The Downing Street Memo – you know – the one that says:
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.”
Is going under-reported in the US (though it seems to be exploding everywhere else).
But it has provoked little media follow-up in the United States. The most widely circulated story in the mainstream press came from the Knight Ridder wire service (5/6/05), which quoted an anonymous U.S. official saying the memo was “an absolutely accurate description of what transpired” during Dearlove’s meetings in Washington.
Other info:
For more than 10 days, the U.S. media nearly ignored it, but finally the so-called “Downing Street Memo” is finally gaining traction in the U.S. press. The Los Angeles Times featured a lengthy report on Thursday, and Walter Pincus of The Washington Post followed on Friday.
Update: Krugman weighs in:
America has been taken hostage. Nobody wants to take responsibility for the terrible scenes that will surely unfold if we leave (even though terrible scenes are unfolding while we’re there). Nobody wants to tell the grieving parents of American soldiers that their children died in vain. And nobody wants to be accused, by an administration always ready to impugn other people’s patriotism, of stabbing the troops in the back.
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