The NYT Delivers the Second Part in its Series to Discredit the Dowing Street Minutes

Well, it looks as if the NYT is the first corporate media outlet to pick up the thread thoughtfully set out by their man Sanger yesterday. Today it's Todd Purdom, who never met a BushCo cover story he didn't just love, who champions the WH that dragged us into an illegal and unwinnable war: (all emph mine)

The disclosure of British government memorandums portraying the Bush administration as bent on war with Iraq by the summer of 2002, and insufficiently prepared for post-invasion problems, has caused a political stir on both sides of the Atlantic, in part because opponents of President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair see the documents as proof that both men misled their countries into war.  

But the documents are not quite so shocking. Three years ago , the near-unanimous conventional wisdom in Washington held that Mr. Bush was determined to topple Saddam Hussein by any means necessary. Plenty of people - chief among them Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state - were also warning in public and private that the Pentagon was ill prepared for prolonged occupation.
 

This is where we are in journalism today.  Even though neither Blair nor Bush has said that the DSM is inaccurate and instead have danced around with careful non-denial denials, the NYT, among other papers, is happy to carry their water.

What no one knew then for certain (though some lonely voices did predict it) is that American forces would find none of the lethal chemical or biological weapons that Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair said made Iraq so dangerous, or that the anti-American insurgency would be so durable and deadly. That is why the British memos' foresight - read with the benefit of hindsight - rings so bittersweet for those who tried in vain to avert the war, and remain aghast at its human and material costs.

Lonely because when they did get coverage, they were shoved on the back pages buried eight grafs down in the story.  This, while Team BushCo was running around talking about mushroom clouds, yellowcake, Sarin on turkey farms and aluminum tubes.

 

But the memos are not the Dead Sea Scrolls. There has been ample evidence for many months, and even years, that top Bush administration figures saw war as inevitable by the summer of 2002. In the March 31, 2003, issue of The New Yorker, with the invasion just under way, Richard N. Haass, then the State Department's director of policy planning, said that in early July 2002 he asked Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, whether it made sense to put Iraq at the center of the agenda, with a global campaign against terrorism already under way. "And she said, essentially, that that decision's been made, don't waste your breath," he said then.

  By July 2002, daily newspapers were filled with details of war plans, which had been seeping out since late spring, and internal administration disputes over whether the planning was adequate. In August, Vice President Dick Cheney made a bellicose speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, in which he warned that a return of United Nations weapons inspectors to Iraq "would provide no assurance whatsoever" of Mr. Hussein's compliance.

None of which is the point of the attention the DSM and the related notes and memos are getting, which, of course, Purdum must know.  If he doesn't then a quick trip over to DowningStreetMemo.com should help him out.   There he can see a handy chart that makes clear exactly how and why BushCo was lying to our country and that the DSM and the supporting documents, which are official confirmation of what those lonely and ignored voices were saying three years ago, are, in fact, "Dead Sea Scrolls" that outline the depth of BushCo's deception. 

 

The so-called Downing Street memo, a summary of a prime minister's meeting on July 23, 2002, does not put forward specific proof that Mr. Bush had taken any particular action, only a general sense that "it seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided." It describes the impression of Britain's chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy," but does not elaborate. 

It doesn't name the person who leaked Valerie Plame to the Vampire Novak, Douchebag of Liberty,  either, but that's not the point, is it?   Purdum is happy to confuse "specific proof" with "official statements."  So that we are led to believe that a smoking gun has not been found.   Read the pertinent part of the DSM again and see if this sounds like "only a general sense" to you:

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as 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. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

Purdum continues down his illogical path:

Rather, what the memo seems to emphasize is that the United States could build greater support for any military action - especially from Britain - by first confronting Iraq through the United Nations, the course it eventually took at the urging of Mr. Blair and Mr. Powell.

The DSMinutes discuss the necessity of involving the UN because the Brits know that that's the best cover they're going to get for BushCo to get his war on.  It all flows from the, according to Purdum, unclear and unconfirmed, point that BushCo was set on invading Iraq come hell or high water.  For as yet unexplained reasons, the UK was willing to shepherd him through a less overtly illegal process to get that done.

And then comes this telling sentence from the WH's man at the NYT:

For better or worse, the questions raised anew by the memos are not likely to go away.

Brilliant analysis, isn't it?  For better or worse, these DSM people just aren't going to shut up about being lied to by their president and the corporate media.  I'd like to read Purdum's analysis of what exactly he thinks the "better" and the "worse" are.  Something tells me it wouldn't jibe with my ideas of what the best and worst case scenarios to come from the DSM  would be.  But then again, I don't work for the WH.

He closes with a tricky combination cop-out/burial of the lede:

 

Last summer, the Senate Intelligence Committee issued a scathing, unanimous report that "most of the major key judgments" in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's illicit weapons were "either overstated, or were not supported by, the underlying intelligence reporting."

 

By prior agreement, the committee focused only on the role played by intelligence agencies, and reserved the question of how policy makers used intelligence for a future study, which is bogged down in internal disputes and competing priorities.

 

But Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the committee's ranking Democrat, said Monday in a statement, "The committee has an obligation to answer these questions, and the American people deserve answers. Only then can we provide a full and complete accounting of the mistakes leading up to the war in Iraq and what changes are necessary to fix them."
 

Translation: Dude, it's up to Congress to figure this out.  Except they won't - don't ask why, I'm not telling.  It's another pile of that "really good journalism" that Elisabeth Bumiller promised we'd be seeing after the ruinous reporting in the lead up to the war.

So it looks like the poor, hapless NYT is stuck with documents that aren't the Dead Sea Scrolls and so are open to all sorts of wild interpretation, which they can turn around and print as analysis.  It's good to be stenographer to the King.

Comments

[doghouse riley]

Bravo!

By the way, here's how I avoided winding up in a neck brace: I started laughing hysterically when Byron Calame brought it up. Though I have to admit it never occurred to me that "it's not a smoking gun because we already knew that" would be the best they could come up with.

[eRobin]

Ah, I had forgotten Calame. It seems the die was cast a while ago at the NYT. They are nothing if not a united front and consistent voice on the subject of Presidential Deception. Oh, wait ...

[Helga Fremlin]

Brilliant, Robin! On the other hand, Todd Purdum has been writing pro-Bush articles since time immemorial - meaning since January 2001 or so ..

[eRobin]

Yes. He's an established stooge.

[William De Pelecyn]

I am a veteran of World War 11 and totally against the Iraq war. I weep for all of our young men dying for nothing. We have to end this slaughter immediately. Our men are not sacrificing their lives for our freedom, but for a useless country. They do not want us there.
Ann De Pelecyn, too