MemoGate: Where Now?

Following last weeks's hearings, Rep. John Conyers was turned away from the White House gates (pic here) when he attempted to deliver a letter sign by over half a million people demanding answers about the lies that led us to war.

Media coverage is picking up, slowly but steadily. Newsweek has a useful article here, although Ellis Henican at Newsday warns "don't get too excited." Even the US military paper Stars and Stripes has coverage.

Associated Press is giving local papers around the world lots of Downing Street Documents text to edit and publish as they please:


Memos: Postwar Iraq a Concern in Britain

U.S. War Plans Much-Discussed in Memos

2002 Memos Undercut British WMD Claims

Redford Says He Linked Deep Throat to FBI

But the big news today is two breaking stories. First, the Independent has reported that the US has used napalm-type firebombs during the Iraq War and lied about it to the British government.

Secondly, yet another leaked British Memo, this one giving detailed legal advice that the pre-war bombings of Iraq (designed to pressure Saddam into retaliation as much as to disable pre-war targets) were "illegal under international law" according to Blair's own Foreign Office.

The advice was first provided to senior ministers in March 2002. Two months later RAF and USAF jets began “spikes of activity” designed to goad Saddam Hussein into retaliating and giving the allies a pretext for war.

The Foreign Office advice shows military action to pressurise the regime was “not consistent with” UN law, despite American claims that it was...

Although the legality of the war has been more of an issue in Britain than in America, the revelations indicate Bush may also have acted illegally, since Congress did not authorise military action until October 11 2002.

The full text of the new memo is here. The story was again leaked by Michael Smith in the Sunday Times. What's he got for us next week, one wonders?

The news media cannot claim these memos are "single-sourced" or otherwise unverifiable, either. As AP reports:

The eight memos — all labeled "secret" or "confidential" — were first obtained by British reporter Michael Smith, who has written about them in The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Times.

Smith told AP he protected the identity of the source he had obtained the documents from by typing copies of them on plain paper and destroying the originals.

The AP obtained copies of six of the memos (the other two have circulated widely). A senior British official who reviewed the copies said their content appeared authentic. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of the secret nature of the material.

Michael Smith could turn out to be MemoGate's Bob Woodward, and his high-level "Deep Throat" source seems to have unending access to embarrassing government papers. This article from The Nation is today's MOST VIEWED opinion piece on Yahoo News:

There is painful irony in the fact that, during the same month that the confirmation of "Deep Throat's" identity has allowed the Washington Post to relive its Watergate-era glory days, that newspaper is blowing the dramatically more significant story of the "fixed" intelligence the Bush Administration used to scam Congress and US allies into supporting the disasterous invasion and occupation of
Iraq...

The years of the Bush presidency will be remembered as a time when American media, for the most part, practiced stenography to power --and when once-great newspapers became little more than what the reformers of another time referred to as "the kept press."

The Conyers letter... is an essential response to our contemporary media crisis. That it had to be written provides evidence of just how serious that crisis has grown.

The parallels to Watergate are further explored here and here.

So what now? It seems clear that the real pressure from these memos is aimed directly at Tony Blair, and there needs to be a lawsuit filed against his government in the UK, citing these memos as proof that he broke international law.

If Blair goes down in such a case, the pressue on Bush and other allies would be enourmous. Of course, legal cases being what they are, that could take years.

In the meantime, watch for John Conyers and the Big Brass Alliance to maintain the pressure. And do whatever you can to maintain media coverage of this critically important issue. Here's one small example.

We are building the perfect wave, folks, just as Bush's popularity plummets and Americans express increasing dissatisfaction with the whole Iraq misadventure.