Almost completely invisible here in the US so far, but in the UK this is a big damn deal…
A newly-released Way Holy Secret memo
from July 2002, written to British defense and foreign-policy
higher-ups regarding Iraq, bluntly states the results of recent
high-level talks with the United States:
inevitable. 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.
Let’s look at that again in slow-motion instant replay:
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.
Oh, and there’s more:
threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that
of Libya, North Korea or Iran.
Much of the rest of the memo shows that Blair has lied his ass off in his claims of what he was told and by whom.
Meanwhile, those of us still in America can see even more clearly, from
inside the secret discussions at the top of the British government:
Bush was lying when he said at the time that war had not been decided on.
The rationales for the war were in place before they were eventually spouted with such urgency.
The books were cooked.
Oh, and by the way:
Right. Yes. That’s fairly clear.
This should be a big damn deal here, too. Granted, to many
well-informed people, this was all rather obvious at the time. And
over the last few years, many reasonable people have come to realize
what happened. But this is a major addition to the documentary proof
that Bush and crew created this war.
Read the full memo here.
Meanwhile, CNN’s website (taken as an example only, not as any measure of legitimate journalism) currently has absolutely nothing about the new memo. Nothing. A search for the name of the memo’s author returns nothing. Instead, the front page currently has a scary picture of a North Korean missile; an announcement that U.S. soldiers have been "cleared" in the shooting of an Italian intelligence agent (Italy, um, disagrees); and the breathtaking news that the First Lady is good with one-liners. Oh, and Mariah Carey has a new album.