Six years ago today, Matthew Rycroft, private secretary to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, wrote a secret memorandum to the U.K.’s ambassador to the U.S., David Manning. The memo contained the minutes of a meeting held that same morning between Blair and a few senior foreign policy advisers. It was exposed by the Sunday Times nearly three years later. Two paragraphs stood out.

Rycroft spoke about a trip that Sir Richard Dearlove had recently taken to Washington. Dearlove, the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service or MI6, is referred to officially as "C":

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. 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. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

And there was this:

The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force.

Many people who were attentive to the White House’s public statements saw hints that a decision already had been made to invade Iraq well before that secret memo was sent to its select group of addressees. There was the 2002 State of Union in late January and the West Point graduation speech in June.

But concerns raised by these speeches were tempered somewhat by the idea that Congress wouldn’t go along, that public support was soft, that the media would yank on the reins, and that the British weren’t on board. This all spurred most observers to believe that an invasion might encounter too many obstacles to go forward. Unless, that is, some definitive evidence could be delivered showing that Saddam Hussein had massive quantities of weapons of mass destruction and was close to building nuclear bombs.

Providing such evidence was exactly what the neoconservative war hounds had been intent on doing, as we now know, ever since September 11 – using the terrible events of that day to achieve what former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill had told us in Ron Suskind’s The Price of Loyalty and former counter-terrorism advisor Richard Clarke had written in Against All Enemies. That is, they proposed from their very first National Security Council meeting in February 2001 to invade Iraq, eight months before al Qaeda’s attacks. Even after September 11, however, getting the public and Congress to go along, as the Downing Street memo stated  in the summer of 2002, required that the facts be "fixed around the policy." Fixed, as in exaggerated and concocted.

On May 1, 2005, Michael Smith at the Sunday Times revealed Rycroft’s memorandum. It was still April 30 in the U.S. when the news appeared, and a Diarist named smintheus picked up on it at Daily Kos, where he garnered comments from five Kossacks. The follow-up Diary the next morning drew more than 300 comments. By May 5, John Conyers, then the ranking Democratic Congressman on the Republican-controlled House Judiciary Committee, who had first read of the Downing Street memo at Daily Kos, sent a letter to the White House signed by 89 of his colleagues asking for answers.  

Soon, frustrated by the thin gruel of traditional media coverage, there was a blogswarm to Awaken the Media, formation of various Web sites, including After Downing Street, and the The Downing Street Memos, and a blogger grouping called the Big Brass Alliance.

For me and others who had for various reasons resisted calls for impeachment prior to 2005, the Downing Street Memo was a turning point. Here was the kind of evidence that we had hoped would someday come to light, evidence that - together with what Clarke and O’Neill had already provided, plus the Valerie Plame affair and the lack of WMDs in Iraq - directly called into question the administration’s claims that the decision to go to war was not made until February 2003. Here was strong evidence that the President had lied to Americans, broken his oath of office and violated national and international law. Not incontestable proof, but certainly grounds for inquiry.  

On June 16, 2005, spurred by the revelations in the secret memo, John Conyers held an unofficial hearing with 35 other Democrats, hearing testimony from, among others, former Ambassador Joe Wilson and former CIA analyst Ray McGovern. It was there that the prospect of a Resolution of Inquiry into impeachment was first raised.

That, of course, was 37 months ago. Much vitriolic talk about impeachment has gone down since then. But very little of it has taken place in the halls of Congress despite considerable new information. Additional memos, like the one David Manning wrote on January 31, 2003, have come to light. Plus, it was learned that a classified version of a National Intelligence Estimate stated that Saddam Hussein was not an imminent threat. Just before the congressional vote on the authorization to use force in Iraq in October 2002, the Bush Administration released a declassified version for public consumption which conveniently deleted NIE's no-imminent-threat assessment.

This Friday, thanks to a long-term grassroots effort as well as the unwillingness to yield by a handful of Congressional Democrats, most notably Dennis Kucinich, impeachment will be on the table at a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee. This could and should have started in 2007. Only time will tell whether "better late than never" applies.

I appreciate Chairman Conyers joining us today, but I don't have much appreciation for his apologetic explanations about why issuing subpeonas is necessary.

I consider these subpoenas to be essential because the evidence our investigation has uncovered points to the pivotal role the White House played in the U.S. Attorney firings.  We have only sought to compel cooperation through subpoenas after more than three months of stonewalling by the White House.

Subpeonas aren't essential, Chairman Conyers, IMPEACHMENT IS.   Subpeonas will either be ignored, or Bush's thugs will just say "I don't recall" a hundred times and then go home and laugh at you.

The White House has FIRED THE CONSTITUTION, Chairman Conyers.

You KNOW they have.

As we know from the Downing Street Memo and from numerous other sources, the US and the UK had made the decision to invade Iraq by no later than the middle of 2002. Blair had gone to Texas to meet Bush in April of 2002 and in the meantime the facts were to be fixed around the policy.

We heard outlandish stories about mushroom clouds, that Saddam was trying to purchase "yellowcake" from Niger, that he was continuing to accumulate weapons of mass destruction and that he had ties to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. In time these were all revealed as fabrications and gross exaggerations.

So our intelligence, which was based on National Intelligence Estimate on Iraqi WMDs, was indeed flawed. However two additional NIEs have now been released which show that the Bush Administration should have known very well what difficulties they could expect once Saddam was removed from power.

The tiff that is the controversy over whether Obama "caved" to Bush over Iraq War funding, or whether he did not, pales next to the truth over what the Democrats knew about bad intelligence in autumn 2002.

A bad case of historical amnesia has developed, and this diary looks back at op-eds from Senators Graham and Edwards in Nov. 2005 in order to set the record straight. (See update at end of diary.)

The House Ethics Committee, in one of its last acts in a Republican controlled Congress, has dismissed the case against Congressman John Conyers after a three years investigation into the charge that he used taxpayer-paid staffers for campaigning and personal errands.

The case against Mr. Conyers was closed without punitive action or a letter of reproval from the Committee on Standards of Conduct, by the ethics panel, which is comprised of five Democrats and five Republicans

In a report issued just before Democrats take control of Congress on Thursday, the bipartisan committee said Rep. John Conyers of Michigan has acknowledged "'a lack of clarity'" in communications with aides about their duties Reuters

You want some clarity?  Read below.

Today the previously secret testimony to the Butler inquiry of Mr Carne Ross, Britain's key negotiator at the UN in the period leading up to the Iraq debacle, was made public by a UK Commons Select Committee. Mr. Ross had previously been threatened by the government with prosecution under the official secrets act if he publicly disclosed his testimony........AND the testimony was definitely worthy of suppression.

Link to article
Link to transcript

The Government's case for going to war in Iraq has been torn apart by the publication of previously suppressed evidence that Tony Blair lied over Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

 

The Iraq War - Music by Edwin Starr

Many of us already know this story and know it well. But a new article on CommonDreams.org by Dr. Richard Behan amazingly pulls together all the strands which succinctly explain the behavior of the Bush Administration and it's deliberate, headlong, relenteless march into war with Afghanistan and Iraq.

The wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq were not simply justified and honorable retaliations to the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. They couldn’t possibly have been that, because both of them were premeditated—conceived, planned, and prepared long before September 11, 2001.

A bold claim, but not one made without ample evidence...

If we are to impeach, we must impeach both Bush and Cheney. It will not do any good for us to impeach Bush and have Cheney take the Oval Office and pick someone just as radical as he is. It will also not do any good for us to impeach just Cheney and allow Bush to groom John "I'm not knowledgeable" McCain for the 2008 election. Therefore, we must simultaneously impeach both of them so that the 3rd person in succession, Nancy Pelosi, would become the next President of the United States.

What remains to be done is for us to work out articles of impeachment against the President. Others may surface after the Democrats begin their job of investigating and getting to the bottom of the matter. If the Bush administration obstructs or lies to the Congressional Committee chairs, those could in and of themselves be grounds for impeachment and removal of Bush and Cheney.

In the meantime, here are the following 14 possible articles of impeachment against the President and Vice President.

On Wednesday the former British ambassador First Secretary to the U.N., Carne Ross, made to a Committee of Parliament some pretty stiff allegations against Tony Blair and George Bush regarding their plans to drag the U.K. and U.S. to war in Iraq. Ross resigned his position in protest over the Iraq war nearly two years ago.

Though he has made certain charges in the past about the rush to war, and Blair's eager embrace of Bush's war mongering, until now Ross has cooperated with the British government in keeping the documentary evidence from the public. He's had to, since he could be charged under the Official Secrets Act if he reveals it.

But now Ross says he's decided the public has to see the evidence. It is evidence, he implies, that the Butler Inquiry ignored when it reported that the Blair government did not manipulate the pre-war intelligence on WMD.

This story is not about today's story, but a small reminder of why this election matters so desperately to so many Americans.

In recent weeks, Henry Porter has published two excellent commentaries at the Observer. He seeks to refocus attention on the British government documents from 2002 that show that Tony Blair was conspiring with George Bush to gin up a war in Iraq. Porter makes a number of interesting observations, the most important of which is this: British intelligence was asked to re-open the search for links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden in February 2002.

In other words, the Blair government was looking to "fix the facts around the policy" of attacking Iraq half a year before the Head of MI6 famously declared that the Bush administration was doing so. The Bush/Blair conspiracy to gin up that war gets more tangled the more we learn about it.

Ok, gather around little wingnuts it's time for a bedtime story:

One upon a time, there was a gay hooker in the WhiteHouse. I know you probably have not heard about 'Jeff Gannon' before because God, in his infinite wisdom has kept this bad information from you until you were older and you could handle it.

Jeremy Greenstock, former British UN ambassador and special envoy to Iraq, gave an interview today to Sky News that is enormously embarrassing to the Bush administration, even though Greenstock does still believe that US and UK forces should remain in Iraq.

Here, the interviewer asked whether Greenstock agrees with the British Defense Minister that an orderly transition of power to the Iraqi defense forces is happening.

GREENSTOCK: Well, that's the process, but it's not orderly. There's no way in which the central government of Iraq can exert its authority over the whole country in the next year or two. This is going to be a long process of violence for many years to come. I don't see it being eradicated.

Newly-disclosed e-mails from the Minority Chair of the House Government Reform Committee Henry Waxman provide new areas of insight into Jack Abramoff's closeness to the Bush administration. Most shocking of all (at least of those I've been able to read so far) is that Abramoff off-handedly mentions "the upcoming war in Iraq." The date--March, 2002.

Alas, there have been no new episodes broadcast of "Iraq, the War", only re-runs of past episodes for quite some time now:

BAGHDAD - A total of 35 bodies were found in the last 24 hours in Baghdad, police said.

BAGHDAD - A U.S. soldier was killed on Tuesday when his vehicle was struck by a roadside bomb explosion in the northwest of Baghdad, the U.S. military said in a statement.

[...]

(Cont.)

The media have focused on the outing of CIA agent Plame, instead of on the much bigger story: why the Bush administration was so intent on attacking her and her husband--and there we get into secret black ops that go to the heart of a campaign to trick the nation into a pointless war.

From Random Lengths News By Paul Rosenberg, Senior Editor

On June 25, an Israeli soldier was captured, apparently by a combination of three fringe Palestinian groups, one an offshoot of the military wing of Hamas. Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) re-entered Gaza three days latter, on a mission to find him. Two weeks later, another Islamic resistance group, Hezbollah, captured two more IDF soldiers, and IDF forces retaliated quickly, launching an ever-widening aerial bombardment, hitting the Beirut airport, and other key infrastructures in northern Lebanon, as well as numerous targets in Hezbollah-controlled southern Lebanon, while Hezbollah launched missiles into Israel's interior.

Israel's massive response--meant to destroy Hezbollah--appears on the brink of massive failure, since Hezbollah's mere survival is enough to severely undermine the aura of Israeli invincibility built up over the decades. Like America's invasion of Iraq, the attacks seem to have been launched without any thought about what comes next, or having a "plan B" in case things didn't work out as hoped for.

This is a live blogging thread for the Senate Democratic Policy Committee's hearing on the use and manipulation of pre-war intelligence. It began at 1:30 PM EDT, and is being broadcast live on C-Span 3. Link

I'll update with more info, but I wanted to get this thread up immediately.

For some background on this hearing, see this diary last night by Terre. It has a list of panelists who will appear. (Updated) Here is a link with an mp3 recording of the hearing (hat-tip to Terre).

After a brief introduction, Sen. Harry Reid is speaking.

Although it has largely ignored the by Corporate Media, Robert F. Kennedy's Rolling Stone Article, "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?" has generated a firestorm of debate in the blogosphere, a harsh response from Fahrad Manjoo of Salon, whose many errors in fact and logic have generated hundreds of letters of protest, (as well as responses from Kossack Malcolm, Bob Fitrakis at the Free Press, and Bob Herbert at the NYTimes) prompting a defense by Salon's Editor Joe Joan Walsh.

Now Mark Crispin Miller, author of Fooled Again has stepped up to the plate with a letter to Salon which they refused to print claiming "In terms of the Ohio election fraud issue," wrote Jeanne Carstensen, "we don't feel your letter, as passionately argued as it is, adds anything substantially new to the debate, which we've covered the hell out of already", but has instead been printed in the Huffington Post.

Details over flip.