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Downing Street Memo... Downing Street Memo... Downing Street Memo...
The Downing Street Memo Story Won't DieThat's grounds for impeachment right there. Please link to this story, pass it around. The US press tried to bury it for Bush--they love him because he gives them scoops, and cute nicknames, and stuff.
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.
Digby has a good post on the Supreme Court's terrible ruling today on medical marijuana:
Rehnquist, Thomas and O'Connor dissented [from the majority's holding that Federal anti-pot laws trump state laws] on the basis of states' rights, which is also consistent with their position. Kennedy swung with the majority --- he has no discernible position. The "surprise" is that Little Nino [Scalia], who is proving himself to be more and more of a straight-up whore every day, voted with Ginsberg and Stevens and the rest. Not because he agrees with the legal doctrine involved --- nothing in his judicial history would suggest that --- but because he just doesn't want people smoking pot. Or perhaps he just thinks that federal power is ducky when it's in the hands of his friends. Either way, he's intellectually bankrupt.
Pretty funny: blogger JC Christian, Patriot (ironic name) sent a sincere sounding email to a right wing group he joined called the Protest Warriors, recommending that instead of doing what they usually do--organize counter-protests against war dissenters--they should all enlist and serve in Iraq. Two people responded, a member whose gilrfriend is stationed in Kosovo and the "commander" of the Protest Warriors' Inland Empire (Spokane WA) Chapter, who begged off that he had done his service in peacetime. Fairly soon thereafter JC was outed as a "liberal troll" and deleted from the PW membership list. It's tough to be pro-War these days with more and more people suggesting that if you believe in it so much you ought to go do some actual fighting.