If you’re like me your Outrage Alert Level has been bouncing from orange to red over the past five years, so it is hard to become even more outraged than normal. However, the treatment in the U.S. press of the contents of a recently released secret British government memo that proves that Bush and Blair were conniving to go to war in Iraq long before Bush & Co started “marketing” the war to the American public has finally done it for me.
What is outrageous is not so much that the memo offers unrefuted proof that Bush lied to the American public time and time again during the run up to the war – or that the announcement of the war was timed to influence the U.S. Congressional elections in 2002. I knew all that.
What is outrageous is that the revelations in this memo – which was released on May 2, 2005 – have caused barely a blip on the radar screens of the So-Called Liberal Media.
Finally, today a story about the memo appeared discreetly at the bottom of page 3 in today’s Los Angeles Times, but the focus of the story is not on the President’s veracity – imagine if this were Bill Clinton – but rather on how lack of coverage of the story has sparked outrage among Bush’s critics. And while CNN International has a piece on it their website, there hasn’t been a peep about it otherwise on cable news.
Here’s how the Times set it up:
Reports in the British press this month based on documents indicating that President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair had conditionally agreed by July 2002 to invade Iraq appear to have blown over quickly in Britain.
But in the United States, where the reports at first received scant attention, there has been growing indignation among critics of the Bush White House, who say the documents help prove that the leaders made a secret decision to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein nearly a year before launching their attack, shaped intelligence to that aim and never seriously intended to avert the war through diplomacy.
Political Gateway has the full contents of the British memo, along with a letter from a couple dozen Democratic members of the House of Representatives demanding an explanation from George Bush.
Alternatively, I have pulled the choicer quotes from the memo and posted them after the jump.
JUMP: Read the rest of the article.
Do you think we’ve gotten so used to being ignored or shouted down (think Dan Rather) when we question the Bush White House that we aren’t bothering anymore? By “we” I mean people like you and me, not the attack poodles (MSM), who never question anything.
The MSM tells us that the 2004 election settled all discussion about Bush’s malfeasance in getting us into an unnecessary war. Funny, though, nobody said the the 1996 elections settled anything about the Clintons. And, in fact, the Impeachment dominated the last two years of Clinton’s term.
If a stained blue dress was evidence enough to impeach Bill Clinton, this secret British memo is enough to impeach George Bush.