Sunday, June 19, 2005

Just making sure

Updated You've doubtless already come across the praise being offered to AP for its clear if belated article on the memos coming out of the UK proving that the Shrub team lied for a full year about its plans for Iraq.
London, June 18 - When Prime Minister Tony Blair's chief foreign policy adviser dined with Condoleezza Rice six months after Sept. 11, the then-U.S. national security adviser didn't want to discuss Osama bin Laden or al-Qaida. She wanted to talk about "regime change" in Iraq, setting the stage for the U.S.-led invasion more than a year later.
What I want to do here is to make sure, since I expect a fair number of you will have read a summary rather than having followed the link to the full article, that you have this: AP has posted the texts of six of the memos. They are in .pdf format and they are available at these links:

http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/fcolegal020308.pdf
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/manning020314.pdf
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/meyer020318.pdf
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/ods020308.pdf
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/ricketts020322.pdf
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/straw020325.pdf

I've posted the text of the other two memos; the first one, the original Downing Street Memo, on May 7; the next one on June 15.

Footnote: The AP article does contain one real howler:
Details of the memos appeared in papers early last month but the news in Britain quickly turned to the election that returned Blair to power. In the United States, however, details of the memos' contents reignited a firestorm, especially among Democratic critics of Bush.
What? The memos were ignored in the UK but they caused a "firestorm" here, here where the major media wouldn't touch them, barely mentioned them, and where likely most people still haven't heard of them? The ass-covering self-deception of which our media is capable is truly astounding.

Updated to say that for some days after this was posted, trying any of the links to the memos as stored on AP got a "page not found" error. But they are all working now.

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