The Downing Street Memo Story Won't Die

By Jefferson Morley, washingtonpost.com Staff Writer, Tuesday, June 7, 2005; 9:18 AM

More than a month after its publication, the so-called Downing Street Memo remains among the top 10 most viewed articles on The Times of London site.

It's not hard to see why this remarkable document, published in The Times on May 1 (and reported in this column on May 3), continues to attract reader interest around the world, especially with British Prime Minister Tony Blair visiting Washington Tuesday.

The July 2002 memo, labeled "SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL - UK EYES ONLY," reports the views of "C," code name for Richard Dearlove, the chief of British intelligence. Dearlove had just returned from a visit with Bush administration officials eight months before the war in Iraq began.

"Military action was now seen as inevitable," Dearlove told Blair and his senior defense policy advisers. "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."

A separate secret briefing paper for the meeting said Britain and the United States had to "create" conditions to justify a war.

funny, the guy gilliard mocked (and rightly so as he was a whiny bitch) in a post you referenced somewhere was on his case (and atrios) for not pushing this story hard enough. glad to see you pulling your weight.


- dave 6-08-2005 5:36 pm

I haven't been following why Atrios and Gilliard think it's weak. To me it's the best, most condensed answer to throw back at anybody who says (i) "the administration has better intelligence than we do about other countries' nukes, etc, and we can't second guess them," which someone actually said to me right after the war started or (ii) that the poor, poor administration had bad information because of too much groupthink in the intelligence community, which is the official excuse du jour. In either case, you say, "Well, the head of British intelligence was at those meetings and now admits the facts were fixed to fit the policy." You just repeat that over and over until it sinks in. That's your smoking gun.
- tom moody 6-08-2005 7:42 pm

they dont think its weak, they just didnt want to be badgered into obsessing over it by an overzealous ass.
- dave 6-08-2005 7:56 pm

Downing Street Minutes ... Downing Street Minutes ...Downing Street Minutes ...

One angle I've heard is, "well it's not news, because we all he was a liar anyway."

Um, no.

Some of us may have known, but there's a big swath of the American public that need to be smacked over the head with the truth a couple of hundred times before they'll get the point.
- mark 6-08-2005 8:03 pm

Is it memo or minutes?
- tom moody 6-08-2005 8:08 pm

The right agrees on its memes.
- tom moody 6-08-2005 8:09 pm

My understanding is that "minutes" is more correct, but both forms are out there. I don't know if it makes a difference, but I have seen some DKos comments by people who think the wording is important. At news.google.com, downing street memo has about double the hits of downing street minutes. But in both cases, the number of hits is depressingly low. The main thing is that the story needs to be repeated. It's finally gotten some national attention, due perhaps to Blair's visit.
- mark 6-08-2005 11:16 pm

Russert (as if): "...the Downing Street Memo or Minutes or whatever bloggers are calling it or them..."

Minutes is better because it implies a contemporaneous record instead of something written up after the fact. The Post is going with memo (and a related paper). Maybe I'll trade off, use memo and minutes interchangeably...
- tom moody 6-09-2005 12:06 am

minutes is too esoteric/anachronistic for america.
- dave 6-09-2005 12:17 am

I guess minutes also seems kind of European. French, ain't it? Perhaps this is why the US press never got excited about the dodgy dossier,


- mark 6-09-2005 10:43 am

I was joking about Russert, but apparently he did refer this week to the "famous Downing Street Memo"--so famous he'd never mentioned it on his show before that.
According to Salon it was "the first time NBC News had even mentioned the document or the controversy surrounding it. In fact, Russert's query was the first time any of the network news divisions addressed the issue seriously."
- tom moody 6-09-2005 11:30 pm

Infamous is what it should be.
- mark 6-10-2005 12:22 am

colin powell was on the daily show last night. somewhat interesting exchange. powell broached(?) the subject of the memo but only as a preemptive measure. and stewart didnt press him on that, which allowed powell to fall back on "the faulty intelligence" line. also stewart tried to push the "rushed to war" angle but didnt press his guest. stewart will fall back on the line that his show is entertainment on comedy central but once you call people out for hurting america youd better not punt when its your turn to step up to the plate. (yes! mixed sports metaphor! take that, cricketeer!) that said, the daily show is the only news i watch on tv these days.

ps - cant you imagine russert imagining himself as some sort of latter day woodstein for this display of intrepid journalism?
- dave 6-10-2005 1:01 am

alot of pressing and falling back, too. its metaphorlicious!
- dave 6-10-2005 1:11 am

Hey, it wasn't so bad on the Thomas Friedman scale:

That is why, in moments of great excitement, you can find Friedman reinventing the very design of the automobile, tossing parts out the window with revolutionary fervor, explaining his radical new vision for humanity in terms of a new way to drive. Thus his famous pre-war description of Bush’s Iraq policy: "It’s O.K. to throw out your steering wheel as long as you remember you’re driving without one."

Is it? Does that metaphor really work? Regardless of what you might think about Bush’s Iraq policy, is it ever possible to drive an actual automobile without a steering wheel? Friedman is perhaps the only writer in history whose meaning needs, literally, to be extracted by the Jaws of Life.

"It’s O.K. to throw out your steering wheel as long as you remember you’re driving without one."

i guess michael kelly took him a bit too literally.

im sure friedmans just imagining a future world where steering has become obsolete. youre so constrained by your parochial datapoints.
- dave 6-10-2005 1:37 am