But an increasing number of news editors are recognizing the newsworthiness of the DSM story. Newsday , the New York tabloid, picked up the AP story. The Houston Chronicle published DSM excerpts this week. So did the San Francisco Chronicle. The editors of the Detroit Free Press say the DSM story is “too significant to be dismissed as simply old news — as the White House would like — or left to historians.”

“Remember what happened after the supposed memo was written. We went to the United Nations. We got a unanimous vote out of the Security Council for a resolution calling on Saddam Hussein to come clean,” he said.

“The president of the United States took advantage of every possibility to try to resolve this without having to use military force. It wasn’t possible in this case.”

Warren Strobel: They are the real thing. . . Neither the British nor the U.S. government has challenged the authenticity of these documents. . .

To me, it’s pretty clear that it shows that the Bush administration had made a fairly fundamental decision as early as March 2002 that it was going to get rid of Saddam and probably do that by invading Iraq. . . the effort to go through the United Nations is not really an effort to find a peaceful solution or a way out of an invasion, but it’s a way to gather international support. In other words, they were hoping that Saddam would stiff the United Nations, would refuse inspections, and that would give them an excuse and would build international support for an invasion. So, you look through this and you don’t find any real discussion of other options, other than war.

Frank Burgos (host): So it seems like they came to the conclusion we’re going to go to war . . . and then find the reasons to justify it?

WS: Yeah, I think that’s accurate. . . another thing that’s interesting to me, and I’ve reported on some of these issues . . . there’s great concern on the British side after these senior British officials have gone to Washington and met with senior Bush administration officials, there’s great concern that the Bush administration has not — is not — preparing or planning sufficiently for the aftermath of an invasion. Most people would now agree, I think that there was not sufficient planning done for what would happen after Saddam fell, and that has led to some of the problems we see today.

[snip]

W.S. [on criticism of the MSM by liberal blogosphere] It’s one of my first encounters with the blogosphere, and the power it has. I think all of us in the media are getting just tons of emails, mostly from the liberal blogs, urging us to look into this more, to report about it, etc. etc. So it shows that the blogosphere has a real impact. Obviously, they don’t drive our coverage, but they certainly can get things on the agenda.

[snip]

W.S. [The memo says that] military action was now seen as inevitable, but the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy, seeming to indicate that the Bush Administration early in 2002 was trying to manipulate intelligence, or form the intelligence to justify a decision for war.

I think that’s news.