Media Black Out Downing Street Minutes

This is a great article. It is posted in the "Editorial" area, which seems to be moving very slowly today. Please read this article and the excellent DU thread, then give it your recommendation, if you're so inclined.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x128950

Media Black Out Downing Street Minutes

By David Swanson
May 31, 2005

Aggressive followers and participants in U.S. politics often have strong opinions about the Downing Street Minutes. Most other Americans have not heard of or are not clear about what the Downing Street Minutes are.

How is this possible? Here we have the official government minutes from a meeting of British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top national security officials, including a briefing by Richard Dearlove, then-director of Britain's CIA equivalent, MI-6, who had just returned from meetings with high U.S. Government officials in Washington. While the meeting recorded in these minutes occurred on July 23, 2002, months before President Bush submitted his resolution on Iraq to the United States Congress and months before Bush and Blair asked the United Nations to resume its inspections for alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the minutes make clear that Bush had decided to overthrow Iraqi President Saddam Hussein by launching a war which, Dearlove reports, would be "justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD ." Dearlove continues: "But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

In other words, here is an official document confirming the earlier reports of various former Bush Administration officials that Bush had decided to invade Iraq long before he made that public, and that he manipulated evidence to provide a bogus justification for the attack. Here is a smoking gun if there ever can be one. How can people not know about this?



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http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=537

Don't let me go to page 2 with no readers.

This article is an excellent one to e-mail to the editor of your local newspaper, along with a link to the MPLS editorial calling Bush a liar and a link to Nader's call for impeachment based on the memo published in the Boston Globe.

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Not that you would care but the (Downing)memo is not a primary source, which is why it didn't get much press attention. Anybody can write an opinion memo about anything.

If you have proof Mr. Bush has lied about anything, please send it. Even the New York Times has dismissed these minutes as "second-hand".

Editor


I posted this earlier this morning. Notice the snide attitude of this Star Trib editor!

posted on the other DU thread (the one I linked to in post # 1 above). I couldn't believe how rude this person was.

I responded at length to this editor e-mail in post #8 of that other thread. For one thing, the Downing Street Memo is most certainly a "primary source." To try to claim otherwise is absolutely bizarre.