Noted for the record

I'm a bit too world-weary these days for any kind of extended commentary so even though this deserves considerably more attention than I'm about to give it, what you see is what you get.

As I'm sure you know, new memos have emerged from the UK, further proving the contention that before the summer of 2002 the Shrub team made a definite decision to attack Iraq while publicly lying about it then and for months afterward, right up until the eve of the war. At a time when the major media were finding themselves forced to cover the first memo, the one that has become known as the Downing Street Memo, the new revelations have produced a range of responses, some of them quite bizarre: For example, some continued scrambling for excuses for their earlier failure to pay attention to the story; a popular version was advanced by Andrea Mitchell and the Washington Post, as Media Matters for America (MMFA) pointed out. The memo wasn't worth covering, they said, because it was "old news." Everyone, of course, knew Bush was bullshitting when he said no decision to invade Iraq had been made, they argued; Mitchell said "you had to be brain-dead not to know what he was up to." (Would that I had the resources to look back at their reporting at the time to see just how often they said or even hinted anything of the kind.)

On the other hand, the Los Angeles Times, which had been virtually silent on the matter, has now run a big story reporting that

[i]n March 2002, the Bush administration had just begun to publicly raise the possibility of confronting Iraq. But behind the scenes, officials already were deeply engaged in seeking ways to justify an invasion, newly revealed British memos indicate.

This from the paper in which, just three days earlier,

editorial page editor Michael Kinsley opted for sarcasm over serious discussion, deriding activists in a June 12 column for sending him emails "demanding that I cease my personal cover-up of something called the Downing Street Memo." Kinsley kidded that the fuss was a good sign for the Left: "Developing a paranoid theory and promoting it to the very edge of national respectability takes ideological self-confidence."

That from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), which also noted that as of the day of Kinsley's column, the LAT had run precisely one story on the Downing Street Memo, that back on May 12, nearly two weeks after the story broke.

MSNBC also had a decent, if short, story on Monday noting how the new memos strengthen war opponents' case and contradict not only past but also recent White House claims:

Vice President Dick Cheney also told a National Press Club luncheon Monday, "Any suggestion that we did not exhaust all alternatives before we got to that point, I think, is inaccurate."

In fact, current and former diplomats tell NBC News they understood from the beginning the Bush policy to be that Saddam had to be removed - one way or the other. The only question was when and how.

(Sidebar: Raw Story has obtained transcribed photocopies of the documents which they confirmed with Michael Smith, the UK journalist who first revealed them. They are available in .pdf format through this link.)

Now if only our so-called national paper of record had found news fit to print instead of printing someone's fit as news. I sent the following to the New York Times with a copy to its new public editor, Byron Calame.

I am quite astonished that as patently misleading an article as David Sanger's June 13 piece about the latest Downing Street memo could appear in the pages of the New York Times.

Sanger goes out of his way to ignore context and meaning in an attempt to claim that this latest memo contradicts the earlier one, revealed by The Times (London, UK) on May 1. That's the one, dated July 23, 2002, that said "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" and "It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided."

Sanger's rebuttal to this is to take a single phrase out of the new memo and impose an assumed meaning on it: It "explicitly states," he writes, "that the Bush administration had made 'no political decisions' to invade Iraq." This, however, is the actual sentence from the memo containing the single occurrence of the phrase:

"Although no political decisions have been taken, US military planners have drafted options for the US Government to undertake an invasion of Iraq."

Note first the word "decisions," plural. If instead of "decisions have" it read "decision has," Sanger's forced reading might have been at least a little persuasive. But it doesn't (and the use of "have" rather than "has" eliminates the possibility of it being a typo). Clearly, something more general is being referred to here.

What that something is can be determined from the previous paragraphs in the memo, which say US military planning "lacks a political framework" and takes the US to task for having given "little thought" to "creating the political conditions for military action" before going on to say "We need now to reinforce this message and to encourage the US Government to place its military planning within a political framework." By any rational reading of the document, those are the sort of "political decisions" to which the sentence fractionally quoted by Sanger refers.

Coupled with the memo's opening reference to Tony Blair's April 2002 promise to George Bush to support the US intent for "regime change" in Iraq, it becomes undeniable that the phrase Sanger quotes does not constitute an "explicit" denial - or any other kind of denial, for that matter - of the charge that the decision to invade Iraq had already been made by July, 2002. Indeed, the entire memo is premised on the conviction that military action is coming and concerns itself with what is required to establish the conditions necessary for the UK to carry though with Blair's promise.

This memo does not rebut the earlier one, it confirms it - as The Times (London) seems to agree; its own article on the new memo opened with:

"Ministers were warned in July 2002 that Britain was committed to taking part in an American-led invasion of Iraq and they had no choice but to find a way of making it legal."

David Sanger's attempt to turn it into something else is either incredibly sloppy, indeed incompetent, journalism or deliberate distortion. I'll leave it to you to decide which is worse.

Yes, I know, I shouldn't have been "astonished" to find such in the NYT, and I wasn't. At one time some years ago I would have been, but no more. But I'm not above a little sucking up in the hope of getting a bit closer attention to what I was saying.

And another point I could have made was that, contrary to Sanger, it's the first memo that's "explicit." It says

Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action....

But I'll go with what I did say as adequate to the purpose.

(And just to be clear, the link to the story in The Times was not included in the message to the NYT.)

Footnote: The New York Times' quick publication of Sanger's pro-White House brief, coming the day after the The Times' article on the new memo, was in marked contrast its response to the earlier memo, its coverage of which "languished" in Calame's word, leaving readers of the paper "pretty much in the dark." No excuse, not even a mealy-mouthed one, has been offered for that abject failure.