These Downing Memo jewels of wisdom from CONYERS are worth repeating IMHO

[BigBearJohn]

"However, if you will excuse the sports analogy, in basketball, it is frequently the case that a team will feel it is getting a series of unfair calls from the referees, and will expend so much energy worrying about the lack of fairness, that it loses track of its game plan.

A smart team, on the other hand, will adopt a two-tier strategy. They will work the refs, meaning complain about the calls, and try to urge the officials to do better. But, more importantly, they will simply play harder so that the bad calls will not be outcome determinative.

How does this apply to the situation at hand? As Eric Alterman has noted in his book What Liberal Media?, the right-wing has made its fortunes by loudly complaining when the media fails to do its bidding or -- as Alterman dubs it -- "working the refs". We must do the same. In letters to the editor, newspaper ombudsmen, calls to talk radio, and diaries on liberal websites, we must loudly decry the media's failure to cover this important story. Please continue to do your part to bring this story to the attention of the cable networks and major newspapers, as well as your elected representatives. Don't give up. I assure you I will press ahead in every way to get this story this coverage and context it deserves.

More importantly, we must put aside the dereliction of duty of the corporate media and simply fight harder for our nation. A media that fails to serve the public interest cannot be our source of validation or our barometer of political success. We must continue to beat the drum on talk radio, liberal websites and other alternative media. When you see the furor this story generates in the alternative media, that should be sufficient for you to know that many, many people recognize this serious breach of the public trust for what it is."

http://www.conyersblog.us/archives/00000085.htm

So -- TWO things: SIGN the memo and WRITE the MSM to get them to expose the truth.

[SpiralHawk]

1. Work the refs !

Right on. Thanks, Bear -- this aims right at a strategic point

[BigBearJohn]

2. .

[BigBearJohn]

3. LTTE: SF Chronicle (see! someone is taking Conyers advice!)

What we now know
Editor -- In last Sunday's Chronicle, the Washington Post's Walter Pincus cites sundry instances in which Bush and his coterie, in their zeal to sell the pre-emptive invasion of Iraq, flouted persistent doubts from intelligence sources that Saddam was any kind of a nuclear or biological- weapons threat.

As we now know, those doubts were entirely valid.

Pincus's revelations, together with the recently-disclosed "Downing Street Memo," in which the head of British intelligence reported to Tony Blair after a 2002 meeting with U.S. officials that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed" to justify military action, warrant a formidable inference that our Iraq misadventure is owing not to failed intelligence, as has been the prevailing "spin," but to an evidence-be-damned distortion thereof in support of a predetermined course of action.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands have been killed or maimed, innumerable villages and neighborhoods reduced to uninhabitable rubble, and worldwide anti- U.S. sentiment inflamed as probably never before. The implications, both morally and legally, are appalling.


RICHARD BOYCE
San Francisco

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/05/29/EDGGACV3QT1.DTL

[Straight Shooter]

4. "evidence-be-damned distortion"

That sums up the agenda of the bush coterie (great word!) in a nutshell.

[BigBearJohn]

5. ANOTHER LTTE: The Northwest Herald

The revelations in the recently leaked Downing Street memo prove there was intentional manipulation of pre-war intelligence.

The memo discloses that when President Bush told the American people and the world that no decision had been made for war, the truth was the matter had been settled months earlier.

This "smoking gun" said that plans were made to "create" conditions for war, and in light of an admittedly "thin" case against Iraq, "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

The results of this disastrous war – more than 1,600 dead service men and women, more than 100,000 Iraqi deaths, and the increase in violence and bloodshed – surely trump any effects of the Newsweek story.


http://www.nwherald.com/print/286190356348413.php

[Wilms]

6. kick n/t

[oasis]

7. kick

[Wilms]

8. kick n/t

[BigBearJohn]

9. .