Rich: Downing Street memo 'proved accurate'

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Sat, 29 Apr 2006 17:03:27 -0700

[Zepps_News] Rich: Downing Street memo 'proved accurate'

 

 

http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Frank_Rich_Downing_Street_memo_proved_0429.htm\

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Frank Rich: Downing Street memo 'proved accurate'

 

 

RAW STORY

Published: Saturday April 29, 2006

 

 

 

After a three month hiatus, Frank Rich returns to the New York Times

with a column slated for Sunday's edition which asserts that " [e]ach

week brings new confirmation " that the Downing Street memo leaked last

May has proved accurate, RAW STORY has learned.

 

Excerpts from Rich's column:

 

 

The Downing Street memo -- minutes of a Tony Blair meeting with senior

advisers in July 2002, nearly eight months before the war began -- has

proved as accurate as " Mission Accomplished " was fantasy. Each week

brings new confirmation that the White House, as the head of British

intelligence put it, was determined to fix " the intelligence and

facts " around its predetermined policy of going to war in Iraq. Today

Bush tries to pass the buck on the missing WMD to " faulty

intelligence, " but his alibi is springing leaks faster than the White

House and the CIA can clamp down on them. We now know the president

knew that the intelligence he cherry-picked was faulty -- and flogged

it anyway to sell us the war.

 

The latest evidence that Bush knew that " uranium from Africa " was no

slam-dunk when he brandished it in his 2003 State of the Union address

was uncovered by The Washington Post: The coordinating council for the

15 American intelligence agencies had already informed the White House

that the Niger story had no factual basis and should be dropped. Last

Sunday, " 60 Minutes " augmented this storyline and an earlier scoop by

Lisa Myers of NBC News by reporting that the White House had

deliberately ignored its most highly placed prewar informant, Saddam's

final foreign minister, Naji Sabri, once he sent the word that

Saddam's nuclear cupboard was bare.

 

" There was almost a concern we'd find something that would slow up the

war, " Tyler Drumheller, a 26-year CIA veteran and an on-camera source

for " 60 Minutes, " said when I interviewed him last week. Since

retiring from the CIA in the fall of 2004, Drumheller has played an

important role in revealing White House chicanery, including its dire

hawking of Saddam's mobile biological weapons labs, which turned out

to be fictitious.

 

Before Colin Powell's fateful U.N. presentation, Drumheller

conveyed vociferous warnings that the sole human source on these

nonexistent WMD labs, an Iraqi emigre known as Curveball, was mentally

unstable and a fabricator. " The real tragedy of this, " Drumheller

says, " is if they had let the weapons inspectors play out, we could

have had a Gulf War I-like coalition, which would have given us the

((300,000)) to 400,000 troops needed to secure the country after

defeating the Iraqi army. "

 

--

" Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government

talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court

order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about

chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order

before we do so "

-George W. Bush, April 20, 2004

 

Pay your taxes so the rich don't have to.

 

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