Must-Reads on the DSM

[UPDATE: NBC story added; hat tip Green Knight.]

MSNBC:

Just last week, President Bush and Blair vigorously denied that war was inevitable. “No, the facts were not being fixed, in any shape or form at all,” said Blair at a White House news conference with the president on June 7. But now, war critics have come up with seven more memos, verified by NBC News...


AlterNet:

A number of citizen groups and Democratic politicians are launching an initiative to investigate information contained in newly unearthed British memos on the war in Iraq, and to demand answers from President Bush. The memorandums provide further evidence that Bush's administration had no reasonable plan for achieving stability or rebuilding Iraq after the war, and build on earlier memos that state it was "fixing" intelligence information to remove Saddam Hussein months before the war started…


TomPaine:

When asked about the July 23, 2002, minutes at their press conference last week in Washington, President Bush and Prime Minister Blair did a good job of obfuscating—enough to mislead our corporate press into the all-too-familiar he-said, she-said reporting. What went unnoticed was the fact that in the process, the two leaders unintentionally acknowledged the authenticity of the minutes, which read like a meeting of Mafioso. They may think no one will read the actual minutes. In that, they are dead wrong…


Editor & Publisher:

Just as the U.S. media -- albeit a month late -- scramble to get on top of the so-called “Downing Street Memo,” the Sunday Times in London unveiled another leaked document which confirms and goes behind the message of the memo…


The Nation:

It's not exactly a news flash that the Bush Administration lied to the public before the invasion of Iraq. What should be on front pages, though, is new proof of the Bush Administration's lies brought to light by the previously unknown Downing Street Minutes, recently obtained and printed in the Times of London. (The Downing Street Memo is a transcript of minutes of a secret meeting chaired by Tomy Blair in Britain in July of 2002 to discuss preparations and propaganda before going to war. It was marked "Secret and strictly personal--UK eyes only.")…


The Heretik:

GEORGE W. BUSH: He’s a Pistol.
And His Own Words Are the Real Downing Street Smoking Gun. People say things in unguarded moments. The idea that a sitting President could poke his head in a briefing meeting National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice is conducting with three Republican senators and say this is astounding. If you want to know whether George W. Bush had decided on war well before he now claims, what more proof do you need? Why has no one asked Bush directly about this?…

(Go read it. You’ll be wondering the same thing.)


And here are a couple of other rather interesting things…

From the FSU News:

For the last month and a half, a gargantuan news story has been slowly gaining coverage in the U.S., though it should have exploded across the front pages as soon as it was reported. In the British press, it was immediately recognized for the bombshell that it was, but here, it has taken the efforts of concerned Americans demanding that the press and Congress acknowledge and pursue this scandal…


A letter to the editor of the Nashville City Paper:

Bush's smoking gun
The Downing Street Memo, the big giant huge smoking gun that confirms that Bush lied us into war. Why it's not on every front page in the country I don't understand. This is way bigger than Watergate ever was. People have died because this president lied us into a war.

An educated citizenry is crucial to a healthy democracy. People in this country aren't getting the information they need to make informed decisions. The American people deserve better from their media. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

37076
Cecily A. Letendre


Seen anything else? Let me know in comments.

And be sure to check the round-ups at The Heretik and Freiheit und Wissen to see what other bloggers are writing about the Downing Street Memos. CN Todd at F&W’s got an especially superb and inspiring post today as part of the round-up you’ll definitely want to read.