A Note of Caution re the Downing Street Memos: Remember Rathergate

[smoogatz]

and Korangate. If Rove stays true to form, he won't allow this story to get much more traction before slipping in a ringer: a purported "smoking gun" document with a superficially impressive provenance, that then turns out to be less than perfectly authentic. The result would be to discredit ALL of the memos--even the real ones. Those who are reporting on these memos (bloggers especially) need to be very careful about establishing the bona fides of each and every new document. This could be the story that brings down Bushco--don't let Rove hang the messenger (and kill the message) yet again.

[neoteric lefty]

1. Has there been other documents being reported

that link the DSM specifically? I haven't seen any, but to be honest, I have been pretty preoccupied for the last few weeks.

[smoogatz]

3. Check the "greatest" page

There are apparently six new documents out--all of which appear to be pretty incriminating.

[Junkdrawer]

2. Now, that I agree with...

Earlier, a poster who shall not be named kept insisting the DSM was such a document itself. I doubted that and the Bush/Blair news conference removed all doubt.

But a new ringer...very likely.

[jobycom]

4. Good caution

The problem won't be a good journalist getting taken again. Rove has done this to Ken Hatfield, Dan Rather, and now Newsweek... The good guys will be looking out for it.

Wouldn't be surprised to see Rove set up a fake story in several friendly papers just so he could shoot it down and thus shoot down the rest, though.

We need an independent investigation. Actually, what we need is for one of our judges to appoint one of our most partisan activists to an investigation with unlimited power to subpoena and punish to investigate the issue. But sadly, we have too much integrity to go the Ken Starr route. So we need integrity and independence, instead.

[evermind]

5. Caution, yes, but please see my post in GD for

reasons to be optimistic:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x3847277

Executive summary: the reasons for caution are well known and have been extensively discussed since Jun 8th. Rawstory and AfterDowningStreet are well aware of the need not to be tricked, and have been working on verifying the documents since June 9th. That they are now happy to publish, and that AfterDowningStreet are claiming "Rawstory has verified the authenticity" gives us every reason to expect to see excellent evidence in favour of the documents when Rawstory update with their "longer narrative late tonight".

[JDPriestly]

6. The spelling in the documents is atrocious.

I cannot believe that members of the British cabinet would sign documents with so many spelling errors. What is the real story on the documents. They sound real, but they do not look at all authentic to me. If spellings were changed, what else was changed in the retyping or transmission process?