A number of people have strongly urged BTC News to stop referring to the Downing Street Memo — which consists of minutes from a meeting during which British Foreign Minister Jack Straw and British intelligence chief Richard Dearlove both said that president Bush had made up his mind at least by July of 2002 to attack Iraq, and Dearlove said the administration appeared to be jiggering intelligence to support that decision — as the Downing Street Memo because that term “trivializes” the documents and its contents.
We are relatively sensitive to the nuances of language around here. We do nuance. We are constantly nuancing, sometimes to the point of irritating even our friends. However: We submit that calling something a memo doesn’t trivialize it — if, for instance, a memo surfaced in which a senior government official told a subordinate, “We’re going to start a war based on phony intel but you have to keep a straight face and pretend we haven’t made up our minds yet,” that would be a non-trivial thing — that continuing to call it a memo is in fact wiser at this point because that’s how it is widely known, and that until someone else gets a White House correspondent with the stones to stand up and ask Scott McClellan about the item in question, no one is really in a position to demand anything of us in respect to it.
So, no. We’ll call it whatever we want to call it, which is and shall remain “the Downing Street Memo.” And we suggest that anyone so heavily invested in the issue as to wax apopletic about the description of it could probably better spend their energies lobbying for an investigation than going all language cop-ish on us. If you want a paradigm for why Republicans are in power, you probably couldn’t do better than the fact that they’ve gotten away with running a scam war and liberals are arguing among themselves about what to call the evidence of it.
Minutes are the real-time record of a meeting, whose veracity is checked by all members attending, and are given to all members attending, and must be kept by all attending. Minutes are the true and accurate testimony of what transpired. If a conspiracy to commit a crime happened during a meeting, and those minutes were made public, and the criminals were government ministers, and the crime was an illegal war — there SHOULD BE HELL TO PAY.
Call it what you like,
Orwell was a journalist, he worked for the BBC. Winston Smith in 1984 spent every day cutting and pasting and photoshopping to change words and pictures and history and accuracy in reporting.
Orwell is that great copy editor in the sky.
Control language=control thought.
Big Brother is reading you!!!
Do you want to spend your time attempting to re-educate me and the millions of other people using “memo,” whom you apparently believe to be too stupid to notice what the principals say in it, or do you want to do something about it? You just wasted another 10 minutes.
I think you’re dead right on this – for me, your position represents the realpolitik of a google-dominated news world.. ;-)
Thanks for continuing to cover the issue.
In reality, a transcript true and accurate testimony to a meeting as it is a word for word account. Minutes are really just notes taken by a single person. When the minutes are typed up, they are sent to every person who attended the meeting. Those people are usually so busy, and overwhelmed with email, that they never even read them. I would hope it is different at the top of the ladder, like the Whitehouse, but it is unlikely. We can only be so lucky if the evidence is indisputable.
Dear Weldon Berger,
You’re right. It was a waste of two, not ten minutes. And it doesn’t matter at all. Absolutly right. The sooner it disappears from the public’s mind the better. Except that it hasn’t entered into the public’s mind. And Rice, Straw, McCain and McClellan have got in their first to say memo=one person’s opinion, so disregard.
There’s another precious two minutes.
Yes, as in “nevermind”. Here we have a crime far more serious than Nixon’s and people at large, like Rhett Butler, an American hero, agree: “Frankly, Charlotte, I don’t give a damn.” That is what we have become.
Keep the discussion going! The Bush administration will bury this story in waves of denial until it goes away. They are that good at making the public numb.
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