The war makers said they wanted to find weapons in Iraq. Inspectors in Iraq concluded the weapons weren't there, and the U.S. launched the war anyway.
The Bush Administration's claims about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda were as laughable as all the claims about weapons. But they were made over and over again, and not debunked effectively by the media. As we meet today, a third of Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein was working with Osama Bin Laden.
A fair amount of the evidence of all of this dishonesty was made public through the mass media, but usually on page 18 in an article with an unrelated headline or in the cartoon section in the Boondocks cartoon, and in a newspaper with the lies trumpeted as truth on the front page.
In a survey of voters last November, the University of Maryland's PIPA, the Program on International Policy Attitudes, found that most of those who got their news from the commercial TV networks held at least 1 of 3 fundamental "misperceptions" about the war in Iraq (and some held 2 or 3 of them):
-- that Iraq had been directly linked to 9/11
-- that WMDs had been found in Iraq
-- that world opinion supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Viewers of Fox News were the most misled. But strong majorities of CBS, ABC, NBC and CNN viewers were also confused on at least one of these points. Among those informed on all 3 questions, only 23 percent supported Bush's war.
In May of this year, the British and European media made a huge story out of something they called the Downing Street Memo and, in subsequent weeks, of an additional seven related documents also leaked from high level sources in the British government.
I worked with an attorney and constitutional law expert named John Bonifaz, the President of Democrats.com Bob Fertik, the Director of Progressive Democrats of America Tim Carpenter, political strategist Steve Cobble, and brilliant researcher Jon Schwartz to pull together a large coalition in this country aimed at pressuring the media and Congress to pursue this topic. We called ourselves After Downing Street. The website is http://www.afterdowningstreet.org
We actually managed by the middle of June to make the Downing Street Memo a front-page story, a topic on the cable word wrestling shows, and the subject of a Democratic hearing on Capitol Hill. This effort was considered by some writers to be one of the progressive blogosphere's first successful efforts to force an uncovered issue into the corporate media. But by the end of June the media had lost interest, even as things progressed in Congress.
When we started demanding media coverage in May, the most common response we received from editors and producers was that the Downing Street Memo was old news. The Washington Post wrote an editorial to that effect, and then following protests printed a front-page story a week or so later. Of course, on one level the claim that this was old news was dishonest and disgusting. Editors may have long since known that the Bushies lied, but their readers and viewers largely did not know. And editors knew this ignorance was responsible for public support for the war, limited as it was. The corporate media never treated the lies as big stories, and as a result many military recruits and their mothers and fathers did not know about them. They should have been told.
On another level, though, there was truth to the claim that this was old news. If you had a lot of free time and pieced together all the books by former administration officials, declassified reports, public statements, official communications, and serious reporting, you had a very strong case that Bush lied, well before the Downing Street Memo showed up. We've posted links to much of this evidence down the left hand side of the After Downing Street website. If you want a good summary, I highly recommend the first 34 pages of a book called "Oil, Power, & Empire" by Larry Everest. For a more detailed examination of the evidence, try a book called "Hood-Winked" by John Prados.
What was new about the Downing Street Memo was that it made us a fly on the wall inside a top level meeting. This so-called memo was actually the official minutes of a meeting of Prime Minister Tony Blair with Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, Then Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon, Attorney General Lord Goldsmith, Chief of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) Sir Richard Dearlove, Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee John Scarlett, Chief of Defence Staff Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, and top aide Sir David Manning. The Downing Street Memo is an incredibly frank glimpse of something we were never meant to see.
What these minutes, and the accompanying documents - particularly the cabinet office paper produced in preparation for that meeting -- confirm for us from very authoritative sources are the following points.
1. Bush had already decided to go to war long before approaching Congress or the public or the UN about it - Indeed, he had already started the attack with increased bombings
2. Bush had already decided to lie about weapons of mass destruction and ties to 9-11
3. The Brits were concerned by the illegality of an aggressive war, but Bush didn't care - The UK Attorney General was quite specific that the war would be illegal without the UN - a few days before the invasion he changed his mind without giving a reason
4. Going to the UN was an attempt to justify the war, and the hope was to craft an ultimatum that Saddam Hussein would reject
5. The focus of the Bush and Blair administrations was on selling the war to the public, and not at all on trying to avoid it
6. The Bush and Blair administrations were aware that Iraq was no threat, and were willing to attack Iraq precisely because it posed no serious threat of fighting back
After Downing Street began making a case for an investigation into grounds for impeachment. Our argument focused on the letter that Bush gave Congress on March 18, 2003, explaining why the war was necessary. His two reasons were the "threat posed by Iraq" and the need to "take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001."
If these were lies, they were felonies. If they were felonies, they were high crimes, the highest imaginable: taking the nation to war on the basis of lies. Impeachment was trivialized under Clinton, and under Clinton's desk, but Clinton's lies didn't kill 100,000 people, destroy foreign alliances, divert the National Guard from guarding the nation, waste hundreds of billions of dollars, promote unsustainable energy practices, or create a training ground for terrorists. A training ground for right wing whackos maybe, but not terrorists.
The Bush Administration's claims about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda were as laughable as all the claims about weapons. But they were made over and over again, and not debunked effectively by the media. As we meet today, a third of Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein was working with Osama Bin Laden.
A fair amount of the evidence of all of this dishonesty was made public through the mass media, but usually on page 18 in an article with an unrelated headline or in the cartoon section in the Boondocks cartoon, and in a newspaper with the lies trumpeted as truth on the front page.
In a survey of voters last November, the University of Maryland's PIPA, the Program on International Policy Attitudes, found that most of those who got their news from the commercial TV networks held at least 1 of 3 fundamental "misperceptions" about the war in Iraq (and some held 2 or 3 of them):
-- that WMDs had been found in Iraq
-- that world opinion supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Viewers of Fox News were the most misled. But strong majorities of CBS, ABC, NBC and CNN viewers were also confused on at least one of these points. Among those informed on all 3 questions, only 23 percent supported Bush's war.
In May of this year, the British and European media made a huge story out of something they called the Downing Street Memo and, in subsequent weeks, of an additional seven related documents also leaked from high level sources in the British government.
I worked with an attorney and constitutional law expert named John Bonifaz, the President of Democrats.com Bob Fertik, the Director of Progressive Democrats of America Tim Carpenter, political strategist Steve Cobble, and brilliant researcher Jon Schwartz to pull together a large coalition in this country aimed at pressuring the media and Congress to pursue this topic. We called ourselves After Downing Street. The website is http://www.afterdowningstreet.org
We actually managed by the middle of June to make the Downing Street Memo a front-page story, a topic on the cable word wrestling shows, and the subject of a Democratic hearing on Capitol Hill. This effort was considered by some writers to be one of the progressive blogosphere's first successful efforts to force an uncovered issue into the corporate media. But by the end of June the media had lost interest, even as things progressed in Congress.
When we started demanding media coverage in May, the most common response we received from editors and producers was that the Downing Street Memo was old news. The Washington Post wrote an editorial to that effect, and then following protests printed a front-page story a week or so later. Of course, on one level the claim that this was old news was dishonest and disgusting. Editors may have long since known that the Bushies lied, but their readers and viewers largely did not know. And editors knew this ignorance was responsible for public support for the war, limited as it was. The corporate media never treated the lies as big stories, and as a result many military recruits and their mothers and fathers did not know about them. They should have been told.
On another level, though, there was truth to the claim that this was old news. If you had a lot of free time and pieced together all the books by former administration officials, declassified reports, public statements, official communications, and serious reporting, you had a very strong case that Bush lied, well before the Downing Street Memo showed up. We've posted links to much of this evidence down the left hand side of the After Downing Street website. If you want a good summary, I highly recommend the first 34 pages of a book called "Oil, Power, & Empire" by Larry Everest. For a more detailed examination of the evidence, try a book called "Hood-Winked" by John Prados.
What was new about the Downing Street Memo was that it made us a fly on the wall inside a top level meeting. This so-called memo was actually the official minutes of a meeting of Prime Minister Tony Blair with Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, Then Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon, Attorney General Lord Goldsmith, Chief of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) Sir Richard Dearlove, Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee John Scarlett, Chief of Defence Staff Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, and top aide Sir David Manning. The Downing Street Memo is an incredibly frank glimpse of something we were never meant to see.
What these minutes, and the accompanying documents - particularly the cabinet office paper produced in preparation for that meeting -- confirm for us from very authoritative sources are the following points.
1. Bush had already decided to go to war long before approaching Congress or the public or the UN about it - Indeed, he had already started the attack with increased bombings
2. Bush had already decided to lie about weapons of mass destruction and ties to 9-11
3. The Brits were concerned by the illegality of an aggressive war, but Bush didn't care - The UK Attorney General was quite specific that the war would be illegal without the UN - a few days before the invasion he changed his mind without giving a reason
4. Going to the UN was an attempt to justify the war, and the hope was to craft an ultimatum that Saddam Hussein would reject
5. The focus of the Bush and Blair administrations was on selling the war to the public, and not at all on trying to avoid it
6. The Bush and Blair administrations were aware that Iraq was no threat, and were willing to attack Iraq precisely because it posed no serious threat of fighting back
After Downing Street began making a case for an investigation into grounds for impeachment. Our argument focused on the letter that Bush gave Congress on March 18, 2003, explaining why the war was necessary. His two reasons were the "threat posed by Iraq" and the need to "take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001."
If these were lies, they were felonies. If they were felonies, they were high crimes, the highest imaginable: taking the nation to war on the basis of lies. Impeachment was trivialized under Clinton, and under Clinton's desk, but Clinton's lies didn't kill 100,000 people, destroy foreign alliances, divert the National Guard from guarding the nation, waste hundreds of billions of dollars, promote unsustainable energy practices, or create a training ground for terrorists. A training ground for right wing whackos maybe, but not terrorists.
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