by Jack Dresser, Ph.D.
Capt., Medical Service Corps, USAR (1962-65)

Encourage Investigation of Downing Street Memo

On May 1, 2005, the Sunday Times of London published a leaked “UK eyes only” transcript of minutes from a meeting of Tony Blair and other top British officials on July 23, 2002, now known as the “Downing Street memo”.  On May 5, 2005, Representative Peter DeFazio joined Rep. John Conyers (D, MI) and 87 other members of the US House of Representatives including Oregon congressmen Wu and Blumenauer as signatories to a letter to President Bush posing five questions arising from the memo.  To date there has been no White House response. The mainstream US media are largely ignoring the story.

During the Downing Street meeting, a participant identified as “C” reported from recent talks in Washington that “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” (to sell the case for war to the American public).  There was “no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record,” C continued, and “there was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.”

Discussion ensued.  The UK Defence Secretary said that the US had already begun "spikes of activity" (reported elsewhere as multiple air strikes).  UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said “it seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action” although “the case was thin” since “Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.”  The UK Attorney-General said that “the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action” and Blair stated that “it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors” (Saddam, of course, avoided this trap by admitting the inspectors.).

A separate secret briefing for the meeting said that the US and UK had to “create” conditions to justify a war.  This was eight months prior to the invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003, while the Bush Administration continued its public declarations that it was pursuing diplomatic efforts to avoid “the last resort”of  war.  Neither the British nor American governments has disputed the authenticity of the memo or the truth of its contents.

These lies and deceptions (which were transparent to me and many others at the time, including Rep. DeFazio who voted against the resolution authorizing war) led the US Congress and public into approving a war resulting to date in the deaths of some 1,700 Americans, thousands more physically and/or psychologically wounded, and Iraqi deaths reliably estimated at over 100,000 by a carefully designed, peer-reviewed study led by Johns Hopkins University researchers and published in Britain’s prestigious medical journal, Lancet.  In his book, Worse than Watergate, former Nixon presidential counsel John Dean describes this as a clearly impeachable offense.

Rep. Conyers gathered 94 congressional and some quarter million citizen signatories to his letter, which he presented again, in person, to the White House.  He also conducted hearings to investigate the information revealed in the memo.  Our Representative DeFazio is pessimistic about Articles of Impeachment emerging from the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, but public outrage could very well shift the balance of control in 2006 and enough public outrage might influence some Republican members facing re-election challenges even before that. Americans should urge their congressional representatives to actively support the Conyers investigation and wherever it may lead.
 
 
 

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Copyright 2006 Jack Dresser, Ph.D.