Downing Street minutes that lasted for months

It is not that often, we have to admit,
that an item posted one night on Times Online is still getting hundreds
of thousands of hits six weeks later, especially when what bloggers
like to call ’the mainstream media’ have largely ignored its existence.

But
that is what happened to the now infamous secret Downing Street memo,
posted on the site on May 1 alongside a story by Michael Smith of The Sunday Times.
And if the document has taken on a life of its own it is largely
because of the bloggers and their web-savvy allies on the
US Left.

The memo is not actually a memo, but the minutes of a top-secret
meeting in Downing Street on July 23, 2002, when Tony Blair gathered
senior ministers and advisers for a briefing on the Iraq situation.
Among those they heard from was Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of the
UK foreign intelligency agency MI6, who was identified only as ’C’.

’C’ reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a
perceptible shift in attitude, military action was now seen as
inevitable, the minutes said. "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."

That was not the only revelation made by the document, but it was
the key one for US readers, all they needed to decide that the Bush
administration had planned eight months before the Iraq war that
the invasion was definitely going to happen and that it was just
sorting out the legal and technical niceties.

The major US newspapers mostly decided not to touch the story,
variously explaining afterwards that they could either not stand up the
document’s authenticity or that everyone knew that that was what
had happened anyway.

Not so liberal bloggers and an alliance of activists, radio
hosts, Democratic members of Congress and newspaper readers who
insisted, and carried on insisting, that the document be aired and
addressed.

The web magazine Salon.com has run a long piece
looking into which media organisations reported the memo and which
ignored it. Until this week, the number of US newspaper articles
reporting on the memo "could be counted on two hands", it said, and
some of those were discussing the lack of media interest in the memo
rather than the substance and implications of the memo.

Salon also reported that of more than 900 questions asked of Scott
McLellan, the White House spokesman, in 19 briefings since the memo was
first published, only two refered to the document (about which Mr
McLellan claimed to be unaware).

The Sunday Times piece had not gone unnoticed in
Washington. As early as May 5, before US media had touched the document
and as Britons voted in an election that had obviously overshadowed the
story in the UK, a group of 89 Democrat members of Congress headed by
Representative John Conyers wrote to President Bush asking him to
confirm or refute the minutes.

Various sites picked up the story and posted a link to the memo,
including the filmmaker Michael Moore’s influential blog.
Technorati.com, which monitors a staggering 11 million weblogs, lists
3,300 sites that have referenced or discussed the memo - although most
just seem to be rants about MSM (mainstream media) "incompetence".

There are even sites dedicated to nothing else but the memo, including DowningStreetMemo.com and AfterDowningStreet.org.

If you visit the DowningStreetMemo site you can click on a link to Mr Conyers’s own site and add your signature to the letter to Mr Bush. So far, 145,000 people have done so; the organisers are hoping to gather 250,000 signatures.

You can also sign a petition
on the Democracy for America site pledging to tell your friends about
the Downing Street memo. This site is run by Jim Dean, a brother of the
former Democratic presidential aspirant Howard Dean.

Almost six weeks after its publication, "memogate" continues to pick
up steam. Senators Kennedy and Kerry have waded in, as has the consumer
advocate Ralph Nader, who suggested that the President should face
impeachment for lying to the American people over the need for war in
Iraq.

Just remember, you read it first in the "Times of London"

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,11069-1647567,00.html