The lack of coverage on the Downing Street Memo as well as the rise of internet blogs and alternative media as a response to the toothless corporate media is becoming as much a story as the memo's themselves.


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Why the Mainstream Media Is Catching On

Internet Bloggers Push Downing Street Memo Onto the News Agenda

By Jefferson Morley
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Thursday, June 23, 2005; 12:20 PM

The Downing Street Memo continues to spread in American political discussion despite efforts to dismiss its significance.

The DSM story, as the top-secret British document it is known on the Internet, has legs because it really represents two stories: an emerging alternative history of how the United States came to attack Iraq and a story of how the New Media has usurped some of the Old Media's power to set the agenda.

Michael Smith, ace reporter for the Sunday Times, continues to lead the journalistic pack on the story, again demonstrating that there is more news in the British official record of war preparations. Smith reported last weekend that the British Foreign Office had concluded in early 2002 that stepped-up U.S. and British attacks on Iraq in the so-called no-fly zone violated international law. Smith's story was based on a "confidential" document entitled "Iraq: Legal Background" that was attached to the original DSM which was presented to senior British officials in July 2002.

The original memo reported that British defence secretary Geoff Hoon said that "the US had already begun 'spikes of activity' to put pressure on the regime" by attacking Iraqi installations starting in May 2002.

The "Legal Background" document shows that the British Foreign Office concluded in March 2002 such attacks could only be legally justified by self-defense, imminent threat or humanitarian crisis as defined by a United Nations resolution.

"The increased attacks on Iraqi installations, which senior US officers admitted were designed to 'degrade' Iraqi air defences, began six months before the UN passed resolution 1441, which the allies claim authorised military action," Smith wrote.

Thomas Wagner, an Associated Press reporter in London, advanced the DSM story when he reported that there was not one but a series of eight British memos "that have renewed questions and debate about Washington's motives for ousting Saddam Hussein."

"In one of the memos, British Foreign Office political director Peter Ricketts asks whether Bush administration had a clear and compelling military reason for war," Wagner wrote in a story picked up by the Times of India, the Winnepeg Sun and Xinhua, the Chinese news service.

"US scrambling to establish a link between Iraq and al-Qaida is so far frankly unconvincing," Ricketts said in the memo. "For Iraq, 'regime change' does not stack up. It sounds like a grudge between Bush and Saddam."

Univision.com, Web site of the international Spanish-language TV network with a big U.S. audience, also picked up the story.

"What is surprising," said Washington correspondent Jorge Ramos Avalos, is "how little attention [the memo] has received in some of the most important news media in the United States despite its being an official document that contradicts the North American version of the beginning of the war."

"Taken together, these papers amount to an indictment of the way the British and American peoples were led to war," says columnist Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian.


"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." - George W. Bush State of the Union speech Jan 28, 2003 "mission accomplished" - George W. Bush May 2, 2003 It does not require a majority to prevail but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brushfires in peoples minds". Samuel Adams said that. Pretty deep for a guy that makes beer for a living - The Boondocks "A conservative is one who admires radicals centuries after they're dead" - Leo C. Rosten