The Allentown (PA) Morning Call today published my op-ed on the 'smoking gun' minutes leaked on May first by the Times of London. Here is a
link to the op-ed. You might want to check it out, if only to encourage the paper to give the story more coverage. Also, please consider writing your own op-ed; that may be one of the best options for getting the story in front of the public. Otherwise, send this op-ed to your local paper and ask them to reprint it. I haven't much time this morning to comment, but I will post a few words below the fold.
This op-ed is not everything I would desire to publish on the subject. You will find that its tenor and approach is close to what might be called the NPR-treat-every-scandal-like-a-Sunday-picnic-report school of journalism. Also, it devotes far less space to bashing Bush than I would have liked. As always, though, there are reasons for taking that approach. I won't defend them, but I'll explain them.
In essence, I wanted to ensure that (a) the op-ed got published; (b) that it included substantial quotations from the minutes; and therefore (c) that the paper did not edit out crucial bits of what I wrote. Thus I composed about the most aggressive and substantial piece that I thought my paper was likely to be willing to print. The Morning Call not infrequently publishes fairly hard-hitting commentary on Bush, but its readership is nearly evenly divided on the President.
When I proposed the op-ed early last week, the paper's editor asked me to start with Blair's troubles before proceding to Bush. From that I inferred that, given the current political climate in the US, the paper would be happier to buffer the accusations against Bush by leveling charges against Blair as well. Since the two things are intertwined, i was willing to do that.
In fact, I was trying to reach some Bush supporters, who are much less likely to spring to Tony Blair's defense instinctively. So the op-ed hits Blair very hard with accusations that are virtually identical, as most readers could infer, to the accusations that may be made against Bush over the same evidence. Rather than likening Bush to Nixon, for example, I liken Blair to Nixon.
I was not happy that the paper rejected my proposed title for the piece, and replaced it with a Blair-in-trouble title. But otherwise, they printed the op-ed pretty much as I wrote it (though they took a direct quotation from the minutes out of quotation marks--see if you can spot it).