Memo to editors: Cover memos

[brettdale]

Memo to editors: Cover memos

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/opinion/content/opinion/epaper/2005/06/26/a2e_lpcol_0626.html


No topic has funneled more recent outrage to this desk than what have become known as the Downing Street memos. Critics charge that the leaked British intelligence documents are further evidence that the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq was a done deal at least eight months earlier, rather than a last resort, and that the administration scammed a timid Congress while assuring a fearful American public that an invasion decision had not been made.

[burrowowl]

1. What the last lines say

Even if the memos are saying only what everyone already knows, the administration needs to answer for them more than it has. In failing to seek those answers, news organizations also have a lot for which to answer.

"The president he's got his war; folks don't know just what it's for," sang Les McCann at the 1969 Montreux Jazz Festival. That classic tune, Compared to What, seems a metaphor for the administration's shifting justifications — WMDs, fighting terrorism, ousting Saddam Hussein, installing democracy — for another war, and for the timid media's culpability in placing men, women and children in harm's way.