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After reading an article about the Iraq war, I thought: What is taking so long? What is taking so long for the American media to quell all of the "manipulation" and actually report what is going on in the world? -snip I am a journalism student. It is refreshing to know that there are still journalists who care more about their readers than the agenda of sinister plotters bent on profiteering from an unjustified conflict while risking the young lives of U.S. soldiers. Seeking the truth, I recently came upon the Downing Street memos. These are the recorded minutes of...

It is truly amazing how fast this story disappeared. Like a weatherman's forecast and an economist's dire prediction, the Downing Street Memos seem to have completely disappeared. Has anyone seen a retraction from the bile spewers and chicken littles?

Since it was first published in the British press in May, the so-called Downing Street memo has generated debate about the Bush administration's intentions of going to war. Critics of the Iraq war have seized on the document--minutes of a July 23, 2002, meeting between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his senior government leadership--as proof that the Bush administration was hell-bent for war even as it publicly sought to bring Saddam Hussein to heel through diplomacy. War critics have focused on a section of the document in which a British spy agency chief, identified as C, discussed a recent...

Sen. Kerry is wielding a double-edged sword By Alexander Bolton Sen. John Kerry is facing a dilemma. With an eye towards running for president again in 2008, the Massachusetts Democrat has positioned himself as one of the most pugnacious critics of the Bush administration, often aligning himself with liberal activists. But at times, his aggressive anti-Bush rhetoric risks alienating other parts of his own party. Kerry’s predicament was apparent this week as he took the lead among Democrats by calling for President Bush to fire his deputy chief of staff, Karl Rove, for Rove’s alleged role in revealing the identity...

……The administration has prevented any official inquiry into whether it hyped the case for war. But there's plenty of circumstantial evidence that it did. …….And then there's the Downing Street Memo - actually the minutes of a prime minister's meeting in July 2002 - in which the chief of British overseas intelligence briefed his colleagues about his recent trip to Washington. "Bush wanted to remove Saddam," says the memo, "through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and W.M.D. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." It doesn't get much clearer than that.

Bob and Gina Fesmire of Sunnyvale are hardly political firebrands. Bob, a Silicon Valley public relations man who sports a ponytail, grew up in a Republican home and embraces Libertarian values favoring small government that stays out of individuals' lives. Gina, a graphic designer, is more left- leaning, but she stresses that they both are registered independents who focus on issues -- not ideology -- during elections. However, outraged by what's now known as the "Downing Street Memo" and the scant initial coverage of it in the U.S. media, the Sunnyvale couple teamed with a Chicago law student and a...

FReepers from the DC Chapter conducted a FReep of the Downing Street Memo Rally  at Lafayette Park next to the White House on June 16. The DSM Rally was sponsored by Code Pink and Progressive Democrats of America (the outfit of William Rivers Pitt of DUmmie FUnnies fame) in an attempt to refight their crushing defeat in the last election. The leftists, including John Conyers (D-Michigan) and other members of Congress who spoke or attended, are trying to impeach President Bush by using a triple-hearsay, ambiguous memo (read great National Review article here) of a lower level British Foreign Office...

If you click on the Downing Street Memo thread,you'll see where I posted a "Eulogy for the DSM". I first want to thank all those that posted comments here and/or visited my website (link above). When I recieve responses at my website, however, I don't know if I should be flattered or not. Why?? It seems that whenever someone leaves a post at my site, it's NEGATIVE. What follows is an anonymous comment posted after the "eulogy". I was going to actually accept this person's criticism until I saw their 4th point: "You right wing revisionist historians are so transparent....

No Bounce: Bush Job Approval Unchanged by War Speech; Question on Impeachment Shows Polarization of Nation; Americans Tired of Divisiveness in Congress—Want Bi-Partisan Solutions—New Zogby Poll President Bush’s televised address to the nation produced no noticeable bounce in his approval numbers, with his job approval rating slipping a point from a week ago, to 43%, in the latest Zogby International poll. And, in a sign of continuing polarization, more than two-in-five voters (42%) say they would favor impeachment proceedings if it is found the President misled the nation about his reasons for going to war with Iraq. The Zogby America...

LONDON - British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Wednesday the "Downing Street memos" paint a distorted picture, and he insisted that the Iraq war was not predetermined by the United States. "People say the decision was already taken. The decision was not already taken," he said in an exclusive interview with The Associated Press. Blair added he was "a bit astonished" at the intensive U.S. media coverage about the leaked memos, which suggested the White House viewed the war with Iraq as inevitable.

Fri Jun 24 2005 09:43:30 ET Vice President Dick Cheney was asked on CNN about the 'Downing Street memo' which said the Bush Administration had decided to go to war with Iraq and the intelligence would be fixed around that policy. Asked if he disputes the memo's claim, Cheney said, "Of course. The memo was written sometime prior to when we actually got involved in Iraq. "And 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...

THE Left is has gone all Captain Renault on us. Captain Renault, you might remember, is the gleefully corrupt cop in "Casablanca" who shuts down a casino by saying he's "shocked, shocked to discover gambling going on here" — even as he stuffs his winnings in his pocket.

The Madison chapter of Veterans for Peace is planning a series of town hall meetings to discuss the impeachment of President Bush. Retired UW Professor Bob Kimbrough hopes the meetings will spark a serious discussion on impeachment. "It's pretty much in the air now, thank goodness," he said. The state Democratic Party has called for the impeachment of Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and some Democrats in Congress have broached the subject. Kimbrough, Buzz Davis and Don McKeating of Madison Veterans for Peace, Chapter 25, are organizing the events. "The purpose, since it's a...

Let’s be calm. Before we join the lynching crowd, the onus to examine this British intelligence report falls on the shoulder of responsible citizens who are not after President George W. Bush’s neck, politically or otherwise. Invectives and verbal abuse against Bush’s decision to invade Iraq based on the alleged “fixing” of intelligence report mentioned in the document is nothing but lapsus linguae if these come from polluted sources in Congress, allied Liberals or cause-oriented groups, politically driven protesting beatniks, and the profit-crazed, wayward media whose excuse for being is to sensationalize news. These anti-Bush and anti-Iraq-war champions of the...

Every day, it seems, there are more blogs, more compilations of blogs and more chatter about blogs, as online debate comes in more flavors. You have congressmen, presidential candidates and corporate leaders all doing the blog thing, as well as legions of ordinary folks armed mainly with opinions. This, in my view, is a great thing, even though no human being, including me, can keep up with the millions of words being posted each day. (Now you have to keep up not just with Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo but with his TPM Cafe, not to mention the 1,239 people...

A quick glance at the DUmmieland forum would tell a visitor that something is amiss in the form of a definite lack of a certain recent obsession. Yes, GONE are the many many Downing Street Memo (DSM in crypto DUmmieSpeak) threads. So what happened? After all, wasn’t it just last week that Pied Piper Pitt breathlessly declared June 16 to be the day that would change history and that nothing would ever be the same again because of a non-official hearing conducted by John Conyers in a congressional broom closet. What has happened to cause the early, unlamented DEATH...

The Downing Street memo has a new fan — Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass. — who recently said that the memo was a "stunning, unbelievably simple and understandable statement of the truth and a profoundly important document." The problem for Kerry, however, is that there is another document that contradicts his view, a document that the defeated Democratic presidential candidate ought to remember. No, I am not talking about the other official British documents disclosed since Kerry made that statement, although they do show just how silly it was for people to interpret the first memo — which contained meeting minutes...

IT'S BAD enough that the Bush administration had so little international support for the Iraqi war that its ''coalition of the willing" meant the United States, Britain, and the equivalent of a child's imaginary friends. It's even worse that, as the British Downing Street memo confirms, they had so little evidence of real threats that they knew from the start that they were going to have to manufacture excuses to go to war. What's more damning still is that they effectively began this war even before the congressional vote. With congressman John Conyers holding hearings, the media are finally starting...

...Bush planted the seeds of the destruction of his Iraq policy before the war started. Salvaging the venture will require an unprecedented degree of candor and realism from a White House that was never willing to admit --even to itself-- how large an undertaking it was asking the American people to buy into. The notion that the president led the country into war through indirection or dishonesty is not the most damaging criticism of the administration. The worst possibility is that the president and his advisers believed their own propaganda. They did not prepare the American people for an arduous...

A few weeks ago, at an airport in Europe, I saw Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code staring at me across the bookstore bins. I had seen it many times before and averted my gaze, but I was facing a long delay, and I suddenly thought: May as well get it over with. Well, of course I knew it would be bad. I just didn't know that it would be that bad. Never mind for now the breathless and witless style, or the mashed-paper characters, or the lazy, puerile reliance on incredible coincidence to flog the lame plot along. What if...

NBC's Katie Couric and Tim Russert managed on Friday morning to cover just about everything in the news -- except Democratic Senator Dick Durbin's incendiary comments equating Guantanamo with the Nazi regime and the Soviet gulags. Couric raised with Russert how the "House introduced a resolution that would require President Bush to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq beginning next year," how "according to the latest Gallup Poll, 56 percent of Americans say now the war was not worth it, almost 60 percent say the Pentagon should pull some or all of the troops out of Iraq," how "some senior Democrats...

Kerry cautious on probing `Downing Street Memo' By Noelle Straub Monday, June 20, 2005 - Updated: 10:36 AM EST WASHINGTON - Walking a tightrope on a politically charged issue, Sen. John F. Kerry vowed weeks ago to raise the controversial ``Downing Street Memo'' as an issue in Washington, but has since publicly held his tongue on the matter. Instead, Kerry has been enlisting other senators to sign onto a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee seeking answers about the memo, aides said. The memo contained minutes of a 2002 meeting in which British officials told Prime Minister Tony Blair they...

As has been discussed on Free Republic earlier, Downing Street Memo Originals Destroyed -UGH!, British "reporter" Michael Smith has told Asociated Press that he copied the original on plain paper and then destroyed the originals. But click here and you see a Reuters Wire Photo Showing a "Seal" on the "copy" offered to the press. The caption reads, "A copy of the so-called 'Downing Street Memo', produced in July 2002 for Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair on the legality of the invasion of Iraq. Photo by Stephen Hird/Reuters". Did he really destroy them, type them on plain paper? Don't look...

The media and the Leftists have had a field day with the Downing Street memos that they claim imply that the Bush administration lied about the intelligence on WMD in order to justify the attack on Iraq. Despite the fact that none of the memos actually say that, none of them quote any officials or any documents, and that the text of the memos show that the British government worried about the deployment of WMD by Saddam against Coalition troops, Kuwait and/or Israel, the meme continues to survive. Until tonight, however, no one questioned the authenticity of the documents provided...

Is Treason the Only Policy the Democrats have to Offer? In America today, we have universities that suppress conservative organizations and views and promote Leftist socialist groups and ideals. We have a great preponderance of university professors who are extremely Liberal, and a vast majority of whom support the Democrat party, and are intolerant of opposing views. We have a large number of Left-wing organizations organizing protest marches against the war. We have a large number of desperate Liberals stoking the fires of hatred because they feel that the nation is ignoring them and their calls for impeachment of the...

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 "he protected the identity of the source he had obtained the documents from by typing copies of them on plain paper...

Are Downing Street memos authentic or elaborate hoax? Blogs question credibility of reporter who typed copies, destroyed originals Are the highly publicized Downing Street memos authentic government documents that show the Bush administration lied about pre-war intelligence on weapons of mass destruction? Or are they part of an elaborate hoax – akin to CBS's infamous National Guard memos on George W. Bush's military service? Many of the same blogs that successfully challenged Dan Rather's documents are now questioning whether the Downing Street memos are for real. With Times of London reporter Michael Smith admitting the memos he used in his...

So, again we have documents with no originals? The eight memos — all labeled "secret" or "confidential" — were first obtained by British reporter Michael Smith, who has written about them in The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Times. Smith told AP 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.

The media and the Leftists have had a field day with the Downing Street memos that they claim imply that the Bush administration lied about the intelligence on WMD in order to justify the attack on Iraq. Despite the fact that none of the memos actually say that, none of them quote any officials or any documents, and that the text of the memos show that the British government worried about the deployment of WMD by Saddam against Coalition troops, Kuwait and/or Israel, the meme continues to survive. Until tonight, however, no one questioned the authenticity of the documents provided...

Repeatedly, those contending that President Bush lied us into the war in Iraq have had to face contrary evidence, stacks and stacks of it, and how have they handled this refutation of their fantasies? By ignoring it. But give them something all but irrelevant to the argument, some itsy, bitsy thing that they can misinterpret as demonstrating the rightness of their view, and notice how some of them behave. Why, they say, the final proof is here at last. I speak of the so-called Downing Street memo, the disclosed minutes of a meeting in 2002 between British Prime Minister Tony...

LONDON (AP) - When Prime Minister Tony Blair's chief foreign policy adviser dined with Condoleezza Rice six months after Sept. 11, the then-U.S. national security adviser didn't want to discuss Osama bin Laden or al-Qaida. She wanted to talk about "regime change" in Iraq, setting the stage for the U.S.-led invasion more than a year later. President Bush wanted Blair's support, but British officials worried the White House was rushing to war, according to a series of leaked secret Downing Street memos that have renewed questions and debate about Washington's motives for ousting Saddam Hussein. In one of the memos,...

It's correct that there is political commotion mounting in opposition to the Iraq war. It is important to distinguish between two kinds. One, which is gaining attention, centers on misrepresentations. The so-called Downing Street Memo is cited. This records an exchange at 10 Downing St. on July 23, 2002, at which, it is said, the representatives of Mr. Bush made it clear that the president had resolved to proceed against Iraq irrespective of what the United Nations might do. Rejecting that account, the Bush people have said that the invasion was not finally planned until after the appeal to the...

It is important that support for Israel in the US Congress is bipartisan. Israel, the only functioning democracy in the Middle East, has no real friend in the world other than America. The stability of that friendship, demonstrated by support in the Congress (and among the American people) over many decades, has been vitally important to help Israel withstand over 50 years of attacks by terrorists or Arab nations. Israel's foes ultimately do not want compromise with it, they have the goal of destroying the nation militarily, or de-legitimizing it politically (such as at the UN and various international courts...

In the Capitol basement yesterday, long-suffering House Democrats took a trip to the land of make-believe. They pretended a small conference room was the Judiciary Committee hearing room, draping white linens over folding tables to make them look like witness tables and bringing in cardboard name tags and extra flags to make the whole thing look official. Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) banged a large wooden gavel and got the other lawmakers to call him "Mr. Chairman." He liked that so much that he started calling himself "the chairman" and spouted other chairmanly phrases, such as "unanimous consent" and "without...

Bush's Missing WMD 'Joke': Is the Media Still Laughing? A brief comment at a forum in Washington this week resurrects one of the most shameful episodes in recent media history: The night a roomful of journalists laughed along with a president making fun of the bogus threat that led to a costly war. By Greg Mitchell (June 18, 2005) -- Dana Milbank of The Washington Post, in an article Friday, suggested that the congressional forum the previous day on the Downing Street memos was something of a joke. In his opening sentence he declared that House Democrats “took a trip...

President Bush wanted Blair's support, but British officials worried the White House was rushing to war, according to a series of leaked secret Downing Street memos that have renewed questions and debate about Washington's motives for ousting Saddam Hussein. In one of the memos, British Foreign Office political director Peter Ricketts openly asks whether the Bush administration had a clear and compelling military reason for war."U.S. scrambling to establish a link between Iraq and al-Qaida is so far frankly unconvincing," Ricketts says in the memo. "For Iraq, `regime change' does not stack up. It sounds like a grudge between Bush...

Dear Sirs: I write to express my profound disappointment with Dana Milbank's June 17 report, "Democrats Play House to Rally Against the War," which purports to describe a Democratic hearing I chaired in the Capitol yesterday. In sum, the piece cherry-picks some facts, manufactures others out of whole cloth, and does a disservice to some 30 members of Congress who persevered under difficult circumstances, not of our own making, to examine a very serious subject: whether the American people were deliberately misled in the lead up to war. The fact that this was the Post's only coverage of this event...

History lesson on “Jihad Johnny” CONyers, Jr. (D-MI)Why “Jihad Johnny”?  During the last Gulf War, “Jihad Johnny” worked closely with then representative David “Half-baked” Bonior (D-MI) to prevent FBI intelligence-gathering operations in Detroit.  These intelligence gathering operations in 1990 were to cultivate Arab sources in the Detroit area for preventing terrorist plots.  When FBI sources started to question Arabs in the Detroit area, asking if they knew of any terrorists and suggesting they contact the FBI about terrorist activity, representative “Half-baked” Bonior shouted racism while joining his buddies, “Jihad Johnny” CONyers, and Johnny “Dingbat” Dingall (D-MI) to hold hearings in...

WASHINGTON - A handful of people at Democratic National Headquarters distributed material critical of Israel during a public forum questioning the Bush administration's Iraq policy, drawing an angry response and charges of anti-Semitism from party chairman Howard Dean on Friday. "We disavow the anti-Semitic literature, and the Democratic National Committee stands in absolute disagreement with and condemns the allegations," Dean said in a statement posted on the DNC Web site. Rep. John Conyers (news, bio, voting record) of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, organized the forum on Thursday at the Capitol to publicize and discuss the...

A few months ago a secret memo from Tony Blair's government fell into the hands of a British newspaper. The 'Downing Street memo' as it has been called, states that the Bush administration had decided that sooner or later we were going to attack Iraq, and that the WMD question would be the justification. According to john Conyers, Maxine Waters and the Democratic 'leadership', this proves their conspiracy theory that the whole war was cooked up by Bush. The problem is that they have no motive.

A fter weeks of ignoring the existence of the Downing Street memo -- the July 2002 minutes of a high-level British meeting reporting that the Bush administration had already decided on war and was shaping the intelligence around its goal -- major media outlets have now gotten to the second phase of coverage: They knew it all the time. Nothing happening here, move along. The current round -- including newspapers, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, which months ago apologized for the inadequacy and overcredulousness of their coverage of the war's origins -- declares that even...

WASHINGTON, June 16 - Opponents of the war in Iraq held an unofficial hearing on Capitol Hill on Thursday to draw attention to a leaked British government document that they say proves their case that President Bush misled the public about his war plans in 2002 and distorted intelligence to support his policy.

A senior House Democrat urged Congress to launch an official inquiry to determine whether President Bush misled the nation about the reasons for toppling Saddam Hussein, as a small, bipartisan group of congressmen proposed Thursday to mandate that the U.S. begin drawing down its troops in Iraq by October next year. The developments came as the bill for the war continued to grow, with the House debating a measure that would provide an additional $45 billion for military operations in Iraq as well as Afghanistan. That would come on top of the $350 billion for combat and reconstruction appropriated so...

A former diplomat who has criticized President Bush's handling of the war in Iraq Thursday appeared to contradict one of the main charges leveled by those who point to the "Downing Street Memo" as proof that the administration knew Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction but went to war with Iraq anyway. The Downing Street "Memo" or "Minutes" originated at a secret July 23, 2002 meeting, where Prime Minister Tony Blair and other top British officials discussed the situation in Iraq. Bush critics have seized on the memo as proof that the president was determined to invade Iraq...

WASHINGTON - A hearing Thursday on a secret British intelligence memo that said President Bush was committed to waging war on Iraq months before he said so publicly ended with a request for Congress to open an inquiry into whether Bush should be impeached for misleading the nation. "All we’re asking is to know the truth," said John Bonifaz, co-founder of AfterDowningStreet.org. "Some of his supporters want to say it’s a question of failed intelligence. If that’s all it was, so be it." But if not, said Bonifaz, "then the American people and the U.S. Congress deserve to know." The...

Democrats Play House To Rally Against the War By Dana Milbank Post Friday, June 17, 2005; A06 In the Capitol basement yesterday, long-suffering House Democrats took a trip to the land of make-believe. They pretended a small conference room was the Judiciary Committee hearing room, draping white linens over folding tables to make them look like witness tables and bringing in cardboard name tags and extra flags to make the whole thing look official. Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) banged a large wooden gavel and got the other lawmakers to call him "Mr. Chairman." He liked that so much that...

It's so nice to see that even the Washington Post, which had cheered so hard for the U.S. invasion of Iraq two years ago, is finally having it up to here with the Bush administration's handling of the worsening Iraq mess. "The U.S. mission in Iraq seems to be drifting dangerously - and the president, once again, is not talking frankly to the country about the sacrifice that may be required, or where the troops and other resources for such an effort will come from," the paper's lead editorial yesterday concluded, perhaps suggesting that the president should come clean about...

This is John Conyers response to Dana Milbank's excellent reporting on the DSM pdeudo-hearing held yesterday by the dems. See the original Washington Post article here Democrats Play House To Rally Against the War June 17, 2005 Mr. Michael Abramowitz, National Editor Mr. Michael Getler, Ombudsman Mr. Dana Milbank The Washington Post 1150 15th Street, NW Washington, D.C. 20071 Dear Sirs: I write to express my profound disappointment with Dana Milbank's June 17 report, "Democrats Play House to Rally Against the War," which purports to describe a Democratic hearing I chaired in the Capitol yesterday. In sum, the piece cherry-picks...

In the Capitol basement yesterday, long-suffering House Democrats took a trip to the land of make-believe. They pretended a small conference room was the Judiciary Committee hearing room, draping white linens over folding tables to make them look like witness tables and bringing in cardboard name tags and extra flags to make the whole thing look official. more...

WASHINGTON -- Congress should conduct an official inquiry to determine whether President Bush intentionally misled the nation about the reasons for toppling Saddam Hussein, a senior House Democrat suggested Thursday. New York Rep. Charles Rangel was among Democratic House members who participated in a forum to air demands that the White House provide more information about what led to the decision to go to war in Iraq. "Quite frankly, evidence that appears to be building up points to whether or not the president has deliberately misled Congress to make the most important decision a president has to make, going to...