Home > John Kerry wimps out on bringing up Downing Street Minutes/Memo- Last (…)

John Kerry wimps out on bringing up Downing Street Minutes/Memo- Last chance for Dem’s credibility

by Open-Publishing - Tuesday 7 June 2005
32 comments

Senator John Kerry (D-MA) and his press office remain silent as controversy mushrooms around a planned floor speech on minutes of a secret 2002 meeting between the officials of the U.S. and UK at which the director of British intelligence warned the intelligence was being “fixed” around the policy, RAW STORY has learned.

The minutes have fueled concern among Democrats in Congress that the concern over Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction was staged, a ploy to get Congress to go along with war.

Kerry’s remarks have taken on epic proportion, likely because a NewsMax article conflated Kerry’s quotes with Ralph Nader’s impeachment cry. AlJazeera.com (which is not affiliated with the news channel) led with a headline today ripening the confusion: “John Kerry to call for impeachment of George Bush.”

"When I go back [to Washington] on Monday, I am going to raise the issue," Kerry told Massachusetts’ Standard Times newspaper last week. "I think it’s a stunning, unbelievably simple and understandable statement of the truth and a profoundly important document that raises stunning issues here at home.”

RAW STORY has confirmed that Kerry intends to deliver a statement on the Downing Street minutes.

Any detail beyond that, however, is up in the air. Spokespersons for the senator have declined to comment further, fueling fresh speculation about the Massachusetts Democrat’s move.

The Downing street minutes, first reported in the London Sunday Times, were drafted by British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s foreign policy advisor. They contain an account of remarks by British MI6 director Sir Richard Dearlove, who 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.”

Eighty-nine House members have called on President Bush to answer new questions surrounding the minutes. Bush spokesman Scott McClellan said the president had no need to respond.

Leading the charge is Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), a Detroit liberal who is the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee.

"Unfortunately, the mainstream media in the United States was too busy with wall-to-wall coverage of a "runaway bride" to cover a bombshell report out of the British newspapers," Conyers wrote in a letter calling on congressmembers to sign. "The London Times reports that the British government and the United States government had secretly agreed to attack Iraq in 2002, before authorization was sought for such an attack in Congress, and had discussed creating pretextual justifications for doing so."

"This should not be allowed to fall down the memory hole during wall-to-wall coverage of the Michael Jackson trial and a runaway bride," he added.

http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Plann...

"When I go back [to Washington] on Monday" John Kerry did not show up on Monday. He must have noticed how everyone on the internet was behind him on this, and everyone has been let down by his inability to stand up. Today is tuesday....paging John Kerry......

most excellent comments from Mike Rivero at WhatReallyHappened.com
As far as I am concerned, the failure of the US Congress to react to the Downing Street memo pretty much proves they knew Bush was lying all along ... and did nothing about it.

Which pretty much delegitimizes the entire government.

Nobody is under any moral obligation to obey the dictates of a government that lies to the people.

No person serving in uniform is obloigated to spend one more day in a combat zone in a war created with lies.

And given that the war is illegal, by virtue of the lies told to the people and to Congress, I don’t think any American owes any taxes to pay for that illegal war, do you?

Congress’s only way to save itself is to play victim, and pound the crap out of the Bush administration for the lies. Anything less, and it will look like Congress knew the claims about Iraqi WMDs were a lie all along and did nothing about it.

Forum posts

  • John Kerry, you have let us down...again. Double speak, double speak. Your credibility is down the p00p shoot along with the rest of congress and the administration. What a crap!

    • Right. Kerry didn’t do what the liars at NewsMax said he was going to do, even though he had never said he was going to do any such thing, and so people on the left will obediently bash him, just as the rightwing spinners intended. Sheesh.

    • Everyone who spent 10 minutes searching the internet knew that Powell’s testimony to the Security Council was bogus crap. Every member of Congress knew that he was lying and that includes Kerry who voted for Iraq anyway.

      Now, the "Democrats" have been offered the prefect opportunity to save face and yet what do they do? Nothing. That makes them doubly complicit.

    • What else would you expect from a pussy like John Kerry. It is left up to Uncle Teddy to do Kerry’s dirty work for him. He is just another Clintonoid humanoid Democrat.

  • Kerry never said he was going to make a floor speech on the DSM. Kerry never said he was going to call for impeachment. The rightwing spin machine built up hype about non-existent statements in order to confuse people and presumably to get Democrats to feel disappointed in Kerry when he didn’t do the things the right-wing spinmeisters had invented.

    All Kerry said was that he was going to bring up the DSM with people when he got back to Washington this week. That could easily mean he’s going to call some friends in the Senate and discuss it privately.

    Why on earth are you spreading right-wing spin and lies against one of our own people?

    • Kerry works for the same people Bush answers to. And no I am not referring to ’we the people’. One very obvious clue was Kerry saying he would wage the same wars as Bush, only more efficently. Was this the message the grass-roots Democrats and Independents were shouting from the streets of NYC?

      Kerry is a stooge, he took a dive in 2004, it would be foolish to expect anything good to come from him now. The whole republican versus democrat scenario is designed to divide us, get us arguing with each other, so that we don’t notice the corruption and lies issuing forth from DC regardless of which party is in control.

    • > Why on earth are you spreading right-wing spin and lies against one of our own people?

      ONE OF OUR OWN PEOPLE???????

      Are you a millionaire skull and bones-er?
      Did you take a dive on election day for a fellow skull and bonesman?
      Did YOU promise to uphold the right of EVERY VOTER and back down like kerry did?

      Because I know that I DID NOT..... AM NOT ... and WILL NOT vote for another democratic FAKE who will sell out our country like a good ol’ GOP sod.

      Screw kerry....

      we need REAL politicians and patriots.... not democratic and republican TRAITORS.

    • Good comments by Mr. Rivero.

      It goes without saying that Kerry is too entrenched in the "Big Lie" to carry on a campaign against his own handlers. Most blog news watchers know that as soon as Kerry intimated getting involved in the "DSM" it was only going to be a ruse to obfuscate the issue - he’s good at playing "just dumb enough" to f*ck up any investigation to the point that it becomes usable for Rove to go on the attack. He played "just dumb enough" to "just" loose the 2004 election, frickin’ sandbagger and Bush’s "strawman"!! He’s probably at Rove’s place right now, dressed in his best SM leathers beaten the crap out Rove (who is loving it!) and spilling Conyers playbook to the RNC. If he couldn’t be in on the game I say f*ckem now!

      Mr. Heinz is as fake as his absurd mechanical politician speaking voice that turned off millions of voters because "there is no choice in this election" - and shit! wasn’t he right? He may yet jump into the "DSM" fray yet, but mark my words - he’ll step in shit everytime he opens his mouth and give the administration all the counterpoints it will need to drive the story back to the "ether" were it came from!! Rehearsed for public MSM consumption...

      mr. optimism

    • Excellent post! The old divide and conquer. Always trying to divide us by race or politics and now by class. They are all working for the same source, this you can be sure of.

    • A poster said... "we need REAL politicians and patriots.... not democratic and republican (...)"

      Sorry, there is no American that would qualify... Not me... Not you... No One... Just look around you... All are hate filled, self-serving creatures who answer to no one... Worship a fake God... Alter [whatever] words that were presumed to be dictated by the Creator to suit our own greed and wants and we live our lives as we see fit...

      Face it, we are in it to get all the stuff in this world for us and ourselves... Story Ends...

    • Kerry is NOT "one of our own people". He’s a mainstream wuss democrat who didn’t raise a single question about Bush’s Iraq madness before the war, and even voted in favor of it!

      He didn’t have the courage to call Bush a liar when it would have mattered, during the election campaign. Kerry lost because wimps deserve to lose. Bush deserved to lose too, but you have to admit that he has more balls than Kerry. Or maybe chutzpah is a better word.

    • Absolutely correct sir. Two past members of Skull and Bones (which only accepts 15 new would be demons a year) run for President, with essentially the same policies on the only issue that matters and we are supposed to believe they are actually opponents? Are we are supposed to believe they stand for something different? Kerry just released his war record - a record which contained PRAISE from some of the Swift Boat Veterns and almost surely would have shut them up. Why did he wait? Why did he not pound Shrub every day by asking, "where is bin Landen Mr. President? " followed up with "where were the planes on September 11th Mr. President?" A syphilitic monkey could have beaten that murderous moron Bush just by asking a few good questions. Questions the corporate media never ask.

      No, Kerry was a shill, a fake opponent, simply there to make the world think that there is still a functioning democracy in Amerika.

      The minutes are real, fixed means fixed, not attached, wake up America, you were lied to, then, now, yesterday and today. Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld et al are mass murderers and war criminals.

      Oh btw Hilary was for the war too, and only idiots did not know the wmd story was a lie, Hiliary is not stupid, but she is just another Kerry - an alternate demon to rule the world, pick your poison Amerika.

      Gary_7vn

    • Kerry is not a wimp, he did muster up the courage to hose down a "VC" teenager in a loin cloth. He is a fake, a phoney, someone who once was a man but is now a mere shadow, in the employ of the shadow government.

      Vote repub, at least they are honest murderers and hegemonists.

      Gary_7vn

  • its so obvious kerry and bush are one and the same. i’m glad he lost the election...nothing would be different...

    • Count every vote! remember that wimp out? same old thing and hey, I voted for the guy. he’s got no stones.

  • This proves that the so called political opposition (democratic party) is only an illusion. All this left-wing versus right-wing fights is to keep the masses distracted and divided while the illuminati controlled politician do the true bidding of their masters. As far as I’m concerned the republic has been long dead since America has been taken over by a private bank. America as many know it is an illusion; time to move out.

  • What are "We the People" waiting for? If the democrats and the republicans are no longer effective in thier job, do "we the people" not have recourse? If I am not mistaken, I believe we do. It would be to our advantage to use that recourse wisely. Instead of protesting in the street, we should be addressing this issue in a mass legal petition. This should surely wake up the congress and let them know that we are not happy with thier performance. It is time to get rid of the trash in our house, It is OUR house, and impeach the lot of them. We need people that will act within the guidelines of the law and for the best interest of the people.

  • Why don’t people get it through their thick heads that the criminals in control of the so-called American Government in Washington, D.C., and in many Statehouses across the Nation, WILL NOT GO GENTLY INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT!! These people don’t care about what you think, or feel, or want, or say, or vote, or write; the only way to get the attention of these criminals and their minions is through violence. So go ahead and puff yourselves up and think you’re all big and bad and beautiful because you talk and write a lot, but when Patriots move to rid America—and you—of all of our trash, how many of you will risk welcoming those Patriots with open front doors? And how many of you will cower behind the back door?

    • There will come a moment when those who prize Democracy and Freedom will stand together and fight against the rising tide of Fascism.

      There will come a moment when the clouds of obfuscation and deceit will clear for a moment and everybody will be able to see the base evil that those in Power are capable of.

      In that moment, the corporate-controlled media will not be able to spin the truth or distract the masses with around-the-clock coverage of some insipid and silly fluff. The people will be talking to each other and passing information electronically to each other and calling each other and meeting each other in the streets and the halls and the stores and the offices and telling the story. The strategies of the BIG LIE (9/11 = Iraq) and the Baby-with-the-Bathwater (CBS Memogate, Newsweek Abu-Grab) will no longer work to mask the truth, for the truth will be so clear and visible that only the small percentage of people who are totally delusional will be able to look at it and not see it.

      In that moment, the main stream media will be irrelevant, the police impotent, and the government no longer will stand unopposed. The 100th Monkey will have come around. The time will be ours.

      That moment COULD have come in November or December of 2004, had John Kerry and John Edwards stood against the tide of election fraud that swept Ohio, Florida, Nevada, Iowa, New Mexico, and perhaps other states. If they had fought at every step for every vote to be counted and every vote irregularity to be investigated and corrected, that moment might have come. If they had stood tall and taken the slings and arrows of the media as they were pilloried as "sore losers" and "anti-American" there were millions who would have stood with them. If they had pointed to the exit polls and questioned the "post-election corrections" it would have been a bit harder for the Administration to use that same technology to denounce elections in the Ukraine only weeks later — it might have created that MOMENT. But they did not, and the opportunity for a moment of decision was passed.

      That moment could have come as the DSM came to light. Those who are our supposed "opposition leaders" could have risen to point out that the big lie ("Democrats voted for this war too") was only true because they were LIED TO! That the American People were LIED TO. That the LIES are the true crime, and that if the Republicans in congress are more beholden to their PARTY than to their COUNTRY, then we must take back our Democracy by some other means.

      OK, so John Kerry took more bad advice lately from his pathetic advisors and didn’t create join in a movement of opposition leaders to create that moment for us with a public discussion of the DSM. That’s OK. Personally, I don’t think John Kerry is the person to create that moment for us.

      But that moment WILL come.

      We must be prepared to defend America from the forces of Fascism that have taken over every branch of our government and even our media. We must be prepared to SHUT THIS COUNTRY DOWN until we can have it back. We do not need to be the ones to fire the first shots, but we must be prepared for the possibility (likelihood!) that those in power will NOT go quietly and may shoot at us. Surprisingly, we will find people standing shoulder-to-shoulder with us that we would have scorned a decade ago. The "true" conservative does not support a government that is run by corporations and runs up enormous debts to give money to the wealthiest few. The "true" Christian does not support a government that kills, maims, wages war, and stops progress in the name of religion. And, of course, there are the Democrats who will stand with us — those willing to take a chance on the worst happening in order to protect what was once the most amazing political experiment in history.

      The moment will come.

      We must be ready.

      Charlie L
      Portland, Oregon
      CLL2001@Gmail.com

    • I agree with Charlie L. I think it’s great that we can all talk to each other about our feelings, but we’re preaching to the choir. We all have the means and the methods to stop the machine and take back our government. Our strength is in our numbers. Why wait years for change? All it would take is for someone to organize us, and say ready, set, go! Until that day comes, we all need to stop feeding the tapeworm! Keep your money local, and away from corporations. Cancel cable TV, stop shopping at the big box stores, etc...

    • Michael Jackson has more people show up on the street in support of him than there are supporters at the demonstrations demanding girlie-Bush’s impeachment! What does that say about Americans and America? Seems most Americans are completely satisfied with criminals and creeps and only slightly amused by rabble-rousers. Past generations of Americans were passionate and caring; now Americans are aloof and diffident - - - they just really don’t give a shit without a ton of Ex-Lax to help them!

  • Can’t say I didn’t see this coming, Kerry is nothing more than opportunist who is not willing to stick his neck out for the American people.

  • In the News at Wildlanders.com suggests that Dean is the answer. We all remember Deam speaking out boldly but being displaced by Kerry. If I remember right, he even suggested Kerry played some nasty political games against him. This would tend to confirm many of the posts here than Kerry is just another Bush. But I am curious what folks think of Dean.

    – Ken

  • All members of Congress play for the same team...and it aint US.

  • All members of Congress play for the same team....and it aint US.

  • John-I-don’t-Kerry proved to America what has happened to the GOV of the empire! Sad part is Bush and his band of thiefs will get away with these war crimes? George Galloway was right. Patriots have been muted and/or bought off. Blood money is difficult to spend, I am ashamed of what has come?

  • I SAY THE WHOLE REPULICANS That are in the Congress and All Over Our Nation MUST GO WITH BUSH,CHENEY,RUMSFIELD,RICE,POWELL,WOLFOWITZ,CARD,ALL OF THE PEOPLE THAT BACKED BUSH’S ACT OF TREASON WHEN THEY ALL KNEW ABOUT IT TOO.............

  • just collected five bucks from my wife on a bet dealing with Kerry’s planned speech. Easiest money I’ve made in months.

    sooner or later someone will figure out that the Kerry nomination was all part of the plan to re-elect bush. Oh, and how interesting that Dean landed such a blum job after running interference for the Senator from Mass. funny, no one has ever researched the fact that although the Dean the campaign was an instant money machine, they had no money after the Mass primary and as early as January had no plan to carry on their campaign.

  • Kerry issued this statement yesterday, 6-8-05!

    "Senator Kerry believes every American deserves a thorough explanation of the Downing Street memo. The Administration and the Washington Republicans who control Congress insult Americans by refusing to answer even the most basic questions raised in this memo about pre-war intelligence and planning for the aftermath of war. That is unacceptable, especially with the lives of Americas sons and daughters on the line. John Kerry will demand answers in the Senate. Stay tuned."

    http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/this_just_in/documents/04747410.asp

  • Know what really shocks me, the American people. For literally years during Clinton, with increasing lethality, shorter time periods between each incident, Ameicans were being slaughtered world wide and domestically-all prior to 9/11. I did not see or hear any of you protesting that. When France and Germany were up to their necks in the Oil-For-Food Program, and the Iraqi children were enhungered and the population tortured and genocide was systematically the capitualted nod for Hussein, the Red Cross and Amnesty International were as silent then as they are toward the genocide of white farmers and the pillage of their land in Africa today.

    The UN and its "global test" adied and abetted the deaths of countless lves as islamic fundamentalist terrorism spread to 60 countries. Where were the overfed, trendy, spolied and alltogether selfish railing and demonstrating amd rioting and writing books and commenting on how terrible Bush is? You all were silent. This completely inavlidates your argument-and shows you as much an instrument of the enemy as your kind was during Viet Nam.

    John Kerry? A spolied brat coat-tail rider who has quite nicely reaped what he has sown.

    Continue to contest and scrutinize this nation’s right to exist, as long as you live in suburbia and have all the material comforts you desire. One day, if you keep pushing and limiting its ability to defend itself and capitualte, you may wind up like innocent Germans in the late 1930s, used, abused and suffering because you supported what sounded like the right thing to do.

    Bush called the dogs off the porch. Enough is enough. I don’t care if there was WMD, because there probably was. The world community gave enough of a tip-off and a place of escape for years to this regime. Our intelligence community has been demoralized, understaffed, politicized and in general loathed since the 1960s. That is our fault, mainly the ilk of the the Democratic philosophy. Well, they got countless people killed.

    Your choice, slit yourt own throats or come along with us and defend our right to be who and what we are.

  • Check out the progress Big John has made on the Downing Street Minutes.