Downing Street Memo
No wonder Franken calls the Downing Street Memo a "smoking gun." In the debrief of the British intelligence chief after a visit to the White House:
"Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
The memo is dated July 23, 2002, seven weeks before 9/11!
posted by Tom Cleland @ 6/08/2005 09:19:00 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
Put another way, seven weeks before 9/11, the Bush administration was working on a terrorism justification for invading Iraq.
I suppose you could say the “conjunction of terrorism and WMD” would be the threat of a suitcase bomb or the like. To me it seems like if that were the case, “WMD” alone would have been sufficient to describe it. Once the challenge of producing a nuclear weapon is accomplished, the challenge of delivering it has got to be minor by comparison.
Also, when it says, “justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD”, to me the word “justified” suggests an event that has already happened. At the time of the Downing Street Memo, the biggest thing I can think of that had already happened was Saddam Hussein's gassing of his own people. But when I think of that, “terrorism” is not the first word that comes to mind. The word “genocide”, perhaps, but not “terrorism”.
Perhaps there’s a better interpretation, I’m just not coming up with it right now.
My friend Charles just had a meeting on this topic where we watched the hearings. This is bigger than I realized.
I've convinced my friends that we need to go raise caine at our local senators offices.
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