News not in the news

[mattlistener]

A recently-revealed British memo regarding a high-level meeting with the White House in July 2002 states "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD [weapons of mass destruction]. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

Though it is widely believed now that intelligence was deliberately distorted to support the case for war, the White House's stance is still that such claims are nonsense and unfounded. The memo also contradicts Bush's repeated claim that he had not decided to go to war at that time. The UK has confirmed the authenticity of the document.

On 5/6 89 members of Congress signed a letter calling for an investigation into the memo.

Editor&Publisher, a journal covering the newspaper industry itself, carries a story discussing both the above news and the fact that it went virtually unreprted in the US for the last 10 days.

Comments

[necturus.livejournal.com]

I know Bush decided to go to war prior to September 2002, because that's when the Russian state TV Web site posted a story (with aerial photograph) describing the construction of an enormous U.S. military base in Qatar. The base had been under construction for several months, the article said, and was pretty clearly intended to support a massive military operation.

The article's not there any more, but I translated part of it on my old Web site (http://www.hippogryph.com/~umarc/old/archives/v04n09.html):

Irina Perminova writes: "As American observers see it, Washington, under pressure from the international community, is gradually moving towards the view that it would be preferable to influence Iraq through the United Nations and not by force. However, the facts now testify to the contrary. At the present time Iraq is practically surrounded by American armies. In bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, and Turkey about 250,000 soldiers, 800 strike aircraft, 40 ships, about 100 'winged rockets', and more than 400 cruise missiles are deployed."

When did George W. Bush ever say anything that wasn't a lie? Not in my memory, certainly.