The Downing Street Memo
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08.13.06
A new report from NBC News claims that Bush Administration officials pressured the British to arrest the London terrorists a week before British surveillance work was complete (via TPM via commenter Suzy). The attack, according to the report, was not imminent.
This is explosive news:
LONDON - NBC News has learned that U.S. and British authorities had a significant disagreement over when to move in on the suspects in the alleged plot to bring down trans-Atlantic airliners bound for the United States.
A senior British official knowledgeable about the case said British police were planning to continue to run surveillance for at least another week to try to obtain more evidence, while American officials pressured them to arrest the suspects sooner. The official spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the case.
In contrast to previous reports, the official suggested an attack was not imminent, saying the suspects had not yet purchased any airline tickets. In fact, some did not even have passports.
[. . .]
At the White House, a top aide to President Bush denied the account.
[. . .]
The British official said the Americans also argued over the timing of the arrest of suspected ringleader Rashid Rauf in Pakistan, warning that if he was not taken into custody immediately, the U.S. would “render” him or pressure the Pakistani government to arrest him.
British security was concerned that Rauf be taken into custody “in circumstances where there was due process,” according to the official, so that he could be tried in British courts. Ultimately, this official says, Rauf was arrested over the objections of the British.
This goes way beyond what we understood previously — that the Bush Administration knew about the arrests ahead of time, and timed a PR offensive against the Democrats around it.
It turns out that it was the other way around: the Bush Administration orchestrated the timing of the arrests to coordinate them with the PR offensive, which attacked Democrats after Ned Lamont’s victory in the Connecticut primary.
For the GOP, the short term political importance of getting the Lamont victory, and the developing sense that America had fully turned against the Iraq War, off the news was reason enough to disrupt an active terror investigation. The disruption hurt the legal case against the terrorists — it will be much harder to convict them without passports or airline tickets. The GOP was so insistent on the timing that they threatened to “render” the lead suspect if the British did not comply with their wishes.
The Republicans, in other words, once again played politics with national security, and hurt anti-terrorism efforts as they did so.
They cannot be trusted to protect us from the threat of terrorism because — to paraphrase The Downing Street Memo — they fix terror investigations around smear campaigns.
Update: The All-Spin Zone, The Heretik, The Next Hurrah, Suburban Guerrilla, Sysyphus Shrugged, Brilliant at Breakfast, Shakespeare’s Sister (crossposted on Ezra Klein, ksh01 @ Daily Kos, MoJo Blog, Cursor, and Memeorandom have more. See Technorati for a full list of blogs commenting on this story.
Update II (8/14/06): Dan Rubin, who writes the blog Blinq for the Philadelphia Inquirer, is skeptical of what he calls “this conspiracy theory,” but he has written a nice summary of the conflicting reports on the timing of the arrests. As I noted in his comment section, however, his claim that the report came from a single source is not exactly right. Parts of the report (the claim, for instance, that “the attack was not imminent”) did come from a single UK source, but the most important revelation — that Bush Administration officials rushed the arrests — has been confirmed by multiple sources in both America and the UK.
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08.17.05
We now have proof: while rescue workers in New York continued to sift through the rubble of the World Trade Center, and while President Bush promised the nation that he would capture Osama bin Laden dead or alive, his administration neglected the War on Terrorism and concentrated instead on settling old scores.
All-Spin Zone has the story.
As Shakespeare’s Sister points out, these important document appear to confirm The Downing Street Memo.
I ask every person whose life was directly affected by September 11, but who has continued to support the President’s War in Iraq: how do you feel now, knowing for certain that less than a month after that day, Bush had already lost sight of Public Enemy #1?
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08.10.05
Like a lone ranger standing on the crest of a hill, looking down at a village overrun by amoral bandits, Cindy Sheehan has camped out in front of George W. Bush’s Crawford ranch, demanding justice.
But unlike that ranger, Cindy is not alone.
Those of you who had a chance to hear Cindy’s moving testimony at The Downing Street Memo hearings know that this mother, whose son Casey was killed in the Iraq War, is a force to be reckoned with.
And she is a force that George W. Bush has refused to reckon with, a voice he has refused to hear.
But the President cannot continue to hide in his ranch with his hands clamped over his ears. He cannot continue to ignore Cindy’s searing anger, her persistent questions, her heartfelt grief.
Maureen Dowd wrote today that “It’s hard to think of another president who lived in such meta-insulation. His rigidly controlled environment allows no chance encounters with anyone who disagrees. He never has to defend himself to anyone, and that is cognitively injurious. He’s a populist who never meets people - an ordinary guy who clears brush, and brush is the only thing he talks to.”
Bush will not meet with Cindy because he is afraid — he knows that he will not be able to charm her with a cute nickname, throw her off-track with some self-deprecating humor, or dazzle her with the accouterments of his office.
Bush will not meet with Cindy because he is afraid to look into her eyes — to see the pain that this unnecessary war has caused, to see that his actions have consequences.
One strong woman.
One weak man, afraid to look her in the eye.
It could not be any clearer than that.
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07.11.05
In case you haven’t noticed the change in my sidebar, The Awaken the Mainstream Media campaign has now morphed into The Campaign to Awaken the U.S. Senate.
Thanks to the hard work and dedication of The Big Brass Alliance, the people behind the Awaken the Media campaign, and every single person who sent an email or called the targeted media outlets, we succeeded in getting coverage of The Downing Street Memo in the press.
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06.24.05
A number of Downing Street Memo links for your Friday reading pleasure:
Jefferson Morley, The Washington Post: Why the Mainstream Media Is Catching On
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.”
Dick Cheney calls the DSM wrong, even though he hasn’t read it: Cheney: Iraq will be ‘enormous success story’
“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 of Knight Ridder Newspapers speaks about the DSM on Philadelphia’s Daily News podcast, Philly Feed (direct link). As one of the hosts, Eric Mayberry says, “It seems like the Downing Street thing has legs.”
Here is a partial transcript (all errors are mine, but I think I got it straight)
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.
We have to keep up the pressure on the Bush administration to answer these memos. As long as soldiers are dying for the administration’s lies, the build-up to war is not “old news.”
Strobel’s comments show that groups like the Big Brass Alliance and Awaken the Media are having a real effect.
But until we get some real answers, we will not — we can not — relent.
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06.20.05
After remaining quiet for months, wingnut blogs have sprung into action on The Downing Street Memos, and are now engaged in a duplicitous campaign to cast doubt on the authenticity of the documents. It’s a vintage wingnut maneuver, and it’s evidence of how worried conservatives are about the implications of the Memos.
But the authenticity of the memos has not been disputed by anyone who was present at the meeting.
If the wingnuts are right, the following people and news organizations are wrong:
1. Tony Blair, Prime Minister of England
“The memo’s authenticity was not disputed by Blair’s office.”
(Christian Science Monitor, 5/17/05).
Blair had motivation enough to dispute the authenticity of the memos, as they were released during his re-election campaign and damaged his credibility. But Blair has never disputed the veracity of the memo.
When Blair was asked about the memo at a White House press conference, he confirmed its legitimacy:
Q. Thank you, sir. On Iraq, the so-called Downing Street memo from July 2002 says intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy of removing Saddam through military action. Is this an accurate reflection of what happened? Could both of you respond?
PRIME MINISTER BLAIR: Well, I can respond to that very easily. No, the facts were not being fixed in any shape or form at all. And let me remind you that that memorandum was written before we then went to the United Nations. Now, no one knows more intimately the discussions that we were conducting as two countries at the time than me. And the fact is we decided to go to the United Nations and went through that process, which resulted in the November 2002 United Nations resolution, to give a final chance to Saddam Hussein to comply with international law. He didn’t do so. And that was the reason why we had to take military action.
2. The Times of London
(a conservative newspaper owned by Rupurt Murdoch):
“. . . there is no further doubting of the memo’s authenticity.” (6/9/05)
3. MSNBC:
“But now, war critics have come up with seven more memos, verified by NBC News.” (6/14/05)
4. CNN:
“British officials did not dispute the document’s authenticity, and Michael Boyce, then Britain’s Chief of Defense Staff, told the paper that Britain had not then made a decision to follow the United States to war, but it would have been “irresponsible” not to prepare for the possibility.” (5/12/05)
5. The Times-Record Herald:
“High-ranking current and former members of both in the British and U.S. governments have reportedly confirmed the memo’s authenticity.” (6/13/05)
6. Editor and Publisher:
“That memo and other internal British government documents were originally obtained by Michael Smith, who writes for the London Sunday Times, Pincus notes. Excerpts were made available to The Washington Post, and the material was confirmed as authentic by British sources.” (6/11/05)
7. The Washington Post’s Jefferson Morley:
“There is no dispute about the authenticity of the Downing Street memo.” (6/7/05)
8. The New York Times:
“Officials at the British Foreign Office in London, while insisting on anonymity, said in response to queries from The New York Times that they would not dispute the authenticity of the document. A spokesman for the White House, David Almacy, said that while he could not comment on its authenticity, it “was written eight months before the war began. There was significant postwar planning in the time that elapsed.” (6/12/05)
9. USA Today:
“USA TODAY chose not to publish anything about the memo before today for several reasons, says Jim Cox, the newspaper’s senior assignment editor for foreign news. ‘We could not obtain the memo or a copy of it from a reliable source,’ Cox says. ‘There was no explicit confirmation of its authenticity from (Blair’s office). And it was disclosed four days before the British elections, raising concerns about the timing.’” (6/8/05, emphasis added)
10. Raw Story:
“The Butler Committee, a UK commission looking into WMD, has quoted the documents and accepted their authenticity, along with British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.”
(thanks to Shakespeare’s Sister for many of these links).
So, whom do you trust?
On one side, you have everyone who was at the meeting in question, the Prime Minister of England, a score of reputable news organizations, and a conservative British paper.
On the other side, you have the skippers of the Swift Boat campaign.
The fatal flaw of the wingnut campaign of deception is that the sources involved are British, and not under Karl Rove’s control.
HOWEVER, if the wingnuts are truly concerned about this issue, I think that they will gladly join our call for a congressional investigation of the Memos. That, it seems to me, would be the best way to determine the legitimacy of the Memos.
Update: One of their own throws cold water on the fire:
So I don’t blame Ed and others for being suspicious. But I can’t get past the fact that no one in the Blair government has blown the whistle, as one would expect if the Smith papers didn’t accurately recount the contents of real documents. This is completely unlike the first hours of confusion when the White House had no idea what to make of the purported Killian documents. Nor, in my view, is Ed’s analogy to the fact that a single, anonymous Defense Department source didn’t question Newsweek’s Koran flushing story when it was first presented valid. We are not dealing here with a single anonymous source who may or may not have any reason to know whether a particular fact is correct. We are dealing, rather, with Tony Blair and numerous members of his administration, who have had a couple of months now to figure out whether someone is passing off fraudulent minutes of their own high-level meetings, in an effort to make them (and others) look bad. I haven’t heard any explanation of why Blair and his colleagues would sit back and allow such a fraud to be perpetrated. It’s not enough to say that the real documents are secret and consequently can’t be made public; that wouldn’t prevent Blair and others from simply saying the reported ones are false, if that were the case.
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06.17.05
hack
n.
(the wordsmiths at All-Spin Zone have more)
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06.17.05
Editor and Publisher columnist William E. Jackson, Jr. asks whether The Downing Street Memos are The Pentagon Papers of Our Time:
On public radio this week, Walter Pincus, the senior national security reporter for The Washington Post, posed the question: if the statements in the various Downing Street memos are to be dismissed as “old” news–since preparing to go to war in Iraq and questions about intelligence were already “conventional wisdom” and published as such in 2002–then why was so much made of the Pentagon Papers back in the 1970s when reporters knew early on, and were writing, that the Vietnam war was a disaster in which the U.S. had made a string of mistakes?
Ironically, it is the same New York Times which bravely published the Pentagon Papers that, as recently as today, is still treating the Downing Street Papers as merely fodder for “antiwar” types.
[snip]
It is hard to escape the conclusion that, for the most part, the American print media’s bringing up the rear “beetlebum” approach in covering the memos constituted a rather blatant dereliction of duty. It indicates a complicity in resisting a re-examination of the official lies on the path to war. It is almost enough to make one believe that major media outlets are afraid to take on the White House’s version of truth, either out of worry over being out of step with other “mainstream media,” or because they fear losing access to high-level sources, or because top editors supported, and support, the invasion and occupation of Iraq–and in some well-known cases, their own stories “fixed” intelligence to fit the pro-war view.
I’ve been disappointed by the New York Times’ lack of coverage of The Downing Street Memo. Just look at today’s article on yesterday’s hearings, which frames them, as Mr. Jackson says above, “as merely fodder for ‘antiwar’ types.”
But we’re not anti-war so much as we are pro-truth.
This “dereliction of duty,” coupled with the collected work of Judith Miller, Jayson Blair, Elisabeth Bumiller, and Daniel Okrent, have caused me to lose faith in a paper that I used to respect, and even venerate.
You’re probably wondering what took me so long.
I’m not sure, but I do know that the DSM issue is the straw that broke the camel’s back. It follows a series of bone-headed moves that the Times has made lately, ranging from its plan to put its best assets behind closed doors to its privileging of style over technology to its insufferable examinations of class in America.
The paper might have weathered any one of these mistakes in isolation, but together, they reveal a paper that has seriously lost its way.
So, where is the future of journalism to be found? I’m not sure, but I think we can see the signs here, here, here, here, and here. And — who knows? — maybe even here.
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06.16.05
Please add your thoughts and observations in the comments.
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06.16.05
The Washington Post is holding a live chat with Michael Smith, a reporter for the Sunday Times of London (the paper that broke news of the memo), right now.
It is one thing for the New York Times or the Washington Post to say that we were being told that the intelligence was being fixed by sources inside the CIA or Pentagon or the NSC and quite another to have documentary confirmation in the form of the minutes of a key meeting with the Prime Minister’s office. Think of it this way, all the key players were there. This was the equivalent of an NSC meeting, with the President, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condi Rice, George Tenet, and Tommy Franks all there. They say the evidence against Saddam Hussein is thin, the Brits think regime change is illegal under international law so we are going to have to go to the UN to get an ultimatum, not as a way of averting war but as an excuse to make the war legal, and oh by the way we arent preparing for what happens after and no-one has the faintest idea what Iraq will be like after a war. Not reportable, are you kidding me?
(link via Carla)
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