memo obtained by the Sunday London Times. "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." That last sentence should stop every American in his tracks. The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.; VOWING DIPLOMACY, TOILING FOR WAR
  
  BREAKING THROUGH US MEDIA BLACKOUT
  
  ILLEGAL WAR IRAQ: Breaking Through US Media Blackout
  Grace Reid, Uruknet; May 15, 2005; BREAKING THROUGH BLACKOUT
  
  FAIR ACTION ALERT; Network Viewers Still in the Dark on "Smoking Gun Memo" Print media continue to downplay story; May 20, 2005 STILL IN THE DARK
  
  Media Black Out Downing Street Minutes; David Swanson
  Collective Bellaciao, France - May 31, 2005..
  MEDIA BLACKOUT