Knight Ridder kicks the AP's ass on the Downing Street Memo (MUST READ!)

[stickdog]

http://www.centredaily.com/mld/centredaily/news/11877957.htm

Memo offers Bush's critics hard evidence on prewar intelligence

BY DICK POLMAN

Knight Ridder Newspapers

PHILADELPHIA - (KRT) - Shortly after his November triumph, President Bush declared that voters had endorsed his prosecution of the war in Iraq. In his words, "We had an accountability moment, and that's called the 2004 elections."

But today, with U.S. casualties rising and military recruitment falling, it is clear that Bush's accountability moment has been extended. Even though he won't run for office again, voters continue to assess the signature decision of his presidency; in growing numbers, they are voicing dissatisfaction. And amid all this unease - for the first time, a majority of Americans say that the war launched in March 2003 has not made this nation safer - a growing grass-roots movement is spotlighting a once-secret British government memorandum, written in the summer of 2002, that depicts Bush as having already decided to wage war, even though the case against Saddam Hussein was "thin."

Americans are probably more conversant about Angelina Jolie than about the contents of the so-called Downing Street memo, which was leaked in London seven weeks ago to the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sunday Times. But if the chaos in Iraq continues (80 U.S. troops and 700 Iraqis died last month), the awareness gap may narrow - because the memo states that as Washington was preparing for war, "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

This is one of the few pieces of hard evidence that supports critics who contend that Bush hyped a non-existent threat - Saddam's purported weapons of mass destruction - as his justification for waging war.

more ...

[Hapameli]

1. Knight-Ridder is the last of the honest newswires

That must be why they're not used much anymore...

[nadinbrzezinski]

2. Ok now this is ironic

Rupert Murdoch OWNS the Sunday Times?

This one most have passed under the radar

[shifting_sands]

4. Downing Street Memo and Rupert Murdoch

Since the Times is in England I would assume Murdoch's purpose has more to do with Blair and Labour than Bush, unfortunately we have given so much power to Bush we think everything is about him. This memo was released just days before the Election in the UK, Murdoch is a Conservative and had a vested interest in seeing the Conservative platform win, and it nearly worked. Labour lost in England, it was Scotland and Wales that carried a diminished Labour party back to power and if anyone watched the first session of Parliament after the election you would have seen that suddenly Blair and the Labour party adopted every single thing on the Conservative agenda.

[muriel_volestrangler]

9. "Labour lost in England" - only true in one sense

According to an analysis based on results from all but two of the seats in England, the Tories won 193 seats in the country and Labour won 285.

But this did not reflect the number of votes cast. The Tories picked up 8,086,306 votes, but Labour had just 8,028,512.

http://www.portal.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/05/07/ntory507.xml

Because of the distribution of voters through the constituencies, Labour still won over half of the English seats in the Commons, despite getting less votes than the Tories.

Murdoch's main purpose with his papers is to make money. He can work with the Labour government quite happily; The Sun, his tabloid (and the biggest selling paper in the UK), supported Labour, while the Times and Sunday Times (they have separate editorial staff) both supported the Conservatives. This reflects the tendencies of their readership anyway.

[NewJeffCT]

10. Murdoch also HATES Blair

and probably figured that the corporate media would never pick it up over here...

[rodeodance]

3. Ret. Army col. says "memo is an authoritative piece of information.."

This is the best part "This is no longer a suspicion or accusation. The memo is an authoritative piece of information, at the highest level." by Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army colonel




......Liberal Internet blogs, and roughly 90 House Democrats, have sought publicity for the memo, and last Tuesday, for the first time, the Washington press asked Bush about it. He didn't dispute its authenticity. He didn't address the observation that his intelligence was being "fixed." He did deny that he had opted for war in the summer of 2002, saying "there's nothing farther from the truth."

Other Bush defenders have gone further. Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee, insisted on NBC last weekend that numerous U.S. probes have "discredited" any suggestion that Bush's war planners fixed the intelligence. And Jim Robbins, who teaches foreign policy to military officers at the federal National Defense University, dismisses the memo as "personal opinions based on unsubstantiated impressions from unnamed sources."

But this document - actually, the minutes of a meeting attended by Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top security aides - is viewed seriously by a range of U.S. policy experts. Michael O'Hanlon, an Iraq specialist at the Brookings Institution, said Thursday that "the memo is right" and "hard to dispute."

Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army colonel who is now a war analyst at Boston University, said: "The memo is significant because it was written by our closest ally, and when it comes to writing minutes on foreign policy and security matters, the British are professionals. We can conclude that the memo means precisely what it says. It says that Bush had already made the decision for war even while he was insisting publicly, and for many months thereafter, that war was the last resort........

"This is no longer a suspicion or accusation. The memo is an authoritative piece of information, at the highest level."

[DisassemblingHisLies]

5. It would be gratifying to see some of these retired military officers

join Conyers in demanding accountability.

[slor]

6. Great article...

and further evidence that WE need to make clear to the Democratic leadership, that they need to NOT just get "behind" Conyers on this issue, they need to stand right beside him!

[blm]

7. KnightRidder noticed that WE noticed. In retrospect, when Cspan ignored

the story and we reacted so forcefully, it could have been the best thing that happened for furthering the story. DU came out like gangbusters and the ensuing cry allowed for the good guys left in the media to do their job KNOWING they had consumer support.

[EFerrari]

8. Knight Ridder kicks Authorized Propaganda most of the time.

:kick: