ANOTHER Downing Stree 'Memo': Scoop/ Uruknet: fm 3.18.02:

[chomskysright]

Another Downing St Memo – Wrongfooting Saddam
The Scoop Editor


CONFIDENTIAL AND PERSONAL
British Embassy Washington

From the Ambassador
Christopher Meyer KCMG

18 March 2002

Sir David Manning KCMG
No 10 Downing Street

IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN: CONVERSATION WITH WOLFOWITZ


1 Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, came to Sunday lunch on 17 March.

2. On Iraq I opened by sticking very closely to the script that you used with Condi Rice last week, We backed regime change, but the plan had to be clever and failure was not an option. It would be a tough sell for us domestically, and probably tougher elsewhere in Europe. The US could go it alone if it wanted to. But if it wanted to act with partners, there had to be a strategy for building support for military action against Saddam. I then went through the need to wrongfoot Saddam on the inspectors and the UN SCRs and the critical importance of the MEPP as an integral part of the anti-Saddam strategy. If all this could be accomplished skilfully, we were fairly confident that a number of countries would come on board.


3. I said that the UK was giving serious thought to publishing a paper that would make the case against Saddam. If the UK were to join with the US in any operation against Saddam, we would have to be able to take a critical mass of parliamentary and public opinion with us. It was extraordinary how people had forgotten how bad he was.

4. Wolfowitz said that he fully agreed. He took a slightly different position from others in the Administration, who were focussed on Saddam's capacity to develop weapons of mass destruction. The WMD danger was of course crucial to the public case against Saddam, particularly the potential linkage to terrorism. But Wolfowitz thought it indispensable to spell out in detail Saddam's barbarism. This was well documented from what he had done during the occupation of Kuwait, the incursion into Kurdish territory, the assault on the Marsh Arabs, and to his own people. A lot of work had been done on this towards the end of the first Bush administration. Wolfowitz thought that this would go a long way to destroying any notion of moral equivalence between Iraq and Israel. I said that I had been forcefully struck, when addressing university audiences in the US how ready students were to gloss over Saddam's crimes and to blame the US and the UK for the suffering of the Iraqi people.





Thursday, 9 June 2005, 4:37 pm
Article: The Scoop Editor

SCOOP EDITOR'S NOTE: The following is a transcript of another document leaked to the media concerning the build up to the Iraq war. It concerns a discussion in early 2002 between the UK Ambassador to the US and then Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.
Importantly the following document appears to confirm the thrust of the allegations made concerning the so-called "Downing Street Memo" < http://www.google.com/custom?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&cof=AWF
ID%3A8c89fa359b35081f%3BL%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.scoop.co.nz%2Fi ... > , namely that the Bush Administration had already made up its mind to go to war against Iraq before it began the diplomatic offensive in the second half of 2002.

The transcript that follows was transcribed by a member of the Democratic Underground forums ( http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=
view_all&address=104x3809302 ) from the PDF version posted online
( http://lists.stir.ac.uk/pipermail/media-watch/2004-October/0
01523.html ) Some of the typos are from the original. Emphasis has been added to key passages.

– Scoop Co-Editor Alastair Thompson

[rawstory]

1. FYI: We have been seeking to verify the veracity of these...

Before posting them online to avoid another Rathergate... but i guess it's too late now. Fingers crossed.

[rawstory]

3. I'd strongly advise taking these down until verifying

Anyway -- my two cents.

[evermind]

4. Verification is a good idea

But why "take them down"?

The "other memos" only impact on the mainstream political process insofar asthey are adopted by mainstream politicians, I would have thought. Just having them available can't do any appreciable damage that I can see. I'm not saying that there isn't a need to authenticate. I just don't see a need to "take down".

Documents were quoted extensively in the UK press in September 2004 (see BBC and Telegraph links, below) and the quoted portions agree textually in all respects with the cryptome file. The quoted documents were acknowledged as genuine by the British government.

Therefore the only possible scenarios in which the cryptome file is fake are that either: 1) it was put together to include the quoted parts (often the most damning!) and then circulated via Michael Lewis - a Cambridge university academic who is interested in media analysis - and Glen Rangwala - an Iraq expert who has been staunchly critical of Blair and Bush's war propaganda (see http://www.middleeastreference.org.uk ) and has acted in that capacity as an adviser to the UK group seeking Blair's impeachment; or 2) that the document was somehow modified in transit between Lewis and cryptome.

In any case, if anyone wants to publish damning conclusions drawn from the documents, they can safely do so by quoting only the parts quoted by the UK press, which include the most damning parts because those quotes have been acknowledged as genuine by the UK Government.

In my view, the documents are old news. What is interesting about them now is the light they shed on the nuances of interpretation of the DSM, particularly where it touches on the inspections process

To anyone interested in looking at them, the file I used to transcribe the docs is back at cryptome.org: http://cryptome.org/leaks-brief.htm (and click on "leaks-brief.zip").

Other relevant links, here and elsewhere:

My original post

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x3809302

LBN thread on the Scoop/NZ story
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x1535356

Smirking Chimp thread discussing authenticity

http://smirkingchimp.com/viewtopic.php?topic=56683&forum=17

Original Telegraph story, Sept 18th, 2004

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/09/18/nwar118.xml

BBC Panorama story

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/panorama/4336727.stm

I would just like to state categorically, and for the record, that I am not now nor have I ever been an employee of (or in any way associated with) Karl Rove! ;-)

[burrowowl]

2. Is this one of the things Conyers has up his sleeve

and would be nice to know what else.