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After reading an article about the Iraq war, I thought: What is taking so long? What is taking so long for the American media to quell all of the "manipulation" and actually report what is going on in the world? -snip I am a journalism student. It is refreshing to know that there are still journalists who care more about their readers than the agenda of sinister plotters bent on profiteering from an unjustified conflict while risking the young lives of U.S. soldiers. Seeking the truth, I recently came upon the Downing Street memos. These are the recorded minutes of...

It is truly amazing how fast this story disappeared. Like a weatherman's forecast and an economist's dire prediction, the Downing Street Memos seem to have completely disappeared. Has anyone seen a retraction from the bile spewers and chicken littles?

Since it was first published in the British press in May, the so-called Downing Street memo has generated debate about the Bush administration's intentions of going to war. Critics of the Iraq war have seized on the document--minutes of a July 23, 2002, meeting between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his senior government leadership--as proof that the Bush administration was hell-bent for war even as it publicly sought to bring Saddam Hussein to heel through diplomacy. War critics have focused on a section of the document in which a British spy agency chief, identified as C, discussed a recent...

Sen. Kerry is wielding a double-edged sword By Alexander Bolton Sen. John Kerry is facing a dilemma. With an eye towards running for president again in 2008, the Massachusetts Democrat has positioned himself as one of the most pugnacious critics of the Bush administration, often aligning himself with liberal activists. But at times, his aggressive anti-Bush rhetoric risks alienating other parts of his own party. Kerry’s predicament was apparent this week as he took the lead among Democrats by calling for President Bush to fire his deputy chief of staff, Karl Rove, for Rove’s alleged role in revealing the identity...

……The administration has prevented any official inquiry into whether it hyped the case for war. But there's plenty of circumstantial evidence that it did. …….And then there's the Downing Street Memo - actually the minutes of a prime minister's meeting in July 2002 - in which the chief of British overseas intelligence briefed his colleagues about his recent trip to Washington. "Bush wanted to remove Saddam," says the memo, "through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and W.M.D. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." It doesn't get much clearer than that.

Bob and Gina Fesmire of Sunnyvale are hardly political firebrands. Bob, a Silicon Valley public relations man who sports a ponytail, grew up in a Republican home and embraces Libertarian values favoring small government that stays out of individuals' lives. Gina, a graphic designer, is more left- leaning, but she stresses that they both are registered independents who focus on issues -- not ideology -- during elections. However, outraged by what's now known as the "Downing Street Memo" and the scant initial coverage of it in the U.S. media, the Sunnyvale couple teamed with a Chicago law student and a...

FReepers from the DC Chapter conducted a FReep of the Downing Street Memo Rally  at Lafayette Park next to the White House on June 16. The DSM Rally was sponsored by Code Pink and Progressive Democrats of America (the outfit of William Rivers Pitt of DUmmie FUnnies fame) in an attempt to refight their crushing defeat in the last election. The leftists, including John Conyers (D-Michigan) and other members of Congress who spoke or attended, are trying to impeach President Bush by using a triple-hearsay, ambiguous memo (read great National Review article here) of a lower level British Foreign Office...

If you click on the Downing Street Memo thread,you'll see where I posted a "Eulogy for the DSM". I first want to thank all those that posted comments here and/or visited my website (link above). When I recieve responses at my website, however, I don't know if I should be flattered or not. Why?? It seems that whenever someone leaves a post at my site, it's NEGATIVE. What follows is an anonymous comment posted after the "eulogy". I was going to actually accept this person's criticism until I saw their 4th point: "You right wing revisionist historians are so transparent....

No Bounce: Bush Job Approval Unchanged by War Speech; Question on Impeachment Shows Polarization of Nation; Americans Tired of Divisiveness in Congress—Want Bi-Partisan Solutions—New Zogby Poll President Bush’s televised address to the nation produced no noticeable bounce in his approval numbers, with his job approval rating slipping a point from a week ago, to 43%, in the latest Zogby International poll. And, in a sign of continuing polarization, more than two-in-five voters (42%) say they would favor impeachment proceedings if it is found the President misled the nation about his reasons for going to war with Iraq. The Zogby America...

LONDON - British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Wednesday the "Downing Street memos" paint a distorted picture, and he insisted that the Iraq war was not predetermined by the United States. "People say the decision was already taken. The decision was not already taken," he said in an exclusive interview with The Associated Press. Blair added he was "a bit astonished" at the intensive U.S. media coverage about the leaked memos, which suggested the White House viewed the war with Iraq as inevitable.

Fri Jun 24 2005 09:43:30 ET Vice President Dick Cheney was asked on CNN about the 'Downing Street memo' which said the Bush Administration had decided to go to war with Iraq and the intelligence would be fixed around that policy. Asked if he disputes the memo's claim, Cheney said, "Of course. The memo was written sometime prior to when we actually got involved in Iraq. "And remember what happened after the supposed memo was written. We went to the United Nations. We got a unanimous vote out of the Security Council for a resolution calling on Saddam Hussein to...

THE Left is has gone all Captain Renault on us. Captain Renault, you might remember, is the gleefully corrupt cop in "Casablanca" who shuts down a casino by saying he's "shocked, shocked to discover gambling going on here" — even as he stuffs his winnings in his pocket.

The Madison chapter of Veterans for Peace is planning a series of town hall meetings to discuss the impeachment of President Bush. Retired UW Professor Bob Kimbrough hopes the meetings will spark a serious discussion on impeachment. "It's pretty much in the air now, thank goodness," he said. The state Democratic Party has called for the impeachment of Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and some Democrats in Congress have broached the subject. Kimbrough, Buzz Davis and Don McKeating of Madison Veterans for Peace, Chapter 25, are organizing the events. "The purpose, since it's a...

Let’s be calm. Before we join the lynching crowd, the onus to examine this British intelligence report falls on the shoulder of responsible citizens who are not after President George W. Bush’s neck, politically or otherwise. Invectives and verbal abuse against Bush’s decision to invade Iraq based on the alleged “fixing” of intelligence report mentioned in the document is nothing but lapsus linguae if these come from polluted sources in Congress, allied Liberals or cause-oriented groups, politically driven protesting beatniks, and the profit-crazed, wayward media whose excuse for being is to sensationalize news. These anti-Bush and anti-Iraq-war champions of the...

Every day, it seems, there are more blogs, more compilations of blogs and more chatter about blogs, as online debate comes in more flavors. You have congressmen, presidential candidates and corporate leaders all doing the blog thing, as well as legions of ordinary folks armed mainly with opinions. This, in my view, is a great thing, even though no human being, including me, can keep up with the millions of words being posted each day. (Now you have to keep up not just with Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo but with his TPM Cafe, not to mention the 1,239 people...

A quick glance at the DUmmieland forum would tell a visitor that something is amiss in the form of a definite lack of a certain recent obsession. Yes, GONE are the many many Downing Street Memo (DSM in crypto DUmmieSpeak) threads. So what happened? After all, wasn’t it just last week that Pied Piper Pitt breathlessly declared June 16 to be the day that would change history and that nothing would ever be the same again because of a non-official hearing conducted by John Conyers in a congressional broom closet. What has happened to cause the early, unlamented DEATH...

The Downing Street memo has a new fan — Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass. — who recently said that the memo was a "stunning, unbelievably simple and understandable statement of the truth and a profoundly important document." The problem for Kerry, however, is that there is another document that contradicts his view, a document that the defeated Democratic presidential candidate ought to remember. No, I am not talking about the other official British documents disclosed since Kerry made that statement, although they do show just how silly it was for people to interpret the first memo — which contained meeting minutes...

IT'S BAD enough that the Bush administration had so little international support for the Iraqi war that its ''coalition of the willing" meant the United States, Britain, and the equivalent of a child's imaginary friends. It's even worse that, as the British Downing Street memo confirms, they had so little evidence of real threats that they knew from the start that they were going to have to manufacture excuses to go to war. What's more damning still is that they effectively began this war even before the congressional vote. With congressman John Conyers holding hearings, the media are finally starting...

...Bush planted the seeds of the destruction of his Iraq policy before the war started. Salvaging the venture will require an unprecedented degree of candor and realism from a White House that was never willing to admit --even to itself-- how large an undertaking it was asking the American people to buy into. The notion that the president led the country into war through indirection or dishonesty is not the most damaging criticism of the administration. The worst possibility is that the president and his advisers believed their own propaganda. They did not prepare the American people for an arduous...

A few weeks ago, at an airport in Europe, I saw Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code staring at me across the bookstore bins. I had seen it many times before and averted my gaze, but I was facing a long delay, and I suddenly thought: May as well get it over with. Well, of course I knew it would be bad. I just didn't know that it would be that bad. Never mind for now the breathless and witless style, or the mashed-paper characters, or the lazy, puerile reliance on incredible coincidence to flog the lame plot along. What if...