Ray McGovern: Fixed Is Fixed

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Fixed Is Fixed

by Ray McGovern, TomPaine.com

With the Downing Street momentum building, it's time to dispel some of the smoke Bush's surrogates are blowing.

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20050622/fixed_is_fixed.php

June 22, 2005

(Ray McGovern was a CIA analyst for 27 years, and is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. He now works at Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour.)

With last week's hearings on the Downing Street memos concluded, much work lies ahead. Now, the information in the Downing Street memos needs to be collated carefully with evidence from the mainstream media, on the Internet, and from other sources regarding what was going on in top policymaking circles in Washington in the preparations for the invasion of Iraq.

All this can be expected to take some time.

Those who have read the most recent British cabinet documents know that they show senior U.K. lawyers and diplomats desperately trying to place a veneer of legality on Prime Minister Tony Blair's promise to President George W. Bush that Britain would join the United States in launching an unprovoked attack on Iraq.

The new memos provide a wealth of information supplementing what has already been revealed—like the relatively unsung example of Elizabeth Wilmshurst, then-deputy legal adviser to the British Foreign Office. Wilmshurst kept insisting that the attack could not be squared with international law, and said it would start "a war of aggression." When her superiors caved in to Blair, Wilmshurst did the honorable thing. She resigned.

But as the word on the memos is getting out and the case is being carefully formulated, the Downing Street memos and the media coverage they are receiving are already giving the Bush administration fits as they try to slow down a train that has already left the station. British Prime Minister Tony Blair's early decision that it would be a fool's errand to challenge the authenticity of the papers has prevented the White House from labeling them spurious. Thus, the administration has concluded that smoke, rather than denial, is what is indicated

..more..

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1. DSM=Probable Cause? another useful article here,

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20050620/why_the_memo_matters.php

Why The Memo Matters
by Mark Danner, The New York Review of Books and TomDispatch

The Downing Street Memos confirm the existence of presidential deceit, even if they don't prove it. In other words, probable cause.

June 20, 2005

Mark Danner, a longtime New Yorker staff writer and frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, is professor of journalism at the University of California at Berkeley and Henry R. Luce Professor at Bard College. His most recent book is Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror, which collects his pieces on torture and Iraq that first appeared in the New York Review of Books. His work can be found at markdanner.com. This article was originally published on TomDispatch.com and will appear in the July 14th edition of the New York Review of Books , on newsstands June 20th.
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