Awaken the MSM: Downing Street Memo Alert (6/16)
Thu Jun 16, 2005 at 07:33:48 AM PDT
John Conyers' hearing at 2:30 today will be televised by C-Span 3. James Sensenbrenner (R WI)--another gift from the GOP who keeps on giving--tried to block Conyers from holding the hearing in the Capitol. Therefore I've targeted Sensenbrenner's hometown paper, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. Please mention his behavior when you contact the paper.
The Bolton nomination battle will re-open soon, and that should be another opportunity to get out the news about DSM. Bolton, you'll recall, illegally got Jose Bustani, chief UN chemical weapons inspector, fired in order to prevent weapons inspections in Iraq from going ahead. In your letters to the media, please mention the AP story on Bolton, Bustani, and DSM.
Also, please try to show the MSM that the DSM story has evolved considerably in recent days, and point out to them new avenues for investigation. The media is much more likely to invest time digging if they see new angles and revelations popping up, and once they become invested in DSM, they will continue with it.
There are several lines of investigation about pre-war policy/planning that we should push for, among journalists as well as in Congress. Far below, I talk about the stalled Senate Intelligence Committee hearings on the manipulation of intelligence regarding WMDs.
A second line of inquiry I'd like to see emerge is this: Did Congress authorize Bush to transfer monies appropriated for Afghanistan to Iraq to fund the pre-war air war in 2002? If not, has Bush committed a crime in misappropriating the funds?
In your letters, please mention the Conyers' hearings and at least one of the following; the new Military Action memo published on Sunday; the six `new'UK memos (on which see below); the Bolton/Bustani story mentioned above; the RAF documents; Bush's stone-walling last Tuesday at his press conference with Blair.
In addition to showing the media why and how the story has evolved in the last few days or weeks, we must convince them that they need to print the full text or at least publish a careful overview of the full text--as the Baltimore Sun did yesterday. That will make it much more likely they will dig deeper into the story. The GOP most definitely does not want the public to read DSM (as we can see from their evasive talking points), because there is almost no way to portray the discussions there positively. It is an explosive document, and they are fearful of it. Please help to convince these newspapers to print it in full.
Here is the trio of media contacts for today. Please email, call, or fax all three of them, and then come back tomorrow for the next installment in this campaign:
(A) Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Contact EITHER Washington Bureau Chief Craig Gilbert. email: cgilbert@journalsentinel.com phone: 202-662-7290
OR Senior National Editor Carl Schwartz. email: cschwartz@journalsentinel.com phone: 414-224-2877
(B) Media General, Senior Washington correspondent John Hall. email: jhall@mediageneral.com phone: 202-662-7664
(C) Detroit Free Press, National News Editor Nancy Laughlin email: laughlin@freepress.com
OR Reader Representative John X. Miller. email: readrep@freepress.com phone: 313-222-2441
The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel has published one excellent editorial on DSM, but no news reports at all. It is the hometown newspaper of Rep. James Sensenbrenner, who tried to block Rep. John Conyers from holding a hearing in the Capitol on DSM today. Media General owns a newspaper chain in the southeast. None of their papers have run any articles on DSM to date, though John Hall is a serious investigative journalist and very capable of doing credit to the subject (do not however bother talking to the DC Bureau Chief for Media General). The Detroit Free Press has published only a single article on DSM (the highly abbreviated and uninformative June 8th report by Ron Hutcheson about the Bush/Blair press conference).
For those who are new participants in this daily targeted media campaign, you can go to the first diary in the series for introductory materials and advice about how to write a letter to the media:
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/6/1/74549/88811
As good as it gets
John Daniszewski, who wrote the outstanding article on DSM for the LA Times on May 12, yesterday produced what is clearly the best report yet to appear on the six `new' documents from Britain. It is a must read, and demonstrates what serious journalists can do when they read the docs closely. NPR's All Things Considered interviewed Daniszewski yesterday in a segment on DSM and related documents, an unusuallythorough and hard-hitting segment.
These documents are not really `new.' They had been quoted extensively last year in two British newspapers, The Daily Telegraph and The Times of London. When he was given the originals , Michael Smith (of The Times) typed up a copy of the six texts on a typewriter, and later returned the originals to the leaker(s). Sometime later a Cambridge University don (with whom I've corresponded) received faxed copies of the typed transcriptions. These made their way into the hands of a Cambridge doctoral student, Michael Lewis, who scanned them and in September 2004 posted them as PDF documents on cryptome.org. (Btw the Cambridge don agrees that there appear to be lines missing from the Iraq Options document, as I argued days ago, and he's looking into what was lost; stay tuned.)
The docs portray the Blair government trying to come to grips with the push for war against Iraq coming out of D.C.; and Blair himself preparing for a meeting with George Bush at Crawford in April 2002. These six documents are deep background to DSM, whereas the Military Action Memo is immediate background to DSM. Much of the reporting in the US thus far on the Military Action Memo has been depressingly shallow. Both the NYT article by David Sanger and the WaPo article by Walter Pincus focus on what the six documents tell us about the poor state of planning in July 2002 for post-war Iraq--a peripheral issue. That is why it is particularly gratifying to see this well-researched, thoughtful, and penetrating analysis of all six `new' documents by John Daniszewski. It is a must read, so I will not quote it extensively. The second half of the article, appropriately, quotes large chunks of the texts as it analyzes them. Daniszewski's choice of quotations is astute; you can get the gist of them from his summary of them.
From the article's first half, this is perhaps the most important paragraph:
The documents contain little discussion about whether to mount a military campaign. The focus instead is on how the campaign should be presented to win the widest support and the importance for Britain of working through the United Nations so an invasion could be seen as legal under international law.
Thus does Daniszewski flatly contradict the frankly preposterous claim that President Bush made at last Tuesday's press conference with Tony Blair: The President stated that all his conversations with Blair before July 2002 had been about finding a peaceful resolution to the Iraq standoff. Last Wednesday's diary commented on the troubles this transparent falsehood will create for the President's credibility, and how stone-walling is just dragging him deeper into the scandal.
Slate finally discovers DSM
Where have they been? A new analysis of DSM by Fred Kaplan at Slate. It's an attempt to look at the value of this evidence skeptically. Thankfully it is not dismissive, in the vein of Michael Kinsley (did I mention that his op-ed is atrocious?). On the other hand, like so many skeptical pieces it devotes most of its attention not to the core issues but to a handful of peripheral ones. It is extremely narrow in focus. Kaplan devotes a lot of energy to proving that the Brits thought Saddam had WMDs. They say they think that, so why is that an issue?
If he hadn't arrived at the debate 46 days late, he might have seen a whole range of issues that he never mentions. For example, what about the problem that Bush is said to be after regime change, with WMDs as the pretext for it? What about the consequence of the fact that the Brits don't really have evidence to prove that their WMD suspicions are right? They decide to deceive their own public and the world, knowing that they'll have a hard time convincing anybody that Hussein suddenly became an imminent threat. Kaplan never mentions the charade cooked up at the UN, for example. He also reduces DSM to a single money quote. The rest of the doc he ignores. He is also silent on the big, obvious issues. Doesn't it matter that the President systematically deceived the nation? What does that mean for democracy, or constitutional government? So an opportunitylost; maybe he'll take a look into the issues that bloggers been kicking around for nearly seven weeks. His response to my email pointing out some weaknesses of his piece, however, was just a tad dismissive.
Kurtz on DSM
Howie Kurtz has a long discussion in WaPo about how and why the MSM failed to take the story seriously, and how activists and bloggers pushed it (to their chagrin) into the news. He says this shows the left can win these battles (and play the refs) as well as the wingnuts. He gives a shout to downingstreetmemo.com and (unattributed) this Awaken the MSM campaign, so that may help to boost our letter-writing numbers further.
A pretty solid piece, though I noted one error--he said that DSM is a memo from Dearlove. Also, regrettably, he did not mention the role of dKos in breaking the story in the US and then pushing it out into the rest of the blogosphere (John Conyers himself said he learned about DSM from the diary on dKos). But we'll be content with even indirect attention for our successes if it adds to our momentum. The piece is particularly interesting for the litany of reasons why MSM neglected to treat the story seriously.
Urge the Senate to re-open investigations into political manipulation of intelligence
In addition to this trio of media contacts, I'm urging people to contact Sen. Pat Roberts to urge him to restart the Sen. Intelligence Committee hearings into pre-war WMD intel. (For my reasons in widening this campaign today, see above.) Last year the Committee issued a report that focused exclusively on alleged failures in intelligence-gathering. Roberts promised Democrats that after the 2004 election the Committee would investigate whether the intel was politically manipulated by the Bush admin to produce the desired reports about WMDs.
Yet those hearings have never been held. It was a false and tendentious distinction to make in the first place; postponing an investigation into alleged manipulation was intended to provide cover for Bush. The pressure that was brought to bear upon the `intelligence community' (a lovely phrase) from within, from above, and from the side (specifically through the Office of Special Plans, a shady set-up that stove-piped bad intel from lousy sources like `Curveball'), has been very widely and credibly reported. See for example this report (thanks to NeuroticBlonde for that link). For Sen. Roberts to have promised and reneged upon his commitment to hold hearings is outrageous to his colleagues and an insult to the nation. I urge you to contact him today to say so, and spread the word to your friends as well. It is even more appalling that Sen. Roberts has taken this action though he served as a Marine and was at one time a reporter. Here is the contact info:
Senator Pat Roberts R-KA, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee . email: pat_roberts@roberts.senate.gov webmail: http://roberts.senate.gov/e-mail_pat.html phone: (202) 224-4774 Fax: 202-224-3514 (Jackie Cottrell, Chief of Staff)
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