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Impeachment on Horizon? Congress Asks Bush To Explain Damaging War Memo

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18:43 / 13.05.05

Wow...CNN carried this story, and it's a loaded one. Could this be the categorically damaging thing we've all hoped for with Bush...?

>> Bush asked to explain UK war memo

Thursday, May 12, 2005 Posted: 2:49 AM EDT (0649 GMT)
CNN.com

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Eighty-nine Democratic members of the U.S. Congress last week sent President George W. Bush a letter asking for explanation of a secret British memo that said "intelligence and facts were being fixed" to support the Iraq war in mid-2002.

The timing of the memo was well before the president brought the issue to Congress for approval.

The Times of London newspaper published the memo -- actually minutes of a high-level meeting on Iraq held July 23, 2002 -- on May 1.

British officials did not dispute the document's authenticity, and Michael Boyce, then Britain's Chief of Defense Staff, told the paper that Britain had not then made a decision to follow the United States to war, but it would have been "irresponsible" not to prepare for the possibility.

The White House has not yet responded to queries about the congressional letter, which was released on May 6.

The letter, initiated by Rep. John Conyers, ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, said the memo "raises troubling new questions regarding the legal justifications for the war as well as the integrity of your own administration..."

"While various individuals have asserted this to be the case before, including Paul O'Neill, former U.S. Treasury Secretary, and Richard Clarke, a former National Security Council official, they have been previously dismissed by your administration," the letter said.

------------------------

18:45 / 13.05.05

Full story here...how excited should we get for the potential fall of the Bush administration?

alejandrodelloco

19:27 / 13.05.05

[threadrot]...Excited enough to not close our HTML tags, actually![/threadrot]

I have a feeling the right is going to do the same thing it does about every damaging revelation that has come up about the admin: they discredit the source. I can already see the whole "Well, it wasn't written by an American, so it was pretty much useless".

I really hate my country half of the time.

Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo

19:31 / 13.05.05

As long as Congress is in the hand of Republicans, this will not matter.

According to ABC's "The Note" media blog (which is how they inform their reporters what stories to cover), the Iraq War is no longer to be covered, even as it devolves to civil war because their research shows that Americans have lost interest in Iraq since they had elections.

In other words, Bush told us that after elections, everything would be fine, and we're too busy worrying about runaway Brides, Popes and Michael Jackson to give a damn that the country is devolving into utter chaos, and soliders are being killed at an increasingly faster rate.

Professor Silly

20:51 / 13.05.05

I can only hope that even if an impeachment will not happen, that at the very least America (left, right, and middle) comes to hate Bush before he dies, so that he can live with the knowledge that he will be seen as one of the worst presidents in American History.

...that, or that one of his daughters has a sex tape leaked on the internet!!! Yeah, that would destroy him but good.

But I agree--not much will probably come of this until after his term is done. The best we can hope for is for this to build along with other Republican snafu's into an overall movement to NOT vote for any of these people in any of the upcoming elections...but even that is assuming an awful lot of those Southerns and Bible-belt Mid-Westerners that get all of their news from Fox.

...I just realized I have a whole new level of cynicism (sigh)....

09:53 / 14.05.05

So, does anyone actually have a link to the actual text of the memo?

10:31 / 14.05.05

Take a look here:

http://downingstreetmemo.com/

15:33 / 14.05.05

So you want to know what the spin will be? Because there is no chance in hell this could ever turn into an impeachment. The spin will be - that is, IF this ever turns into a major news story, which it won't - that this is merely the opinion of Rycroft, or perhaps of "C" reporting from Washington, but in any case one man. Not an American, and we all know how much anti-Bush sentiment there is in the UK, right?

I don't think this is cynicism, it's realism, unfortunately. In the Bush Administration Era this is a million miles from exposive or damaging. It will not even register on the Scandalometer. Bush would have to be caught in the act, by someone with a camera, of having sex with Ari Fliescher while stabbing children with a crucifix for any "damage" to stick - the man is teflon.

13:18 / 16.05.05

Yeah...and I haven't seen one mention of this story in mainstream US news since May 12. Not a good sign.

14:14 / 16.05.05

They've never been very good IME but I think the CBS memo thing was the last straw. They're absolutely terrified now that anything that's published will be counter-spun and ridiculed, and they've never been very interested in investigating things anyway (costs money, might disturb advertisers, may have political repercussions).

The situation now seems to be one in which spin control is so rapid, aided and abetted by pundits and internet loyalists who will fill in any gaps that Karl Rove leaves, that it barely seems worth it to put this stuff out - certainly to most news organisations, who have to spend money to do it. They certainly don't push any of it. The "refutations" might seem facile but it doesn't take much to convince people who already support the government and don't want any cognitive dissonance thanks. And when an unjustified statement of "it's just lies and bias" is accepted as a suitable response to any evidence, you can ignore pretty much anything you like.

16:09 / 16.05.05

Yeah...and I haven't seen one mention of this story in mainstream US news since May 12. Not a good sign.

I try to keep an eye on the news, and this thread was the first I've heard of it. Not a single thing is going to happen; he pretty much has the Congress bitched, and so many people in this country have gone completely delusional. They won't acknowledge that he lied because that would mean having to acknowledge that they were utterly, totally duped, and allowing the left to say "Told ya." Which, damn it, we did.

17:18 / 16.05.05

Oh, I dunno.

If it can float around until '06, and one or two promising (read: lean and hungry) new congress folks get sent up to Washington, I can definitely see it being used as ammo in what is already shaping up to be one of the nastiest, most tied up congresses ever.

Not, like, an ultimate weapon, but definitely a big club to wield.

14:02 / 18.05.05

I'm surprised there's not a thread about the Newsweek chucking the Koran in the toilet story, but I'm too lazy to start one....I wonder how much discussion there will be about the White House pressuring a news magazine to retract a story which is probably true in order to quell anti-US violence around the globe.

Professor Silly

16:34 / 18.05.05

I've seen an editorial or two in the Rocky Mountain News (my local newspaper) bitching about the lack of coverage...which in it's own way is a type of coverage. However, apparently only 19% of Americans read the paper everyday, so it's reaching a slim minority of the population.

17:37 / 18.05.05

The interesting thing is -- was there really desecration of the Quran during interrogations? Many amnesty int'l-type groups say many such complaints and accounts have been logged, now the US gov't and Newsweek is saying "Nope, never happened, we even sent a memo forbidding out interrogators to do that years ago." Then again, they also would have denied abuse at Abu Gharib if the pictures hadn’t gotten out first...

17:57 / 18.05.05

I just posted this memo onto my blog, hopefully we can just keep spreading the word. Our Sight Machine isn't nearly as large as theirs but hay, we do what we can.

22:30 / 18.05.05

I am not at all suprised that nothing is ever going to come of this. Like was said earlier..proof is not going to mean a thing when everyone deep down knows what a total nazi this guy is. People who bring proof disappear and so he has frightened everyone to the point that they will dumb up quikly and the Bush regime is scheduled to move on as a dynasty. One of his daughters will be the first female monarch at this point.
As far as the torture goes and the other ungodly acts like the tons of DU being dropped on that country. Tip of the Ice burg. And what about Blair, it seems like he isn't going anywhere after becomeing Bush's little oil bitch.
Your going to see more children born without heads then you will want to believe...because it is already happening.
Torture or the threat of it is a tool to cow modern man/sheep into swallowing the worst global atrocities of history.
Hundreds of black children go missing in London, races are being eradicated in Brazil and all over Africa. DU will cause damage to people in the mideast and downwind for Billions of years.
At this point I see them getting away with anything. MOOOOO. mooooo, baaahhhh, baaaahhhh. Dumb up and live in blisss.

22:38 / 18.05.05

Morpheus, if you're going to continue to churn out non-specific "you sheeple are SLEEPING" Voice of Doooom toss, could you try to confine it to your own thread? Please?

08:38 / 19.05.05

The inner circle seems to like to rot my thread enough with the joke suit...yet I am not joking. Sorry to bum you out...what was the topic again...oh yeah the bush memo. Bush is not the voice of god, I do know that. And so he should have been put on trial for crimes against humanity long ago for any number of reasons. Why do you think it should all of a sudden start because of a memo. He is given the power because oil is your god...or maybe is not. W.S.A.Y.O.?
Now follow the white elephant to the passion pit of blissful discourse.

ONLY NICE THINGS

09:20 / 19.05.05

None of that is about the Bush memo, Morph. It's just about Bush, wandering off into other vague proclamations of dark forces and conspiracy theories. Are you, perchance, a vampire with the power to turn threads into toss?

11:11 / 19.05.05

he's like like morpheus from sandman, and morph from them xmen cartoons, and morph from tony hart: as stylish, doomed, intelligible.

14:24 / 19.05.05

Maybe I've been living without the tirades of internet weirdoes for too long, but this is absolutely top-drawer stuff isn't it? Keep it coming, I say.

16:07 / 19.05.05

It's like a cut-up of George Galloway and David Icke, innit?

alejandrodelloco

00:49 / 20.05.05

Oh shucks. I rather liked the other thread, but it seems that one is deleted...

Serously though, Morph, we have a "way" of doing things around here: for each of the claims that you're making, explain why we should believe them. Saying "ENTIRE RACES IN BRAZIL ARE DISAPPEARING WTF" makes good copy, but if we don't know what proves this, why this is, and most importantly: why this is on topic, then we have a post. Do we get it yet?

...heh heh...inner circle...

00:56 / 20.05.05

Oh shucks. I rather liked the other thread, but it seems that one is deleted...

Nope, just moved to Conversation.

20:22 / 20.05.05

NPR finally covered the Downing St Memo today, though oddly enough they packaged it with the Sun/Saddam story, as though it wasn't meaty enough on its own. The White House response to the memo, "from Karl Rove on down" as they put it, is that this entire topic of the Iraq war (?!) was addressed and put to bed during last year's election. In other words, the American people decided by reelecting Bush that whatever he did we approve, hooray! 51% of us heartily approve! So there will be no more talk of Iraq, okay! Chilling. NPR also speculated that this sentiment is at the root of the media's sluggishness (to put it mildly) in reporting the memo at all.

20:12 / 21.05.05

It is old, and now already gone. As Scott McClellanis may as well have said. Black is white now and so...who cares?
This is not the Watergate burglary and it is not a fabricated Gulf of Tonkin incident. It is nothing new, just a new version of something that is old - so old it has become all but too boring.

The critics of the war, all of them Democrats, have accused Bush and his top aides of misusing what has since been shown as limited intelligence in the prewar period. The notes of the meeting between Dearlove and Blair now prove it. So what? The same critics have been unsuccessful in getting an investigation into the misuse of the intelligence and as long as they are in the minority they never will. What are they expecting to happen here that didn't happen in Britain?

14:43 / 22.05.05

Please list sources for quotations.

Professor Silly

17:16 / 22.05.05

My local paper, the Rocky Mountain News, finally printed an article on this topic on Friday, March 20th, on page 38A. It was written by a New York Times writer, so it will probably be dismissed as "liberal media scaremongering" by the 30% of Americans who apparently voted for Bush

20:11 / 22.05.05

Sorry, you'll have to trust me on this one. I forgot.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

15:38 / 23.05.05

It's horrifyingly believable if accurate, there is a Conservative push that accuracy is something that only matters if it's a Democrat making the mistake...

20:33 / 26.05.05

as for the infamous "they flushed the Quran down the toilet" story, now the Pentagon says "oh, that guy, we spoke to him and he now says it didn't happen." Unbelievable.

03:14 / 30.05.05

It's not that Americans don't believe that Bush might have cooked the books- it's that they don't care. In some ways, it's almost refreshing to at least have it be so fucking apparent.

alejandrodelloco

12:56 / 30.05.05

I hate how he manages to avoid all the shit by simply ignoring it. Bad President! Bad President!

19:51 / 31.05.05

He says the new Amnesty Int'l report about various abuses of prisoners at Camp X-Ray and elsewhere, which include additional allegations of flushing and messing with the Quran, are "absurd" and inaccurate. His defense? he basically says 'the people who made these allegations hate America, of course they're going to make up lies to try to damage America.'

That's right, George, I'm sure EVERY ONE of them is lying. Especially the ones who got picked up for terrorism but aren't really terrorists.

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