Downing Street Memo update

I've been somewhat remiss as a member of the Big Brass Alliance (a network of bloggers promoting awareness of the Downing Street Memo). Since my initial post announcing that Marching Orders was joining the organization, and an update last week, I've been pretty silent. California politics have been heating up, after all...

But now there's a fairly big piece of new news (as opposed to old news, like a memo that leaked two months ago but didn't get picked up by the mainstream media for six weeks): A second British memo has been leaked, this one demonstrating that Britain had agreed as early as July 2002 to support American adventurism in Iraq:

Ministers told of need for Gulf War 'excuse'

(Times Online) MINISTERS were warned in July 2002 that Britain was committed to taking part in an American-led invasion of Iraq and they had no choice but to find a way of making it legal.
The warning, in a leaked Cabinet Office briefing paper, said Tony Blair had already agreed to back military action to get rid of Saddam Hussein at a summit at the Texas ranch of President George W Bush three months earlier.
The briefing paper, for participants at a meeting of Blair’s inner circle on July 23, 2002, said that since regime change was illegal it was “necessary to create the conditions” which would make it legal.
This was required because, even if ministers decided Britain should not take part in an invasion, the American military would be using British bases. This would automatically make Britain complicit in any illegal US action.

You can read the memo in its entirety here.

Roundups of commentary on this newest development can be found at The Heretik and Freiheit und Wissen.

So, the plot thickens, thanks to some anonymous friend deep within Her Majesty's government: We're accumulating more and more evidence that the US mindfully concocted the rationale for war, and now we know that the US was convincing her closest ally to start manufacturing consent six months before the war started.

And the noise being made in the blogosphere is being heard on high: As reported by Shakespeare's Sister (one of the BBA organizers) and Alternate Brain , Representative John Conyers (D-Ohio) has called a Judiciary Committee meeting on the Downing Street minutes. This is, of course, all happening against a background of a hostile corporate media that had dropped the story initially, and a Republican Congress that's likely to throw every possible barrier in the way of a real investigation.

Nonetheless, as the Brain said: Sometimes, shit does happen. And it looks like it's happening now.

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Downing Street Memo update

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