Two Excellent Knight Ridder Editorials on the DSM

[stickdog]

http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/newssentinel/news/editorial/11965588.htm

Americans inching closer to a reckoning

BY ROBERT STEINBACK

(KRT) - Do you want to know?

That's the only popular division that matters in the United States today: Those who want to determine once and for all if President Bush knowingly ``fixed the facts'' regarding Iraq, thereby misleading Congress and the American people into supporting an unnecessary war, and those who will cover their ears and hum loudly in order to maintain their belief that Bush and his advisors remain above reproach. You're in one camp or the other. Either you want to know if you've been lied to, or you don't.

The American public is inching tentatively toward a reckoning unlike any this nation has ever experienced. The oh-so-clever Bush administration strategists and their quasi-media acolytes, who have kept the reckoning at bay with a deft combination of we're-at-war patriotic fervor and fear-the-evil-liberals rhetoric, are running out of parlor tricks.

Rep. John Conyers of Michigan last week held an unofficial public briefing - despite being forced into a tiny Capitol Hill basement by GOP leaders - to talk about the so-called Downing Street Memo. The July 2002 memo, published in the Times of London on May 1, recounted the views of top advisers to Prime Minister Tony Blair that the Bush administration had already made up its mind to invade Iraq despite an absence of justification, and that it appeared facts were being manipulated to support the policy. Since its publication, other information has surfaced revealing that the Americans and the British tried unsuccessfully to provoke Saddam Hussein into giving them a justification for war - first by launching an unauthorized bombing campaign in 2002, then by pushing the United Nations to demand weapons inspectors return to Iraq - a gambit Hussein trumped by agreeing to do so.

http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/newssentinel/news/editorial/11965594.htm

Bush administration's supposed control over reality is starting to crumble

BY ERIC MINK

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

(KRT) - Something is happening here, Bob Dylan wrote 40 years ago in a somewhat different context, but hyperventilating liberals don't seem to know what it really is. Starting about seven weeks ago, impassioned lefties latched onto some secret British government memos that they regard as smoking-gun evidence of Bush administration deceptions leading up to the war with Iraq. The leaked documents, dating from the spring and summer of 2002, describe discussions about Iraq between top British officials and high-ranking Bush policymakers.

The authenticity of their contents is unchallenged, but even so, the memos only record the Brits' memories and impressions. They are not word-for-word transcripts of their encounters with the likes of Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz and others in the Bush power structure.

(snip)

The true significance of the so-called Downing Street memos is not so much what they say but, rather, what they represent. First, that they leaked at all indicates escalating opposition to Iraq policies from within government - in this case, the government of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Bush's most steadfast ally.

Second, their existence raises a tantalizing point: Surely Rice, Wolfowitz and the other U.S. participants wrote their own first-person memos describing the same meetings. What might they reveal?