What Smoking Gun? Where?

By Robert Dreyfuss, TomPaine.com
Posted on May 23, 2005, Printed on May 25, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/22068/

We've all seen enough CSI to know that you can't ignore a smoking gun. But the media has so far pretty much ignored the so-called Downing Street memo, which implicated the Bush administration in falsifying intelligence in connection with the plan for war in Iraq. Let's try to understand why.

On the left, it's part of the catechism now that President Bush and his administration lied about the reasons for going to war against Iraq in 2003, and that they "cooked" the intelligence used to inflate the Iraqi threat. The over-baked intelligence was then used, wittingly, to justify claims that Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program, vast stockpiles of chemical and biological arms, SCUD missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles to deliver them, and, of course, ties to Al Qaeda that implicated Saddam Hussein in the events of 9/11.

On the right, the catechism says the opposite: that the Bush administration went to war in good faith, that U.S. intelligence functioned without political pressure to come up with its way-off-the-mark conclusions, and that not only did the weapons exist but that we might still find them if we keep looking--in Syria, perhaps?

Only one of these catechisms has the imprimatur of truth--which is why, 26 months after the war with Iraq began, it seems more important than ever to get to the bottom of it. Unfortunately, just as the United States has given up looking for Iraqi WMD, official Washington and the media have given up trying to see which one of these catechisms is phony. The proof is the utterly blasé reaction to what seems to be a true "smoking gun": the so-called Downing Street memo, based on verbatim U.S.-British talks in 2002, in which the British calmly reported that the United States had already decided to make war on Iraq and that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." (MORE...)