and now for nothing completely different

US Main Stream Media is still pretty much disregarding the severity of the implications of the Downing Street Memo possibly, as Shakespeare's Sister indicates, because they were persuaded to ignore the story.

Despite George & Tony's Peacenick impression the other day, more evidence pointing to the fix has been unearthed in the form of Rummy's proactive approach to attacking Iraq in the wake of 9/11. According to notes taken by Rummy's aides

. . .barely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq — even though there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks.

[snip]

Now, nearly one year later, there is still very little evidence Iraq was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks. But if these notes are accurate, that didn't matter to Rumsfeld.

"Go massive," the notes quote him as saying. "Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

In allegations similar to those published by former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, Bush's ghost writer has taped interviews in which Bush was actually considering opportunities to increase his political capital by invading Iraq well before becoming President:

"He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999," said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. "It was on his mind. He said to me: 'One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.' And he said, 'My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.' He said, 'If I have a chance to invade·.if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency." Herskowitz said that Bush expressed frustration at a lifetime as an underachiever in the shadow of an accomplished father. In aggressive military action, he saw the opportunity to emerge from his father's shadow. The moment, Herskowitz said, came in the wake of the September 11 attacks. "Suddenly, he's at 91 percent in the polls, and he'd barely crawled out of the bunker."

It shouldn't be a suprise to know that British court documents reveal that the US gave the British advance notice of when the war would start (or that documentation published outside the US last year would summarily be ignored by US media). According to right-wing pundits, all this talk about human rights violations, abuse of power (mis)leading the country to war is all an Amnesty International & left-wing extremist plot to re-create the glory days of Watergate by taking down a Republican President by the treacherous act of *gasp* catching him in the act of impeachable offenses.


OK, maybe something a little different: Conyers' letter to President Bush has over 240,000 signatures (getting thousands more by the minute).

Tags: Iraq War; Bush Administration; Foreign Policy; BBA; Downing Street Memorandum; Blair

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