The Downing Street Memo was the first documentary evidence of what many people had believed for years, that George W. Bush deliberately lied in order to convince Congress and the people of the United States that the invasion of Iraq was right and necessary. He had not only “misled” the United States, as most people were now saying, but he had done so knowingly.
The Downing Street Memo didn’t get much attention in the mainstream American media. You pretty much had to be on the internet with alternative news sources, or listening to Democracy Now! in order to have heard about it. Here it was—in all its horrible truth and illumination—documentary evidence that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had manipulated the intelligence about WMD in order to deceive the nation into going to war.
The actual words of the memo were “intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” of invading Iraq. This memo was, in fact, the minutes of a meeting between the Prime Minister of England, Tony Blair, and his highest ranking members of MI 5, England’s equivalent to the CIA. Top Secret. It was leaked to The London Times and appeared on its front page on May 1, 2005; yet in the U.S. this front page news item did not get printed in The Washington Post until two weeks later, nor in The New York Times until three weeks later, and even then buried deep inside the paper. Documentary evidence that our leader had lied to our Congress and to the nation as a whole was thereby relegated to the back pages of our major newspapers.
I wrote a letter to The Sacramento Bee to complain of its lack of coverage. The Bee did not reply to me. I wrote a second letter. No reply. I wrote a third letter and received this reply:
Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 08:10:45
To: Bob Locke
From Letters Editor opinion@sacbee.com
Subject: Re: Dodging the Downing Street MemoThe Bee has been on the receiving end of a number of letters about the Downing Street Memo. Most of these letters come from people who obviously have never read The Bee. Since The Bee has published stories on the memo and even recently published an article about a second 2002 memo, letters suggesting that The Bee is in some way covering up the topic are not considered for publication.
John Hughes, Letters Editor
So, censorship plain and simple. You can go ahead and WRITE your letters of complaint, but The Bee won't publish them. The point of the writers, of course, was that The Bee was not giving this important story the prominence that it deserved.
As you might expect, I now wrote a letter that I sent to all the top editors of The Bee complaining of this censorship policy regarding letters submitted by an unknown but assumedly substantial number of their readership. Burying is not coverage, but cover-upage. And, as you might expect, I received no responses from any of those editors.
So if you have never before heard of the infamous Downing Street Memos (now there have been several more leaks, each quite damaging to Bush and Blair on questions of the Iraq War) now you have. You should also know that Representative John Conyers, another hero and the ranking member of the Judiciary Committe, has been trying his valiant best to get the House of Representatives involved in an investigation of this question of our leader’s having “fixed” intelligence and facts about WMD to get us to go to war, but James Sensenbrenner, the majority chair of the Judiciary Committee along with all his loyal members in the tyrannous Majority, has thrown many obstacles in the way. More cover-up in the name of partisan “My Man” blindness.
I have to revise that last paragraph since the Democratic Congress was elected at the end of 2006. I have had such disappointments in the leadership of that Congress, whom I expected to right the wrongs that the previous Republican Congress had committed in their blindly partisan support of their party's president. Nancy Pelosi announced even before the election that impeachment was “off the table”. Impeachment is a primary duty of the House of Representatives when a President or other high official has gone rogue, as most certainly George W. Bush, led along by his Vice, Dick Cheney, has done. My quondam hero John Conyers has gone along with Pelosi, disappointing me greatly in his integrity and spine. Well, who knows what goes on behind closed doors, what kinds of pressure Conyers has been subjected to by the leadership? But right is right. And impeachment of an Executive who has lied and caused the deaths and maiming of many many thousands of Americans—not to mention the deaths and homelessness of more than a million Iraqis who were never any threat to us, and the devastation to that country, and disruption of the entire region—is not only right, it is dutiful to our Constitution.
Copyright © 2006, rev. 2008 Robert Locke
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