SMOKING MEMO
Two from ZNet

I've not written about the recent revelation of a British document that very clearly shows that the Bush administration was hell-bent on invading Iraq, whether it had WMDs or not, because it already seemed pretty obvious. However, it is becoming pretty clear that this new piece of evidence packs more of a punch than anything I've seen before. So here are a couple of essays explaining what's on the line here.

First, a little something by my favorite American expatriate journalist, Greg Palast:

Impeachment Time: "Facts Were Fixed."

The top-level government memo marked "SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL," dated eight months before Bush sent us into Iraq, following a closed meeting with the President, reads, "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."

Read that again: "The intelligence and facts were being fixed...."

For years, after each damning report on BBC TV, viewers inevitably ask me, "Isn't this grounds for impeachment?" -- vote rigging, a blind eye to terror and the bin Ladens before 9-11, and so on. Evil, stupidity and self-dealing are shameful but not impeachable. What's needed is a "high crime or misdemeanor."

And if this ain't it, nothing is.

The memo, uncovered this week by the Times, goes on to describe an elaborate plan by George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair to hoodwink the planet into supporting an attack on Iraq knowing full well the evidence for war was a phony.

Click here for the rest.

And from former CIA analyst Ray McGovern:

Proof Bush Fixed The Facts

Actually, politicization is far too mild a word for what happened. The intelligence was not simply mistaken; it was manufactured, with the president of the United States awarding foreman George Tenet the Medal of Freedom for his role in helping supervise the deceit. The British documents make clear that this was not a mere case of "leaning forward" in analyzing the intelligence, but rather mass deception - an order of magnitude more serious. No other conclusion is now possible.

Small wonder, then, to learn from CIA insiders like former case officer Lindsay Moran that Tenet's malleable managers told their minions, "Let's face it. The president wants us to go to war, and our job is to give him a reason to do it."

Click here for the rest.

Probably nothing will come of this. In the Palast article, he notes how the US press seems to be ignoring, in typical form, the importance of this document. However, the British press is all over it, and there's a good chance that Labour is going to vote Blair back to his home district. A small victory, I guess.

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