The Downing Street Memos: piecing together the political
puzzle
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| Posted
Jul 11, 2005 PT by Dani Veracity |
"It sounds like a grudge between Bush and Saddam,"
Peter Rickets, political director of the British foreign office, told
Foreign Secretary Jack Straw in the March 22, 2002 Downing Street memo.
Though many British and American anti-war groups have questioned the war
against Iraq and the
search for Osama bin Laden from the beginning, the now-famous Downing
Street memos may be the catalyst that sparks their grumbling into a
decisive roar. For the British, the first Downing Street memo -- a
minute-by-minute record of a meeting between British Prime Minister Tony
Blair, Straw and other top officials -- reinforced the prevailing
anti-war sentiment among the British populace. Over a million Britons
took to the streets to protest British involvement in the war at its
start, and they still want no part of it now. "The assumption is
that Britons delivered their verdict on Iraq by cutting Labour's
majority," writes Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian
article. "Yes, they did lie to us."
Americans have been even more divided about the war in Iraq.
Freedland writes that the United States "sleepwalked into
battle." While I personally would argue against such an expression,
many Americans did unquestioningly accept the U.S. government's
assertion that Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida were an evil partnership that
carried out the September 11 attacks in unison. Accordingly, there
currently are many Americans who continue to believe in the
righteousness of American and British military actions in the Middle
East, regardless of mounting evidence that the war was unjustified on
legal (if not ethical) grounds. There are also many Americans who
starkly oppose the events occurring in the Middle East. For such
Americans, the Downing Street memos may prove to be the validation
they've been hoping for.
The Downing Street Memos: The Basic Facts
The Downing Street memos have become the subject of immense
controversy. Not everyone is convinced of their relevance or even of
their validity. So before we dive any deeper into the dark waters of
this controversy, let's review the facts concerning the Downing Street
memos.
In the May 1, 2005 online edition of London's Sunday Times,
reporter Michael Smith published a memo sent from Matthew Rycroft,
British Prime Minister Tony Blair's foreign policy aide, to a group of
British officials. In that memo, Rycroft summarized the Prime Minister's
July 23, 2002 meeting on Iraq. You can read the full text of the memo,
now known as the Downing Street Memo (DSM), for yourself in the Times
Online. We'll go over some of the thought-provoking details later on
in this article.
Then, on June 12, 2005, the Sunday Times published a
second memo, now commonly referred to as "DSM II." On July
21, 2002, the memo was originally sent to Prime Minister Blair and his
top advisers to brief them for the July 23 meeting that was detailed in
the first Downing Street memo. Again, DSM II contains information that
we'll explore later on
The two Downing Street memos have also recently created interest in
two Daily Telegraph articles ("Failure
isn't an option, but it doesn't mean they will avoid it" and "Secret
papers show that Blair was warned of Iraq chaos"). These
articles were published by Smith on September 18, 2004 and were also
based on six other Downing Street memos. Immediately upon publication,
Smith's articles were widely quoted throughout the British press.
On October 5, 2004, University of Cambridge professor Michael
Lewis made facsimiles of Smith's typed transcripts available online;
however, the majority of the American public was unaware of these
articles. In fact, on June 15, 2005, following the Sunday Times
publication of DSM II in London, the Los Angeles Times
published an article,
referring to the six memos as "new" -- only to Americans, of
course. The Los Angeles Times article states, "Michael
Smith, the defense writer for the Times of London who revealed
the Downing Street minutes in a story May 1, provided a full text of the
six new documents to the Los Angeles Times." With the
American populace largely unaware of these documents during the recent
presidential election, one may question how the results of the November
2, 2004 election might have been effected.
Are They Authentic Government Memos?
A key fact that you should be aware of before reading the memos'
contents is that the published memos were transcribed from photocopies
of the original documents. This means that Smith is unable to provide
original source material as proof of the memos' validity. In response to
questions about the accuracy of his sources, Smith explained his actions
to an online news site, Raw
Story: “I was given [the memos] last September while still on
the [Daily Telegraph]. I was given very strict orders from the
lawyers as to how to handle them. I first photocopied them to ensure
they were on our paper and returned the originals, which were on
government paper and therefore government property, to the source. It
was these photocopies that I worked on, destroying them shortly before
we went to press on Sept. 17, 2004. Before we destroyed them, the legal
desk secretary typed the text up on an old-fashioned typewriter.”
Smith also told Raw Story that he destroyed the photocopies
because they might have marks on them that would identify the person who
provided him the documents.
In addition to Smith's own explanations about the memos' validity,
some British governmental organizations do not deny the authenticity of
the documents in question. For example, in a June 7, 2005 press
conference, Prime Minister Blair apparently confirmed the authenticity
of the first Downing Street memo in stating, "That memorandum was
written before we went to the United Nations." The British Foreign
Office "acknowledged the documents were genuine but stressed they
were only a snapshot of thinking at a particular time," according
to a September
20, 2004 article in the Guardian
The U.S. government has given less of a response to the press
concerning the Downing Street memos. According to the Wikipedia
entry on the
Downing Street Memo, US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and White
House spokesman Scott McClellan neither denied nor confirmed their
legitimacy as genuine government documents. President
Bush, the British Embassy in Washington and an unnamed White House
official have also yet to comment specifically on the memos'
authenticity as governmental documents. The single exception to this
tight-lipped policy occurred when Vice President Dick Cheney called the
first Downing Street memo a "supposed memo," in his June
23, 2005 interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer. By all assessments, the
Downing Street memos are authentic documents issued from within the
British government.
U.S. Congressional Response
Many citizen groups, such as the Progressive Democrats of America,
Veterans for Peace, Gold Star Families for Peace, Velvet Revolution,
Democratic Underground, Global Exchange, Code Pink, Democracy Rising and
911Citizens Watch, also believe in the authenticity of the Downing
Street memos and perceive them as a call to action – and they're not
the only ones. The U.S. Congress has the power to take this issue to the
next level, and a small group of its members are pushing for that to
happen.
In his widely published article, "Just
hearsay, or the new Watergate tapes?", David Paul Kuhn explains
Democratic Rep. John Conyers' fight to call a congressional inquiry of
the Downing Street memos. Though they were prevented from holding an
official hearing, on June 16, 2005, Conyers and about three dozen other
Democrats held a forum about the Downing Street memos in the basement --
yes, the basement -- of the Capitol building. That's where they were
consigned to hold their forum; moreover, they had to juggle the meeting
with attending 11 votes on the House floor that were scheduled at the
same time as the forum. Many believe that the timing of those 11 votes
and the location to which the group of Congressmen were delegated to
hold their forum were no accident.
Despite these obstructions, Kuhn reports that Rep. Conyers still
had an attentive audience when he declared that the first Downing Street
memo was the first "'primary source" document to report that
prewar intelligence was intentionally manipulated in order to make a
case for invading Iraq. Kuhn further writes, "The Democratic
representatives attending the forum said they believed that if such
information had gone out prior to the war, neither the House nor the
Senate would have supported the Oct. 11, 2002 congressional vote giving
the president the power to order the invasion."
Many of the attending Democrats likened the first Downing Street memo
to Watergate, although no one specifically raised the possibility of
impeachment. On the other hand, New York representative Charles B.
Rangel asked a question that was on the minds of many Democrats:
"Has the president misled, or deliberately misled, the
Congress?" As Kuhn points out, deliberately misleading the Congress
is indeed grounds for impeachment. The forum did get some mainstream
media coverage and on May 5, 2005, 89 members of Congress sent President
Bush a letter containing questions about the Downing Street memos. They
have yet to receive a response, so Rep. Conyers is now running an
internet petition to collect private citizens' signatures. You can take
part on Rep.
Conyers' web site.
The Downing Street Memos Speak for Themselves
You might be wondering why so many people are so concerned about
the Downing Street memos. The cause of their concern is evident in the
text of the memos. According to downingstreetmemo.com,
the contents of the memos contradict the Bush and Blair administrations'
public statements about the war.
The first Downing Street memo has received the most media
coverage; it contains the greatest number of potentially inflammatory
details. For example, the memo reads, "C reported on his recent
talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military
action was now seen as inevitable. 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 NSC had no patience with the UN route and no enthusiasm for
publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little
discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action."
"C" refers to Sir Richard Dearlove, who was chief of the MI6,
Britain's Secret Intelligence Service.
The statement that "military action was now seen as
inevitable" seems harmless enough -- until you consider that the
memo was dated July 2002. In his Mar. 8, 2003 radio address, President
Bush had stated, "We are doing everything we can to avoid war in
Iraq." Another statement found in DSM contradicts the president's
message: "It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take
military action, even if the timing was not yet decided." The most
potentially inflammatory statement of all reads, "The intelligence
and facts were being fixed around the policy."
Such a statement does not at all reflect how a proper government
should be run, by any means. It's also quite clearly not the message
that the American public was given. Blitzer presented this issue to Vice
President Cheney in their interview, stating, "The criticism though
that's been leveled at you, in effect, pressured the intelligence
community to come up with this assessment…" The vice president
then interrupted Blitzer at that moment, but he eventually responded,
"It's (the assessment) not true. And anybody who's looked at it,
and several people have, has found it's not true … There's nothing to
support it. There never was because it never happened."
In Vice President Cheney's assessment, either the Downing Street memo
is a fake or many people's interpretations of it are wrong. But Prime
Minister Blair apparently has validated the memo as a genuine document
originating from his government. With that in consideration, can the
Vice President truly be right and thus negate our interpretations of the
text as wrong? Is there really another way to interpret Sir Richard's
comment that "the intelligence and facts were fixed around the
policy?" Those are the questions we must ask ourselves regarding
the first Downing Street memo.
The second Downing Street memo focuses on the Blair
administration's need to justify entering war with Iraq. DSM II states:
"Ministers are invited to … engage the U.S. on the need to set
military plans within a realistic military strategy, which includes
identifying the succession to Saddam Hussein and creating the conditions
necessary to justify government military action." The key phrase
is, "creating the conditions necessary to justify government
military action." Again, as far as any informed citizen is
concerned, a proper government doesn't create the requisite
conditions necessary to justify a war; rather, a proper government responds
to such conditions, should they arise of their own accord.
Let's review the six other Downing Street memos; the documents
that Smith based his September 2004 articles on. In UK Foreign Office
Political Director Peter Ricketts' memo to UK Foreign Secretary Jack
Straw dated March 22, 2002, Ricketts wrote, "Even the best survey
of Iraq's WMD
programmes will not show much advance in recent years on the nuclear,
missile or CW/BW (chemical or biological weapons) fronts: The programmes
are extremely worrying but have not, as far as we know, been stepped
up."
Much like the statements contained in DSM, this statement seems
innocuous enough on its own. However, let's place it into its proper
context and examine it in light of President Bush's and U.S. Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's statements about Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction. In his September 12, 2002 speech to the UN General
Assembly, President Bush stated: "Right now, Iraq is expanding and
improving facilities that were used for the production of biological
weapons." On March 20, 2003, Rumsfeld told American troops that
Hussein is advancing his weapons of mass destruction daily: "With
each passing day, Saddam Hussein advances his arsenal of weapons of mass
destruction and could pass them along to terrorists. If he is allowed to
do so, the result could be the deaths not of 3,000 people, as on
September 11th, but of 30,000 or 300,000 or more innocent people."
One could argue that from March 22 to September 12, 2002 Hussein
may indeed have stepped up his production of weapons of mass
destruction. If such an argument could be validated, it would support
both the memo from Ricketts and the statements from President Bush and
Rumsfeld. But the question remains: Where are the WMDs? If Hussein was
advancing his weapons of mass destruction "with each passing
day" as Rumsfeld suggests, by now these weapons would have become
so numerous as to render their full concealment impossible. So just
where are these weapons?
Ricketts' memo expresses doubt on another valuable point relating to
the so-called "evil alliance" between Iraq and Al Qaida. The
memo says, "[The] U.S. scrambling to establish a link between Iraq
and Al Qaida is so far frankly unconvincing. To get public and
Parliamentary support for military operations, we have to be convincing
that the threat is so serious/imminent that it is worth sending out
troops to die for; it is qualitatively different from the threat posed
by other proliferators who are close to achieving nuclear capability
(including Iran)." Ricketts boils down the whole situation to a
rather striking conclusion: "It sounds like a grudge between Bush
and Saddam."
According to a memo dated March 25, 2002, Straw, the recipient of
Ricketts' March 22 memo, believed in Ricketts' assessment enough to
relay the information to Prime Minister Blair. Straw stated: "If 11
September had not happened, it is doubtful that the U.S. would not be
considering military action against Iraq. In addition, there has been no
credible evidence to link Iraq with UBL (Osama bin Laden) and Al Qaida.
Objectively, the threat from Iraq has not worsened as a result of 11
September. What has however changed is the tolerance of the
international community (especially that of the US), the world having
witnessed (sic) on September 11 just what determined evil
people can these days perpetuate."
Based on these two memos, it is clearly evident that top-ranking
British officials seriously doubted the justifications presented by the
United States in preparation for a war against Iraq. Despite the doubts
that existed at the highest levels of the British government, it is
engaged along with the United States in a war that has no timetable and
no end in sight.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair's Initial Response to the Memos
After reading the Downing Street memos, one cannot help but to
wonder what precisely Prime Minister Blair thought about them initially.
After all, the controversial memos were written by his officials. In a
June 7, 2005 interview with Blair -- almost a week before the American
press at large commented on the issue -- Online News Hour
reporter Gwen Ifill confronted Blair about the first Downing Street
memo. Blair responded, "Basically, the case that people are making,
that somehow we'd taken the decision to invade, you know, irrespective
of what Iraq did, it's simply not correct … And so when people -- you
know, they take bits out here of this memo or that memo, or something
someone's supposed to have said at the time, and what people ignore is
we went through a very open, obvious process through the United Nations
and the issue was how did you -- because the view I took, as the
president did, was we had to enforce United Nations resolutions against
countries that were developing and proliferating WMD, that after
September the 11 the world had changed, we had to take a definitive
stance."
In this initial confrontation, Prime Minister Blair took a stance
resembling that of Vice President Cheney's: that the Downing Street
memos were being interpreted wrongly. That indeed would be a fair
rebuttal if, as Blair suggests, people were just reading
"bits" of the memo taken out of context. That, however, is not
the case at all; the full text of the memos is readily available online.
Every person with internet access is able to read the memos in their
entirety and interpret the text in its proper context. Many people have
already done just that. So the question is: "Can so many people be
wrong?" Apparently Prime Minister Blair does not think so, because
he later validated the authenticity of the memos in a June 7, 2005 press
conference, as noted earlier in this article.
U.S. Press Coverage (or Lack Thereof) of the Memos
The British press certainly did not ignore the Downing Street
memos. The U.S. mainstream press, by many standards, did. As Terry Neal
of the Washington Post writes, "While the European media
have covered the memo extensively, it has received scant attention by
the mainstream media in America." It took nearly two weeks for the
American mainstream media to catch on, and it may have never covered the
story if it hadn't been for internet bloggers. According to BBC News,
"Bloggers, keen to keep the pressure on the Bush and Blair
governments, have tried to keep the memos in the limelight and put
pressure on the mainstream media." That doesn't mean that the
Downing Street memos have been well received by the American mainstream
media; there seems to be an overwhelming desire to discredit them.
In their essay, "Smoking
Signposts to Nowhere," Tom Engelhardt and Mark Danner compare
the radically different treatment of the memos displayed by the British
and American mainstream press. In Britain, the memos were front-page
material; in the United States, they're mostly confined to the editorial
pages -- if written about at all.
Of course, the American mainstream press does have its reasons. In
the Washington Post June 15, 2005 editorial, "Iraq,
Then and Now,", the editors argue that the mainstream press
hasn't been covering the memos because they simply offer no
"news": "War opponents have been trumpeting several
British government memos from July 2002, which describe the Bush
administration's preparations for invasion, as revelatory of President
Bush's deceptions about Iraq. Bloggers have demanded to know why 'the
mainstream media' have not paid more attention to them. Though we can't
speak for The Post's news department, the answer appears obvious: The
memos add not a single fact to what was previously known about the
administration's prewar deliberations. Not only that: They add nothing
to what was publicly known in July 2002."
Do the memos truly tell us nothing new? Was it, then, common
knowledge to the public that the British government had felt that a war
with Iraq was more than anything owing to "a grudge between Bush
and Saddam?" By all accounts, the public knew of no such thing
until the Downing Street memos finally enlightened us.
Can We Really Afford to Ignore the Downing Street Memos?
The American mainstream press has its own interests for not
crediting the Downing Street memos as "newsworthy." American
citizens, however, must seriously think about the relevant implications.
For example, what if the
Pentagon Papers or the Watergate scandal had not been considered
newsworthy? In their essay, Engelhard and Danner explore this issue:
"Imagine that the Pentagon Papers or the Watergate scandal had
broken out all over the press -- no, not in the New
York Times or the Washington Post but in newspapers in
Australia or Canada
-- and that, facing their own terrible record of reportage, of years of
being cowed by the Nixon administration, major American papers had
decided that this was not a story worthy of being covered. Imagine that,
initially, they dismissed the revelatory documents and information that
came out of the heart of administration policy-making; then almost
willfully misread them, insisting that evidence of Pentagon planning for
escalation in Vietnam or of Nixon administration planning to destroy its
opponents was at best ambiguous or even nonexistent; finally, when they
found that the documents wouldn't go away, they acknowledged them more
formally with a tired ho-hum, a knowing nod on editorial pages or in
news stories. Actually, they claimed, these documents didn't add up to
much because they had run stories just like this back then themselves.
Yawn. This is, of course, something like the crude pattern that coverage
in the American press has followed on the Downing Street memo, then
memos."
When the American press first covered the Pentagon papers, it didn't
know for certain that it would impact our nation's government and
history in such a lasting way. Similarly, the Downing Street memos could
be something just too big to ignore -- that is already what many Britons
and Americans believe. As Freedland writes in the Guardian,
"The trouble is, it is not behind us. The occupation continues and
people are still dying, daily, in substantial numbers."
In a New York Review of Books essay entitled "Why
the Memo Matters", Mark Danner expresses a similar sentiment:
"We might believe that we are past such matters now. Alas, as
Americans go on dying in Iraq and their fellow citizens grow ever more
impatient with the war, the story of its beginning, clouded with propaganda
and controversy as it is, will become more important, not less … As
support for the war collapses, the cost will become clear: For most
citizens, 1,700 Americans dead later -- tens of thousands of Iraqi dead
later -- the war's beginning remains as murky and indistinct as its
ending." Danner followed with the question "How much
longer?" When relayed this question, Prime Minister Blair's
response was: "I don't know."
The World Speaks on the Downing Street memos (in order of
appearance in this article):
The second problem is the END STATE. Military operations need
clear and compelling military objectives. For Kosovo, it was: Serbs out,
Kosovars back, peace-keepers in. For Afghanistan, destroying the Taleban
and Al Qaida military capability. For Iraq, "regime change"
does not stack up. It sounds like a grudge between Bush and Saddam.
a
memo dated March 22, 2002 from Peter Ricketts, British foreign
office political director, to Jack Straw, Britain's Foreign Secretary,
on advice given on Iraq to Blair
Now try to work this one out. Before the war
on Iraq, Britain witnessed a ferocious debate over whether the case
for conflict was legal and honest. It culminated in the largest
demonstration in the country's history, as a million or more took to the
streets to stop the war. At the same time, the US sleepwalked into
battle. Its press subjected George Bush to a fraction of the scrutiny
endured by Tony Blair: the president's claims about Saddam Hussein's
weapons of mass destruction and links to al-Qaida were barely
challenged. While Blair had to cajole and persuade his MPs to back him,
Bush counted on the easy loyalty of his fellow Republicans
- and of most leading Democrats.
The election itself has played a role too. The assumption is that
Britons delivered their verdict on Iraq by cutting Labour's majority and
therefore the reckoning has, at least partially, happened. That is
certainly how the government likes to play it: privately, ministers will
hint that the whole Iraq business was a bit of a nightmare but it's
behind us now and we can all move on." "Yes,
they did lie to us" by Jonathan Freedland
"The Downing Street memos: The Basic Facts"
The secret Downing Street memo
SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL - UK EYES ONLY
DAVID MANNING
From: Matthew Rycroft
Date: 23 July 2002
S 195 /02
cc: Defence Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Attorney-General, Sir
Richard Wilson, John Scarlett, Francis Richards, CDS, C, Jonathan
Powell, Sally Morgan, Alastair Campbell IRAQ: PRIME MINISTER'S MEETING,
23 JULY
Copy addressees and you met the Prime Minister on 23 July to
discuss Iraq.
This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be
made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its
contents. heading
of the first Downing Street memo (DSM)
Cabinet Office paper: Conditions for military action
The paper, produced by the Cabinet Office on July 21, 2002, is
incomplete because the last page is missing. The following is a
transcript rather than the original document in order to protect the
source.
PERSONAL SECRET UK EYES ONLY
IRAQ: CONDITIONS FOR MILITARY ACTION (A Note by Officials) heading
of the second Downing Street memo (DSM II) with explanation from the Sunday
Times
The Prime Minister knew the US President was determined to
complete what one senior British official had already described as the
unfinished business from his father's war against Saddam Hussein.
There was no way of stopping the Americans invading Iraq and they
would expect Britain, their most loyal ally, to join them. If they
didn't, the transatlantic relationship would be in tatters. But there
were serious problems.
A Secret UK Eyes Only briefing paper was warning that there was no
legal justification for war. So Mr Blair was advised that a strategy
would have to be put in place which would provide a legal basis for war.
It was also vital that the Prime Minister should be able to persuade the
public that war was justified and, just as importantly, convince those
among his backbench MPs who were becoming increasingly vocal in their
opposition to another US-led war.
"Failure
isn't an option, but it doesn't mean they will avoid it" by
Michael Smith
Tony Blair was warned a year before invading Iraq that a stable
post-war government would be impossible without keeping large numbers of
troops there for "many years", secret government papers
reveal.
The documents, seen by The Telegraph, show more clearly than ever
the grave reservations expressed by Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary,
over the consequences of a second Gulf war and how prescient his Foreign
Office officials were in predicting the ensuing chaos
Michael Smith, the defense writer for the Times of London who
revealed the Downing Street minutes in a story May 1, provided a full
text of the six new documents to the Los Angeles Times.
Portions of the new documents, all labeled "secret" or
"confidential," have appeared previously in two British
newspapers, the Times of London and the Telegraph. Blair's government
has not challenged their authenticity.
"New
Memos Detail Early Plans for Invading Iraq" by John Daniszewski
"Are They Authentic Government Memos?"
“I was given them last September while still on the [Daily]
Telegraph,” Smith, who now works for the London Sunday Times, told RAW
STORY. “I was given very strict orders from the lawyers as to how to
handle them.”
“I first photocopied them to ensure they were on our paper and
returned the originals, which were on government paper and therefore
government property, to the source,” he added. The Butler Committee, a
UK commission looking into WMD, has quoted the documents and accepted
their authenticity, along with British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.
Smith said all originals were destroyed in order to both protect the
source and the journalist alike.
“It was these photocopies that I worked on, destroying them
shortly before we went to press on Sept 17, 2004,” he added. “Before
we destroyed them the legal desk secretary typed the text up on an old
fashioned typewriter.” The copying and re-typing were necessary
because markings on the originals might have identified his source,
Smith said. The documents below were leaked last September, prior to the
US election. The document known as DSM was published after the below
documents.
“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.”
"Confirming
the Downing Street documents" by Larisa Alexandrovna
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.
"Text
of Bush, Blair News Conference" by the Associated Press
The Foreign Office yesterday acknowledged the documents were
genuine but stressed they were only a snapshot of thinking at a
particular time. Nor did they reflect the changes that took place over
the following 12 months, in particular referring the issue to the UN,
which the White House did at Mr Blair's behest, though it failed to get
a second security council resolution authorising war.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan, when questioned about the
document's accuracy, did not confirm or deny its accuracy. US Secretary
of State Condoleeza Rice and UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, when
questioned about the document's accuracy, did not confirm or deny its
accuracy. George W. Bush has not responded to questions from Congress
regarding the memo's accuracy. The British Embassy in Washington did not
respond to requests for comment. A White House official said the
administration wouldn't comment on leaked British documents. The
reporter, Michael Smith, who first reported this story has admitted the
memo is a copy, typed by one of his secretaries on a manual typewriter.
He returned the originals to his confidential source.
Wikipedia
entry: "Downing Street memo
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Right, and remember -- remember what happened
after that 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 and comply with the U.N.
Security Council resolution. We did everything we could to resolve this
without having to use military force. We gave him one last chance even
in asking him to step down before we launched military operations. The
memo is just wrong. In fact 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. But I'm convinced
we did absolutely the right thing. I'm convinced that history will bear
that out and that the -- any notion or controversy or poll connected
with that in no way should be taken as justification for challenging the
policy.
Interview
of the Vice President by Wolf Blitzer, CNN
"U.S. Congressional Response"
Among the citizen groups are:
Veterans for Peace
Progressive Democrats of America (PDA)
911Citizens Watch
Democracy Rising
Code Pink
Global Exchange
Democrats.com
Democratic Underground
Velvet Revolution, and
Gold Star Families for Peace
Forced to the basement of the US Capitol and prevented from
holding an official hearing, Michigan representative John Conyers defied
Republicans and held a forum on Thursday calling for a congressional
inquiry into the infamous British document known as the "Downing
Street memo".
Three dozen Democratic representatives shuffled in and out of a
small room to join Mr Conyers in declaring that the Downing Street memo
was the first "primary source" document to report that prewar
intelligence was intentionally manipulated in order make a case for
invading Iraq.
Not only did Republican leaders consign the Democrats to the
basement, but Democrats also claimed that the House scheduled 11 votes
concurrent with the forum to maximise the difficulty of attending it.
Because the forum wasn't an official hearing, it won't become a part of
the Congressional record - but members worked to make sure that the
attending media and activists captured their words for posterity.
The Downing Street memo, so far disputed by Washington and London in
some of its details, but not its authenticity, reports on minutes of a
meeting between the British prime minister, Tony Blair, and his national
security team on July 23 2002.
First reported by the London Sunday Times on May 1 this year, the
internal memo states that, in the opinion of "C" (Sir Richard
Dearlove, the head of the British secret intelligence service),
"intelligence and facts were being fixed around the [Bush
administration's] policy". The author of the memo added that it
"seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military
action".
Since then, several other British government memos have become
public that also make the case that the White House was planning the war
long before it admitted to doing so. The Democratic representatives
attending the forum said they believed that if such information had got
out prior to the war, neither the House nor the Senate would have
supported the October 11 2002 congressional vote giving the president
the power to order the invasion.
To the Democrats taking turns to speak at the forum on Thursday,
the memo was tantamount to the first word of tapes in the Nixon White
House during the Watergate scandal. Impeachment was on these
representatives' minds as four long-time critics of the war in Iraq,
including the former ambassador Joe Wilson, repeatedly urged Congress to
hold an official inquiry into the validity and origins of the Downing
Street memo.
Speaking on the question of impeachment, representative Charles B
Rangel, D-NY, asked, point blank: "Has the president misled, or
deliberately misled, the Congress?"
The answer is at the heart of Mr Conyers' push for further
investigation. Misleading Congress is an impeachable offence, and Mr
Conyers' petition for an inquiry into the memo seemed a first step in
that direction - though no one made that call outright.
"Just
hearsay, or the new Watergate tapes?" by David Paul Kuhn,
originally published in Salon
As a result of these concerns, we would ask that you respond to
the following questions:
1)Do you or anyone in your administration dispute the accuracy of
the leaked document?
2) Were arrangements being made, including the recruitment of allies,
before you sought Congressional authorization to go to war? Did you or
anyone in your Administration obtain Britain's commitment to invade
prior to this time?
3) Was there an effort to create an ultimatum about weapons inspectors
in order to help with the justification for the war as the minutes
indicate?
4) At what point in time did you and Prime Minister Blair first agree it
was necessary to invade Iraq?
5) Was there a coordinated effort with the U.S. intelligence community
and/or British officials to "fix" the intelligence and facts
around the policy as the leaked document states?
These are the same questions 89 Members of Congress, led by Rep. John
Conyers, Jr., submitted to you on May 5, 2005. As citizens and
taxpayers, we believe it is imperative that our people be able to trust
our government and our commander in chief when you make representations
and statements regarding our nation engaging in war. As a result, we
would ask that you publicly respond to these questions as promptly as
possible.
Letter
to the President by John Conyers, Jr.
"The Downing Street Memos Speak for Themselves"
C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a
perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as
inevitable. 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 NSC had no patience
with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the
Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the
aftermath after military action.
text
of the first Downing Street memo (DSM)
"C" refers to Sir Richard Dearlove, then chief of
Britain's intelligence service.
"Excerpts
From the Downing Street Memos"
“We are doing everything we can to avoid war in Iraq. But if
Saddam Hussein does not disarm peacefully, he will be disarmed by
force”
- George W. Bush,
Mar. 8, 2003 Radio Address
The Downing
Street Memos: Why Care?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: It's not true. And anybody who's looked at it,
and several people have, has found it's not true. The WMD commission
looked at that very carefully and found not a shred of evidence to
support it. The Senate Intelligence Committee which did a complete and
thorough study before the WMD commission and questioned hundreds of
intelligence analysts found there was absolutely no truth. They couldn't
find one single individual who would validate that comment you just
made. There's nothing to support it. There never was because it never
happened.
Interview
of the Vice President by Wolf Blitzer, CNN
Ministers are invited to:
(1) Note the latest position on US military planning and
timescales for possible action.
(2) Agree that the objective of any military action should be a
stable and law-abiding Iraq, within present borders, co-operating with
the international community, no longer posing a threat to its neighbours
or international security, and abiding by its international obligations
on WMD.
(3) Agree to engage the US on the need to set military plans
within a realistic political strategy, which includes identifying the
succession to Saddam Hussein and creating the conditions necessary to
justify government military action, which might include an ultimatum for
the return of UN weapons inspectors to Iraq. This should include a call
from the Prime Minister to President Bush ahead of the briefing of US
military plans to the President on 4 August.
the
second Downing Street memo (DSM II)
The truth is that what has changed is not the pace of Saddam
Hussein's WMD programmes, but our tolerance of them post-11 September.
This is not something we need to be defensive about, but attempts to
claim otherwise publicly will increase scepticism about our case. I am
relieved that you decided to postpone publication of the unclassified
document. My meeting yesterday showed that there is more work to do to
ensure that the figures are accurate and consistent with those of the
US. But even the best survey of Iraq's WMD programmes will not show much
advance in recent years on the nuclear, missile or CW/BW (chemical or
biological weapon) fronts: the programmes are extremely worrying but
have not, as far as we know, been stepped up.
a
memo dated March 22, 2002 from Peter Ricketts, British foreign
office political director, to Jack Straw, Britain's Foreign Secretary,
on advice given on Iraq to Blair
"Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that
were used for the production of biological weapons."
George W. Bush, President
9/12/2002
Speech to UN General Assembly
The Downing
Street Memos: Why Care?
"With each passing day, Saddam Hussein advances his arsenal
of weapons of mass destruction and could pass them along to terrorists.
If he is allowed to do so, the result could be the deaths not of 3,000
people, as on September 11th, but of 30,000 or 300,000 or more innocent
people."
Donald Rumsfeld
3/20/2003
Remarks to American Troops, Defense Department
US scrambling to establish a link between Iraq and Al Qaida is so
far frankly unconvincing. To get public and Parliamentary support for
military operations, we have to be convincing that the threat is so
serious/imminent that it is worth sending out troops to die for; it is
qualitatively different from the threat posed by other proliferators who
are closer to achieving nuclear capability (including Iran).
a
memo dated March 22, 2002 from Peter Ricketts, British foreign
office political director, to Jack Straw, Britain's Foreign Secretary,
on advice given on Iraq to Blair
If 11 September had not happened, it is doubtful that the US would
now be considering military action against Iraq. In addition, there has
been no credible evidence to link Iraq with UBL (Osama bin Laden) and Al
Qaida. Objectively, the threat from Iraq has not worsened as a result of
11 September. What has however changed is the tolerance of the
international community (especially that of the US), the world having
witnesses sic on September 11 just what determined evil people can these
days perpetuate.
"British Prime Minister Tony Blair's Response to the Memos"
PRIME MINISTER BLAIR: Basically, the case that people are making,
that somehow we'd taken the decision to invade, you know, irrespective
of what Iraq did, it's simply not correct. The whole reason we went to
the United Nations back in, originally in September 2002, then with the
resolution in November 2002, was precisely in order to see if there was
a way of giving Iraq a last chance to come into compliance with the
United Nations resolutions and avoid conflict. But they didn't.
And so when people -- you know, they take bits out here of this
memo or that memo, or something someone's supposed to have said at the
time, and what people ignore is we went through a very open, obvious
process through the United Nations and the issue was how did you --
because the view I took, as the president did, was we had to enforce
United Nations resolutions against countries that were developing and
proliferating WMD, that after September the 11 the world had changed, we
had to take a definitive stance.
Gwen
Ifill's Interview of Prime Minister Blair
"The American Press's Coverage (or Lack Thereof) of the
Memos"
Bloggers, keen to keep the pressure on the Bush and Blair
governments, have tried to keep the memos in the limelight and put
pressure on the mainstream media.
"While the European media have covered the memo extensively,
it has received scant attention by the mainstream media in
America," wrote Terry Neal of the Washington Post this week.
BBC NEWS:
"Bloggers' 'victory' over Iraq war memos" by Kevin
Anderson
This is, of course, something like the crude pattern that coverage
in the American press has followed on the Downing Street memo, then
memos. As of late last week, four of our five major papers (the Wall
Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and USA
Today) hadn't even commented on them in their editorial pages. In my
hometown paper, the New York Times, complete lack of interest was
followed last Monday by a page 11 David Sanger piece ("Prewar
British Memo Says War Decision Wasn't Made") that focused on the
second of the Downing Street memos, a briefing paper for Tony Blair's
"inner circle," and began: "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, but that American military planning for the possibility was
advanced."
Compare that to the front-page lead written a day earlier by
Michael Smith of the British Sunday Times, who revealed the existence of
the document and has been the Woodstein of England on this issue
("Ministers Were Told of Need for Gulf
War 'Excuse'"):
AFTER LAGGING for months, debate on Iraq in Washington is picking up
again. That's a needed and welcome development, but much of the
discussion is being diverted to the wrong subject.
War opponents have been trumpeting several British government
memos from July 2002, which describe the Bush administration's
preparations for invasion, as revelatory of President Bush's deceptions
about Iraq. Bloggers have demanded to know why "the mainstream
media" have not paid more attention to them. Though we can't speak
for The Post's news department, the answer appears obvious: The memos
add not a single fact to what was previously known about the
administration's prewar deliberations. Not only that: They add nothing
to what was publicly known in July 2002.
"Iraq,
Then and Now"(Editorial)
"Can We Really Afford to Ignore the Downing Street
memos?"
Imagine that the Pentagon Papers or the Watergate scandal had
broken out all over the press – no, not in the New York Times
or the Washington Post, but in newspapers in Australia or
Canada. And that, facing their own terrible record of reportage, of
years of being cowed by the Nixon administration, major American papers
had decided that this was not a story worthy of being covered. Imagine
that, initially, they dismissed the revelatory documents and information
that came out of the heart of administration policy-making; then almost
willfully misread them, insisting that evidence of Pentagon planning for
escalation in Vietnam or of Nixon administration planning to destroy its
opponents was at best ambiguous or even nonexistent; finally, when they
found that the documents wouldn't go away, they acknowledged them more
formally with a tired ho-hum, a knowing nod on editorial pages or in
news stories. Actually, they claimed, these documents didn't add up to
much because they had run stories just like this back then themselves.
Yawn.
"Smoking
Signposts to Nowhere"by Tom Engelhardt and Mark Danner
The trouble is, it is not behind us. The occupation continues and
people are still dying, daily, in substantial numbers. In the US the
realisation seems to be dawning that this episode represents, at the
very least, a case of maladministration, of desperately poor governance.
That failure should be investigated, by Commons committees as much as by
congressional ones, not because some of us cannot let go of the past -
but because there is no other way to ensure such folly never happens
again.
"Yes,
they did lie to us" by Jonathan Freedland
We might believe that we are past such matters now. Alas, as
Americans go on dying in Iraq and their fellow citizens grow ever more
impatient with the war, the story of its beginning, clouded with
propaganda and controversy as it is, will become more important, not
less. Consider the strong warning put forward in a recently released
British Cabinet document dated two days before the Downing Street memo
(and eight months before the war), that "the military occupation of
Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building
exercise." On this point, as the British document prophetically
observes, "U.S. military plans are virtually silent." So too
were America's leaders, and we live with the consequences of that
silence. As support for the war collapses, the cost will become clear:
for most citizens, 1,700 American dead later – tens of thousands of
Iraqi dead later – the war's beginning remains as murky and indistinct
as its ending.
PRIME MINISTER BLAIR: Yes. I think it's been more difficult than we
expected because I think what has happened in Iraq is -- the will of the
Iraqi people is clear. Millions of them went and voted. They want a
democratic government. They want a decent future for their country.
But what's happened is that those who are opposed to us, the
terrorist groups that want to start this sort of jihad between the
Muslim world and the Christian world, between Arabs and the Western
world, those people have gone into Iraq, linked up with some of the
people who are insurgents there, and what they're trying to do is to
destabilize that democracy in order to defeat not just the Iraqi people
and their will but also our ability to show the world that what we
actually want is democratic freedom for people, not occupation, not
making satellite states of these countries.
And so that what's at stake is very, very big indeed, if we
stabilize Iraq and deliver democracy, as I believe we will, the benefits
will be felt, you know, not just in the region but right round the
world. And so what is at stake here is huge for us.
GWEN IFILL: But how much longer?
PRIME MINISTER BLAIR: I don't know.A
Gwen
Ifill's Interview of Prime Minister Blair
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