All Downing Street all the time; Friedman discovers Guantanamo

On the other side of the Atlantic, what is now known as the Downing Street Memo created a major uproar, making the front pages of most British papers and probably contributing to the loss of some among the 100 or so seats trimmed from Tony Blair’s majority in Parliament. This, despite that the memo relates somewhat ambiguous comments from Blair’s cabinet (rather less ambiguous taken with previous ones from March of 2002 by Blair’s then-Ambassador to the U.S., Sir Christopher Meyer, and Blair’s then-foreign policy advisor, Sir David Manning) which can be taken to mean that the British government had decided more than six months prior to the invasion of Iraq that they woould back the US war.

On our side of the pond, the memo is creating a different sort of noise. In it, as most readers will know, two senior British officials say unequivocally that George Bush had already made up his mind to go to war by July of 2002, that intelligence was being “fixed around the policy,” that the evidence against Iraq was “thin,” and that Iraq posed less of a threat than Iran, Libya and North Korea.

The giant sucking sound you hear, to borrow from Ross Perot, is our press’ coverage of the memo. (For a reasonably complete timeline of U.S. press coverage as of May 21, three weeks after the memo was leaked to the British press, see this. Coverage since then has largely been limited to editorials and op-ed pieces; no major investigative story has been published since Walter Pincus’ May 21 Washington Post piece.)

Neither government, in the U.K. or the U.S., have disputed the accuracy of the meeting minutes summarized in the memo. But even though by far the more serious charges in the memo are leveled at the U.S. administration — that the “last resort” war, costing the country nearly $300 billion and counting, nearly 2,000 military dead and counting, nearly 20,000 wounded, maimed and injured and counting, many tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis dead, maimed and wounded, and our credibility shattered not only in the Muslim world, but the rest of it as well, was the product of incessant lying, to Congress and the American public, by George Bush and his administration — our press have given it an almost invisible fraction of the attention the British press have done.

In fact, no institutional press outlet in the U.S. has noticed that White House press secretary Scott McClellan very carefully avoided disputing the charges in the memo when answering a question posed by BTC News White House writer, Eric Brewer. Not one.

In addition, neither British foreign minister Jack Straw nor U.S. secretary of state Condi Rice would disavow the memo when questioned about it during a joint appearance following a May 17 meeting.

Unlike the press, Democratic Congressman John Conyers of Michigan is actively pursuing the questions raised by the memo. Conyers wrote a letter to the president, signed by nearly 100 other representatives, demanding an explanation of the assertions in the memo. He is also considering dispatching an investigative team to London in an effort to interview some of the principals at the meeting described in the memo. Conyers has also asked that the public add their signatures to the letter he sent the president.

To review: the memo describes a meeting in which two very senior British officials flatly state that president Bush was determined to invade Iraq at least as early as July of 2002, eight months prior to the invasion and before the U.S. had approached the U.N. for support; that intelligence was being fixed to support that policy; and that Iraq was not a threat to its neighbors. Big brouhaha in London; virtual silence here despite unequivocal evidence, undenied by the White House, that George Bush shepherded the country into a needless war and lied during the entire time he did so.

Perhaps one day it will be history, even if it’s never news.

Meanwhile, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman has discovered that the Guantanamo Bay prison camp is bad for our reputation, and asks that president Bush close it down.

Friedman is careful to assure readers that he remains a manly man, muscularly committed to destroying terrorists root and branch; it’s just that he wants it done with a cheerful smile overlaying the iron will.

He doesn’t mention the U.S. practice of disappearing people to places like Uzbekistan, where they are boiled to soften them up for a humane interrogation. Presumably this is because most of those individuals either don’t survive or are never released, and are so unable to besmirch our reputation.

Friedman has until recently been recovering, at an undisclosed location, from several years of botched predictions and bizarre metaphors. Friends and faithful readers had hoped that the columnist had packed his entire store of such predictions and metaphors into his new book, appropriately entitled, “The World is Flat.”