posted June 16, 2005 07:24 PM              

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Rep. John Conyers says the memo calls into question some pre-war statements by President Bush.

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WASHINGTON (June 16) - Some congressional Democrats are insisting that the White House provide more information about what led to the decision to go to war in Iraq, citing a British document known as the ''Downing Street memo'' as evidence intelligence was distorted.

Rep. John Conyers and other Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee conducted a public forum Thursday prompted by documents that have surfaced from inside the British government about prewar planning.

Former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who advised the Bush administration in 2002 that Saddam Hussein had not tried to buy a certain kind of uranium from Africa, said Conyers' hearing was important.

''We are having this discussion today because we failed to have it three years ago when we went to war,'' Wilson said.

''It used to be said that democracies were difficult to mobilize for war precisely because of the debate required,'' and the lack of debate in this case allowed the war to happen, he said.

Wilson wrote a 2003 newspaper opinion piece criticizing the Bush administration's claim that Iraq had sought uranium in Niger. After the piece appeared someone in the Bush administration leaked the identity of Wilson's wife as a CIA operative, exposing her cover.

Wilson has said he believes the leak was retaliation for his critical comments. The Justice Department is investigating and two reporters are being threatened with jail time for refusing to divulge their sources on the issue.

The Downing Street memo says the Bush administration believed that war was inevitable and was determined to use intelligence about weapons of mass destruction to justify the ouster of Saddam.

The ''intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy,'' says the memo, recounting a July 23, 2002, meeting of Prime Minister Tony Blair and his national security team. The meeting took place just after British officials returned from Washington.

U.S. officials and Blair deny the assertion about intelligence and facts being ''fixed,'' a comment that the memo attributes to the chief of British intelligence at the time. The meeting took place eight months before the invasion of Iraq.

Conyers pointed to statements by Bush in the run-up to invasion that war would be a last resort. ''The veracity of those statements has - to put it mildly - come into question,'' he said.

The London Sunday Times disclosed the contents of the memo May 1.

Bush should respond to questions raised by the Downing Street memo, says a letter signed by Conyers and over 90 other members of Congress, as well as a half-million Americans.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan dismissed the memo on Thursday and indicated that no one in the White House plans to respond to the letter.

''This is simply rehashing old debates that have already been discussed,'' he said.

The Sunday Times also reported on an eight-page briefing paper prepared for Blair which concluded that the U.S. military had given ''little thought'' to the aftermath of a war in Iraq.

The briefing paper of July 21, 2002, said a postwar occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building exercise and that ''as already made clear, the U.S. military plans are virtually silent on this point. Washington could look to us to share a disproportionate share of the burden.''

AP-NY-06-16-05 16:35 EDT

posted June 20, 2005 02:21 PM            

The so-called Downing Street Memo - which was presumed to be authentic when Bush administration critics began touting it last month as evidence the president committed impeachable crimes - is actually a manually recreated copy - with the source of the memo now admitting he retyped the document before destroying the originals.

British reporter Michael Smith, who broke the memo story in the London Times on May 1, revealed to The Associated Press over the weekend that "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."

Smith's admission means there's now no independent way to determine the accuracy of the Downing Street Memo, i.e., whether he made any typos or transcription errors that could have changed the memo's meaning.
The revelation has conjured up memories of the CBS News forged document scandal last year, where anchorman Dan Rather argued that damaging records he obtained from President Bush's National Guard file were essentially accurate, even though they had been faked by his source.

While British officials hadn't disputed the authenticity of the Downing Street Memo, a senior member of the Blair government who reviewed the memo in light of reporter Smith's admission could say only that its contents "appeared authentic."

That official, however, requested anonymity, refusing to make an on-the-record endorsement of the memo's accuracy.

New questions about the authenticity of the Downing Street Memo come at a particularly awkward time for Democrats in America. Only last week, House Democrats staged a mock impeachment hearing based on the re-created document.

Former presidential candidate John Kerry announced on June 2 that he intended to confront Congress with the Downing Street Memo, believing at the time that the document's authenticity was beyond reproach.

"I think it's a stunning, unbelievably simple and understandable statement of the truth and a profoundly important document that raises stunning issues here at home," he told a reporter.

posted June 21, 2005 12:39 AM            

Even if his mouth isn't open, Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean finds a way to stick his foot in it. Last week, it was his contribution to a hugely embarrassing moment for the Democratic Party. which saw him involve the party in an anti-Operation Iraqi Freedom hearing on Capitol Hill and allow several individuals into party headquarters during that hearing who passed out anti-Semitic and anti-Israel propaganda.

It all started when Michigan Democrat Rep. John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, and his staff decided to hold a "congressional hearing" on Capitol Hill last Thursday in attempt to draw media attention to the so-called "Downing Street Memo."

Depending on how one reads the document, which was leaked by individuals inside the British government, it is purportedly a contemporaneous recounting of a meeting of Prime Minister Tony Blair's national security team, in which it is asserted that the Bush Administration believed that an invasion of Iraq was inevitable, and that intelligence about weapons of mass destruction would be critical to gaining support for the removal of Saddam Hussein.

Most levelheaded analysts have stated that there is nothing in the memo that hasn't been stated before by President Bush, Prime Minister Blair, or their administrations. But to the kooky fringe of the left, of which Conyers is a charter member, the memo presents all kinds of possibilities to allege sinister plots and lies.

Frustrated that the media in the United States -- and even in the UK -- weren't in a frenzy over the memo, Conyers and a group of like-thinking Democrats decided to hold their hearing. Given the small size of the room in which it would be held, Democratic Judiciary staff wanted to ensure that as many supporters and press as possible could view it in real time. So they reached out to DNC chair Dean, who had also been carping about the memo on the road.

Dean readily cooperated, opening up the headquarters' Wasserman Conference Room for a live video feed of the meeting. A number of groups were invited to the DNC for the viewing, including Democrats.com, MoveOn.org, the Center for American Progress, People for the American Way, the Media Fund, and America Coming Together. During the conference, some of those present in the room were handing out material, some of it anti-war and highly anti-Semitic in tone.

"No one knows who was passing it out," says a DNC staffer. "Chairman Dean believes that it was Republican operatives who did it to embarrass us, and was going to go public with that thinking, but he was persuaded to just apologize and move on."

Dean, however, did not apologize; he only denounced the fact that the material was distributed. Nor did he or Conyers unequivocally condemn the remarks of one the individuals who testified at the Conyers hearing, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern. McGovern told Conyers, as well as Reps. Maxine Waters, (CA), Barney Frank, (MA), and Jim McDermott (WA), among others, that the war was part of an effort to allow the United States and Israel to "dominate that part of the world."

Dean, in his statement on the DNC website, cited the "dominate" language, but did not disclose that it had been uttered in what passed for a formal, Democratic Party congressional hearing, nor did he identify the source.

Other than McGovern, the hearing featured such anti-Bush administration and anti-Iraqi liberation regulars as Cindy Sheehan, a mother who lost her son in Iraq combat, and John Bonifaz, a lawyer, who in 2003 was lead counsel for a federal lawsuit filed by Conyers and then-presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich challenging the authority of President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld to launch a war against Iraq.

"Dean loved the idea of getting involved in this hearing, even though he knew where some of these guys were going to go with their public statements," says the DNC staffer. "That he is in bed with guys like Conyers and Waters and McDermott shows just how out of touch he is with where the party needs to be."

Part of the problem, too, says the DNC staffer, is that the headquarters has become a playground for fringe groups that never would have been given access under previous DNC chairmen. "You see some of the people being let in here for meetings and for coordination briefings and you have to wonder where this thing is going. There is no judgment about who the party should be associated with. If they hate Bush, can raise money, they're in. That's what happened with the Downing Street hearing. That's why we're backpedaling now."
http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=8327

posted June 23, 2005 12:30 AM            

This would take some quality reading time, but to "cut to the chase", I'm posting this up as a summary to all that it means:

June 15, 2005

THE WORLD
New Memos Detail Early Plans for Invading Iraq
British officials believed the U.S. favored military force a year before the war, documents show.

By John Daniszewski, Times Staff Writer

LONDON — In March 2002, the Bush administration had just begun to publicly raise the possibility of confronting Iraq. But behind the scenes, officials already were deeply engaged in seeking ways to justify an invasion, newly revealed British memos indicate.

Foreshadowing developments in the year before the war started, British officials emphasized the importance of U.N. diplomacy, which they said might force Saddam Hussein into a misstep. They also suggested that confronting the Iraqi leader be cast as an effort to prevent him from using weapons of mass destruction or giving them to terrorists.

The documents help flesh out the background to the formerly top-secret "Downing Street memo" published in the Sunday Times of London last month, which said that top British officials were told eight months before the war began that military action was "seen as inevitable." President Bush and his main ally in the war, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, have long maintained that they had not made up their minds to go to war at that stage.

"Nothing could be farther from the truth," Bush said last week, responding to a question about the July 23, 2002, memo. "Both of us didn't want to use our military. Nobody wants to commit military into combat. It's the last option."

Publication of the Downing Street memo at the height of Britain's election campaign at first garnered little notice in U.S. media or other British newspapers. But in the weeks that followed, anger has grown among war critics, who contend that the document proves the Bush administration had already decided on military action, even while U.S. officials were saying that war was a last resort.

The new documents indicate that top British officials believed that by March 2002, Washington was already leaning heavily toward toppling Hussein by military force. Condoleezza Rice, the current secretary of State who was then Bush's national security advisor, was described as enthusiastic about "regime change."

Although British officials said in the documents that they did not think Iraq's weapons programs posed an immediate threat and that they were dubious of any claimed links between the Iraqi government and Al Qaeda, they indicated that they were willing to join in a campaign to topple Hussein as long as the plan would succeed and was handled with political and legal care.

The documents contain little discussion about whether to mount a military campaign. The focus instead is on how the campaign should be presented to win the widest support and the importance for Britain of working through the United Nations so an invasion could be seen as legal under international law.

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.

They cover a period when reports had begun appearing that the Bush administration was forming plans to go after Hussein in the next phase of its "war on terrorism." A Feb. 10, 2002, article in the Los Angeles Times, for instance, said that the U.S. was considering action against Hussein that might require a massive number of U.S. troops.

Published accounts, including those by the Washington Post's Bob Woodward and former U.S. counter-terrorism chief Richard A. Clarke, said that Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld began focusing on Iraq soon after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon.

In his Jan. 29, 2002, State of the Union address, Bush described Iraq, Iran and North Korea as part of an "axis of evil."

The documents present a picture of a U.S. government fed up with the policy of containing Iraq, skeptical of the U.N. and focused on ousting Hussein.

Blair's advisors were weighing how Britain could participate in a war. The need to establish a policy on Iraq led to a flurry of meetings between senior U.S. and British officials and internal British government memos in advance of a Bush-Blair summit in April 2002 at the president's ranch near Crawford, Texas. (According to one of the subsequent documents that has been leaked, a British Cabinet briefing paper written in July 2002, Blair gave Bush a conditional commitment at the Texas summit to support military action to remove Hussein.)

In one memorandum, dated March 14, 2002, and labeled "secret — strictly personal," Blair's chief foreign policy advisor, David Manning, described to the prime minister a dinner he had had with Rice.

"We spent a long time at dinner on Iraq," wrote Manning, now the British ambassador to the U.S. "It is clear that Bush is grateful for your [Blair's] support and has registered that you are getting flak. I said that you would not budge in your support for regime change but you had to manage a press, a Parliament and a public opinion that was different from anything in the States. And you would not budge either in your insistence that, if we pursued regime change, it must be very carefully done and produce the right result. Failure was not an option."

The memo went on to say:

"Condi's enthusiasm for regime change is undimmed. But there were some signs, since we last spoke, of greater awareness of the practical difficulties and political risks…. From what she said, Bush has yet to find answers to the big questions:

• How to persuade international opinion that military action against Iraq is necessary and justified;

• What value to put on the exiled Iraqi opposition;

• How to coordinate a US/allied military campaign with internal opposition (assuming there is any);

• What happens the morning after?"

Manning told Blair that given Bush's eagerness for British backing, the prime minister would have "real influence" on the public relations strategy, on the issue of encouraging the United States to go first to the United Nations and on any U.S. military planning.

Manning said it could prove helpful if Hussein refused to allow renewed U.N. weapons inspections.

"The issue of weapons inspectors must be handled in a way that would persuade Europe and wider opinion that the U.S. was conscious of the international framework, and the insistence of many countries on the need for a legal basis. Renewed refusal by Saddam to accept unfettered inspections would be a powerful argument," Manning wrote Blair.

Four days after the Manning memo, Christopher Meyer, then the British ambassador in Washington, wrote to Manning about a lunch he had with Paul D. Wolfowitz, then the U.S. deputy secretary of Defense and a leading proponent in the administration of confronting Hussein. Meyer said in the memo that he had told Wolfowitz that U.N. pressure and weapons inspections could be used to trip up Hussein.

"We backed regime change," he wrote, "but the plan had to be clever and failure was not an option. It would be a tough sell for us domestically, and probably tougher elsewhere in Europe."

Meyer wrote that he had argued that Washington could go it alone if it wanted to. "But if it wanted to act with partners, there had to be a strategy for building support for military action against Saddam. I then went through the need to wrong-foot Saddam on the inspectors and the [U.N. Security Council resolutions] and the critical importance of the [Middle East peace process] as an integral part of the anti-Saddam strategy. If all this could be accomplished skillfully, we were fairly confident that a number of countries would come on board."

Another memo, from British Foreign Office political director Peter Ricketts to Foreign Secretary Jack Straw on March 22, 2002, bluntly stated that the case against Hussein was weak because the Iraqi leader was not accelerating his weapons programs and there was scant proof of links to Al Qaeda.

"What has changed is not the pace of Saddam Hussein's WMD programs, but our tolerance of them post-11 September," Ricketts wrote. "Attempts to claim otherwise publicly will increase skepticism about our case….

"U.S. scrambling to establish a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda is so far frankly unconvincing," he said.

Ricketts said that other countries such as Iran appeared closer to getting nuclear weapons, and that arguing for regime change in Iraq alone "does not stack up. It sounds like a grudge between Bush and Saddam." That was why the issue of weapons of mass destruction was vital, he said.

"Much better, as you [Straw] have suggested, to make the objective ending the threat to the international community from Iraqi WMD before Saddam uses it or gives it to terrorists," he said. A U.N. Security Council resolution demanding renewal of weapons inspections, he says, would be a "win/win."

"Either [Hussein] against all the odds allows Inspectors to operate freely, in which case we can further hobble his WMD programs, or he blocks/hinders, and we are on stronger grounds for switching to other methods," he wrote.

The arguments that Iraq had illegal, hidden weapons of mass destruction, programs to develop more of them, and that it might give them to terrorists were to become some of the Bush administration's chief reasons for the war. When no weapons were found, the administration blamed faulty intelligence and said the war still was justified because it ended Hussein's brutal dictatorship and allowed an emerging democratic government.

In November 2002, the U.S. and Britain managed to get a toughly worded resolution through the Security Council that reintroduced arms inspectors into Iraq for the first time since 1998. However, it fell short of authorizing the use of force against Hussein's government.

Straw, writing to Blair on March 25, 2002, expressed concern about a lack of support among members of Parliament from the governing Labor Party.

"Colleagues know that Saddam and the Iraqi regime are bad," he wrote. "But we have a long way to go to convince them as to: The scale of the threat from Iraq, and why this has got worse recently; what distinguishes the Iraqi threat from that of e.g. Iran and North Korea so as to justify military action; the justification for any military action in terms of international law; and whether the consequences really would be a compliant, law-abiding replacement government.

"Regime change per se is no justification for military action; it could form part of the method of any strategy, but not a goal," he said. "Elimination of Iraq's WMD capacity has to be the goal."

The new documents also include an earlier 10-page options paper, dated March 8, 2002, from the overseas and defense secretariat of the Cabinet Office, sketching out options for dealing with Iraq. The thrust of the memo was that the economic sanctions imposed on Iraq after the 1991 Persian Gulf War were likely to fail, and that, in any case, the U.S. had already given up on them.

"The U.S. has lost confidence in containment," the document said. "Some in government want Saddam removed. The success of Operation Enduring Freedom [the military code name for the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan], distrust of U.N. sanctions and inspection regimes, and unfinished business from 1991 are all factors.

"Washington believes the legal basis for an attack already exists. Nor will it necessarily be governed by wider political factors. The U.S. may be willing to work with a smaller coalition than we think desirable," it said.

The paper said the British view was that any invasion for the purpose of regime change "has no basis under international law."

The best way to justify military action, it said, would be to convince the Security Council that Iraq was in breach of its post-Gulf War obligations to eliminate its store of weapons of mass destruction.

The document appeared to rule out any action in Iraq short of an invasion.

"In sum, despite the considerable difficulties, the use of overriding force in a ground campaign is the only option that we can be confident will remove Saddam and bring Iraq back into the international community," it said.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-britmemos15jun15,0,7241602,full.s tory

--------------------------------------------

Here are the photocopies of the originals, just click on "open" after you go through the hyperlink and another window will open up:
http://cryptome.org/leaks-brief.zip

Happy reading!

posted June 24, 2005 11:50 AM            

War with Iraq was inevitable, given Saddam's continuing violation of his ceasefire agreement....in the face of 15 or so UN Resolutions, including Resolution 1441 which warned of serious consequences for failure to get with the program.

His harboring, training and funding of terrorists.

His brutal repression of Iraqi citizens

The belief of all intelligence agencies and the UN Security Council members that Saddam had WMD in violation of the ceasefire agreement he signed.

The fact, as revealed in the memo, that Bush, Blair and the intelligence services of the US and Britain believed Saddam had WMD.

So, this propaganda blitz is built on a house of cards. A house that is crumbling around the ears of leftists in the Congress and elsewhere. Leftists desperate for an issue because nothing else they've tried has gotten their leftist candidates elected.

An all out effort on the part of leftists to elect the traitor John Kerry failed. Bush is still President, Cheney is still Vice President, Rice is now Sec State, Rumsfeld is still Sec Defense. When all the leftists wake up tomorrow morning...those who actually do get out of bed in the morning, instead of the afternoon, they will find none of that has changed. Additionally, they will find coalition forces are still killing their terrorist friends in Afghanistan and Iraq. Hey, any enemy of America is a friend of the leftists. Common enemy.

One only need look to who leftists shed those crocodile tears for. Is it American military personnel...no. Is it those poor, poor, poor murdering terrorist prisoners at Gitmo and Abu Gharib...oh, absolutely. Like I said, America is their common enemy.

posted June 24, 2005 11:03 PM            

Are we in a war with terrorist or are we acting out in a repetitious scene, were the only thing so far that really has been changing into is the way the United States is ran and each and every civil right is being striped away from us?

Is this "War on Terror", really a "War on Iraq" that is really a "War against Saddam", which in turn has become a "War on America" and that all those "cards" has been used against "us" in the long run?!

I believe that even the "Real ID act" is certified proof that this "War" that we're "in" is nothing but a tool to use against those that reside in a "once was" freedom based Western Hemisphere and the freedoms that are dwindling as we speak!

While our Government is still selling out to Communist China, of course!

posted June 25, 2005 12:08 AM              

quote:

---

the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea, and Iran."

---

this was already known among those who were paying attention.....we dont need a memo....

it seems like you are the one who thinks in terms of "getting people elected"

the abu graib abuse did put our troops at great risk all by itself....i would like to have seen some authorities who were directing things there to be held responsible.....

posted June 25, 2005 01:53 AM            

quote:

---

the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea, and Iran."

---

Well, the fact is that Bush was reelected. It's also a fact an all out effort was made to get Kerry elected and it failed. So, in spite of all the lefts hearts bleeding for terrorist murderers and attempts to tie Bush to a torture scandal, that failed too. Accusations are not proof, no matter how many pieces of crap the left threw against the wall, little of it stuck. That's a function of the left always making wild unprovable accusations for political purposes.

Let me tell you what puts our troops at risk. It's the left with their constant drumbeat of accusations of prisoner abuse..most of which is not abuse at all. We're not running club Med in Iraq or Gitmo. It's NewsWeek running a totally phony story about disrespect by guards towards the Koran. It's naive reporters writing stories about every unproven and unfounded accusation made by a murdering terrorist.
It's Kennedy, Levin, Leahy, Biden, Schumer and the other leftist cadre making public pronouncements about abuse that didn't happen in most cases and questioning whether the US can even win that gives terrorists the idea that if they can kill enough Americans, the US will leave and they can take over Iraq. That's what gets American forces killed. Your friends on the left pulled exactly the same stunt in the Vietnam war and Vietnam generals later said, if it hadn't been for the Congress limiting US options in the war and the American press solidly in the enemy camp, they would have surrendered. The communists had a lot of help from right here in the United States. Kerry was only one of the communists little helpers.

posted June 25, 2005 04:14 AM            

2. FREEDOM OF INFORMATION: Government has closed once-public immigration hearings, has secretly detained hundreds of people without charges, and has encouraged bureaucrats to resist public records questions.

3. FREEDOM OF SPEECH: Government may prosecute librarians or keepers of any other records if they tell anyone that the government subpoenaed information related to a terror investigation.

4. RIGHT TO LEGAL REPRESENTATION: Government may monitor federal prison jailhouse conversations between attorneys and clients, and deny lawyers to Americans accused of crimes.

5. FREEDOM FROM UNREASONABLE SEARCHES: Government may search and seize Americans' papers and effects without probable cause to assist terror investigation.

6. RIGHT TO A SPEEDY AND PUBLIC TRIAL: Government may jail Americans indefinitely without a trial.

7. RIGHT TO LIBERTY: Americans may be jailed without being charged or being able to confront witnesses against them.

posted June 25, 2005 03:28 PM            

This is just recently:

8. RIGHT TO PROPERTY:

9. RIGHT TO PRIVACY: