Missing the Point of the Downing St. Memo

In an effort to prove that they didn't blow off reporting on the Downing Street memo, the media has attempted to say that the memo doesn't saying anything that the press hadn't previously reported, i.e. that the Bush Administration was planning for war against Saddam Hussein.

And if that wasn't enough, Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post added that Critics, however, note that the memo by Richard Dearlove, then head of British intelligence, offered no specifics about any cooking of the intelligence books and could easily have been drawn from ongoing news accounts about the administration gearing up for war.

That the facts were being fixed was only one part of the memo. As Slate pointed out there were three points to the memo, that the Bush administration:

• Knew Saddam Hussein didn't pose a threat
• Decided to overthrow him by force anyway; and
• Was "fixing" intelligence to sell the impending invasion to a duped American public.

The media and Republicans have decided that the first two points are unimportant and that the third was false. Yet here is a memo describing minutes of British intelligence meeting and as Michael Smith, reporter for the Sunday Times of London, whose coverage broke the story, said It is one thing for the New York Times or The Washington Post to say that we were being told that the intelligence was being fixed by sources inside the CIA or Pentagon or the NSC and quite another to have documentary confirmation in the form of the minutes of a key meeting with the Prime Minister's office.

When faced with this truth, conservatives argue that "fixed" doesn't mean fixed, it means focused. Unfortunately, that also is false, Smith pointed out. This is a real joke. I do not know anyone in the UK who took it to mean anything other than fixed as in fixed a race, fixed an election, fixed the intelligence. If you fix something, you make it the way you want it.

But how was the public to know they were lying? If only someone in the U.S. had actually pointed out the lies in real time surely the media would have looked into it. Wouldn't they?
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These guys are the most crooked, you know, lying group of people I've ever seen," John Kerry - March 10, 2004.