The Lies That Deceive

After Downing Street is a Coalition of veterans’ groups, peace groups, and political activist groups, which launched on May 26, 2005, a campaign to urge the U.S. Congress to begin a formal investigation into whether President Bush has committed impeachable offenses in connection with the Iraq war. The campaign focuses on evidence that emerged earlier this month in a British memo containing minutes of a secret July 2002 meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top national security officials.

After Downing Street reports in response to the release of the memo: “John Bonifaz, a Boston attorney specializing in constitutional litigation, sent a memo to Congressman John Conyers of Michigan, the Ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, urging him to introduce a Resolution of Inquiry directing the House Judiciary Committee to launch a formal investigation into whether sufficient grounds exist for the House to impeach President Bush. Bonifaz’s memo, made available today at AfterDowningStreet.org, begins: ‘The recent release of the Downing Street Memo provides new and compelling evidence that the President of the United States has been actively engaged in a conspiracy to deceive and mislead the United States Congress and the American people about the basis for going to war against Iraq. If true, such conduct constitutes a High Crime under Article II, Section 4 of the United States Constitution.’”

The Downing Street “Memo” is actually a document containing meeting minutes transcribed during the British Prime Minister’s meeting on July 23, 2002 - a full eight months PRIOR to the invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003. The Times of London printed the text of this document on Sunday, May 1, 2005, but to date U.S. media coverage has been limited. Despite the memo’s disturbing and explosive revelations nearly a month ago, there has been a virtual media blackout with some newspapers deliberately turning a blind eye to the Downing Street memo. It’s time for the media to address real news.

More than two years after the start of the Iraq War, Americans are just now learning that our government was dead set on invasion, even while it claimed to be pursuing diplomacy. This is an issue beyond partisan politics — no President should ever mislead our Nation and our Congress into a war.

The contents of the memo are shocking. The meeting minutes detail how our government did not believe Iraq was a greater threat than other nations, how intelligence was “fixed” to sell the case for war to the American public, and how the Bush administration’s public assurances of “war as a last resort” were at odds with their privately stated intentions. When asked, British officials “did not dispute the document’s authenticity” and a senior American official has described it as “absolutely accurate.” Yet the Bush administration continues to simultaneously sidestep the issue while attempting to cast doubt on the memo’s authenticity.

Another important piece of information, which has been overlooked in this story, was reported in a recent Salon article by Juan Cole — that Tony Blair had to actually convince George Bush to go after al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, and Bush would only do so in exchange for Britain’s support of the Iraq invasion:

“Astonishingly, the Bush administration almost took the United States to war against Iraq in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11. We know about this episode from the public account of Sir Christopher Meyer, then the U.K. ambassador in Washington. Meyer reported that in the two weeks after Sept. 11, the Bush national security team argued back and forth over whether to attack Iraq or Afghanistan. It appears from his account that Bush was leaning toward the Iraq option.

Meyer spoke again about the matter to Vanity Fair for its May 2004 report, “The Path to War.” Soon after Sept. 11, Meyer went to a dinner at the White House, “attended also by Colin Powell, [and] Condi Rice,” where “Bush made clear that he was determined to topple Saddam. ‘Rumors were already flying that Bush would use 9/11 as a pretext to attack Iraq,’ Meyer remembers.” When British Prime Minister Tony Blair arrived in Washington on Sept. 20, 2001, he was alarmed. If Blair had consulted MI6 about the relative merits of the Afghanistan and Iraq options, we can only imagine what well-informed British intelligence officers in Pakistan were cabling London about the dangers of leaving bin Laden and al-Qaida in place while plunging into a potential quagmire in Iraq. Fears that London was a major al-Qaida target would have underlined the risks to the United Kingdom of an “Iraq first” policy in Washington.

Meyer told Vanity Fair, “Blair came with a very strong message — don’t get distracted; the priorities were al-Qaida, Afghanistan, the Taliban.” He must have been terrified that the Bush administration would abandon London to al-Qaida while pursuing the great white whale of Iraq. But he managed to help persuade Bush. Meyer reports, “Bush said, ‘I agree with you, Tony. We must deal with this first. But when we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq.’” Meyer also said, in spring 2004, that it was clear “that when we did come back to Iraq it wouldn’t be to discuss smarter sanctions.” In short, Meyer strongly implies that Blair persuaded Bush to make war on al-Qaida in Afghanistan first by promising him British support for a later Iraq campaign.”

It’s too bad all of this didn’t come out during the 2004 election cycle, but nonetheless, it is not too late to take action on a matter as grave and as serious as this seems to be. Congressman John Conyers is calling on American citizens to sign on to a letter to the President that demands a response to questions originally posed by Conyers and 88 other members of Congress in a similar letter dated May 5, 2005. Conyers has committed to personally delivering the letter to the White House when it garners 100,000 citizen signatures.

Let’s help him get there. Follow this link to sign. Also, write to your Congresspeople here. Or contact the President at President@Whitehouse.gov.

Democrats.com (not affiliated with Democrats.org) is even offering a reward of $1,000 to anyone, professional journalist or citizen activist who gets President Bush to answer a particular question.

The question is: “In July 2002, did you or your administration ‘fix’ the intelligence and facts about non-existent Iraqi WMDs and ties to terrorism — which were disputed by US intelligence officials — to sell your decision to invade Iraq to Congress, the American people, and the world - as quoted in the Downing Street Minutes?”

Democrats.com is even offering a smaller reward if you ask it and Bush does not answer.

There are also new revelations of not only systematic efforts to bring a war against Iraq in most of 2002, it appears there is also evidence that war was BEING CONDUCTED against Iraq in 2002… PRIOR TO UN Resolution 1441 and PRIOR TO any vote in Congress. “It was not until November 8 (2002) that the UN security council passed resolution 1441, which threatened Iraq with “serious consequences” for failing to co-operate with the weapons inspectors.” Rep. Conyers has “prepared a letter to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld detailing these new charges and asking for his response…”

It turns out that former counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke and former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill were right. Both have been pilloried for writing that by the Summer of 2002 Bush had already decided to invade. How many others who tried to tell us the truth have had their careers ended or their reputations ruined as a result of speaking out? How many more truthful people will be attacked or ruined by this Administration and it’s political operatives?

I am, sadly, not at all surprised that the mainstream media could look past all of these issues, or didn’t have the courage to do REAL reporting. But, you know, The Truth Will Prevail…