DSM Shadowing Blair Visit with Bush in Washington (from IPA)

[ailsagirl]

Lots of pertinent links on this website

Institute for Public Accuracy
June 6, 2005

Two days before Tony Blair's scheduled Tuesday meeting with President Bush in Washington, the chairman of the Republican National Committee faced questioning on NBC's "Meet the Press" about the festering Downing Street Memo scandal. Tim Russert said: "This was a memo, July 23, 2002, from the head of British intelligence to Prime Minister Blair; in effect, notes taken from a briefing that was given to Prime Minister Blair after the head of British intelligence came back from a trip to Washington. It says this: ' reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. 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.'"

Russert added: "This is July of 2002. We didn't invade until March of 2003. And the prime minister of Great Britain is being told by the head of his intelligence that he went to Washington and believes that a decision had already been made and that the administration was fixing or manipulating the intelligence to support the policy."

=snip=

Swanson noted that Sunday, when asked about the Downing Street Memo on NBC's "Meet the Press," Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee, claimed "that report has been discredited by everyone else who's looked at it since then. Whether it's the 9/11 Commission, whether it's the Senate, whoever's looked at this has said there was no effort to change the intelligence at all." Said Swanson: "Mehlman is pretending to claim that these bodies have investigated the Downing Street Minutes and discredited them, while really claiming that these bodies discredited the idea that the Bush administration cooked the intelligence to fit its desired policy. This amounts to claiming that a new piece of evidence can be dismissed on the grounds of what authorities allegedly concluded PRIOR TO discovering the new evidence. This is absurd."


http://www.accuracy.org/newsrelease.php?articleId=1062

[evlbstrd]

1. It turned out to be a lame attempt on Russert's part.

He let Mehlman off the hook in the end.

[ailsagirl]

2. egads-- what a photo of Pat Robertson!!!!! blecccch

Russert must have forgotten, briefly, that he's not a journalist.

:spank:

[evlbstrd]

3. But he caught himself in the end.

Yeah, I love that pic of Pat.

"He's got twenty million dollars in his heavenly bank account."
Frank Zappa.