Interesting: 'Downing Street memo' spotlighted in Congress By Lawrence M. O'Rourke -- Bee Washington Bureau Published 2:15 am PDT Friday, June 17, 2005 WASHINGTON - House Democrats opposed to the Iraq war came together Thursday to draw more public attention to the so-called "Downing Street memo," the British government document that advised Prime Minister Tony Blair that President Bush was determined to invade Iraq nearly a year before the war was launched. At an event in the Capitol, House Democrats pointed out that the memo, first reported in the London Sunday Times on May 1, a few weeks before the British election, got scant attention in U.S. newspapers or broadcasts until liberal bloggers castigated the U.S. press for not exposing inconsistent Bush statements on the war. On the Senate side of the Capitol, Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., cited the memo Thursday in further holding up Bush's nominee for the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton. Reid and Senate Democrats have demanded a full accounting of whether Bolton exaggerated assessments of several countries' weapons programs. "Concerns about this administration hyping intelligence and Great Britain hyping intelligence cannot be dismissed lightly," Reid said, adding that it "is no small matter for us to learn whether Mr. Bolton was a party to other efforts to hype intelligence." At the forum in a tiny room at the Capitol, about two dozen liberal Democrats said that the memo was proof that Bush misstated intelligence in claiming that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and posed an imminent threat to the United States and its allies. The House Democrats accused Bush and his top aides of deliberately deceiving the public about his intent to go to war. They said the British memo contradicted the president's statement that he did not decide to invade Iraq until shortly before the March 2003 launch of hostilities. Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee and dean of the Congressional Black Caucus, organized Thursday's meeting at the Capitol. He billed it as a congressional hearing, though it did not have the endorsement of any committee chairman, all of whom are Republican. The Democrats and a small audience heard statements critical of the war from former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, Boston lawyer John Bonifaz, a co-founder of AfterDowningStreet. org, and Cindy Sheehan of Vacaville, the mother of Casey Sheehan, who was killed in action in Iraq in April 2004. Conyers and other House members then attended an anti-war rally in Lafayette Park across from the White House and delivered to the White House gate a letter from about 100 House Democrats asking Bush to say when he and Blair decided to invade Iraq. Conyers also presented a petition he said was signed by more than half a million U.S. citizens. White House spokesman Scott McClellan says Conyers "is simply trying to rehash old debates." The rallying point for the Democrats was a memo, drafted after a July 23, 2002, meeting in London of Blair and his top aides. The memo, written by Richard Dearlove, then head of British intelligence, said that Bush had "fixed" the intelligence on Iraq and that war was inevitable. The memo asserted that "Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD." The memo noted that "there was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action." Conyers said that if the memos are accurate, "they establish a prima facie case of going to war under false pretenses." "This means that more than 1,600 brave Americans and hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis would have lost their lives for a lie," said Conyers. Six weeks after the London newspaper disclosed the memo, and after the British election that kept Blair in power, Bush and Blair met at the White House on June 7 and afterward addressed the memo during a news conference. As for allegations that he had by the summer of 2002 decided to go to war against Saddam, Bush declared, "There's nothing further from the truth." He said he and Blair talked about "how can we do this peacefully. ... Both of us didn't want to use our military." Blair also insisted that he and Bush tried to end the dispute with Saddam without armed conflict. "The facts were not being fixed in any shape or form at all," Blair said. At the panel in the Capitol, House Democrats asked why the memo had gotten so little attention from the U.S. news media. Though many major U.S. newspapers and broadcast outlets were fully aware of the British memo, few reported on it at any length. Some editors have subsequently offered explanations. Philip Taubman, Washington bureau chief for the New York Times, said in an account written by the newspaper's public editor that "given what has been reported about war planning in Washington, the revelations about the Downing Street meeting did not seem like a bolt from the blue." Glenn Frankel, London bureau chief for the Washington Post, said, according to an account published in the Post, that he "could not initially confirm the memo's authenticity and 'didn't really see that there was anything new in it.' " The Post's ombudsman, Michael Getler, wrote that he had been "deluged" with e-mails prompted by liberal groups and said he was "amazed" that it took the Post two weeks to follow up on the London Times report, according to a story in the Post. The Associated Press, which many U.S. newspapers rely upon heavily for foreign coverage, virtually ignored the memo after its London publication. Deborah Stewart, AP's international editor, said in a reported statement: "There is no question AP dropped the ball in not picking up on the Downing Street memo sooner."
