Blair, Bush Deny Downing Street Memo

Someone finally had the guts to ask the big question, and both Bush and Blair denied it.

The Boston Globe reports:

Both leaders denied that the July 23 memo, written as a description of a meeting between Britain's top intelligence official and members of the Bush administration, accurately reflected events.

"The facts were not being fixed in any shape or form at all," responded Blair, who noted the memo was written before the United States and Britain went to the UN saying Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and seeking support for action against him.

"There's nothing farther from the truth," Bush said, adding that that military force was "our last option."


This denial will be taken by some as proof positive that the "smoking gun" is a damp squib, by others that the statements of the two leaders are in the same class as "I did not have sex with that woman."

However, A look at the full transcript of what the two leaders said is instructive.

Both admit the UK meeting did in fact take place and Blair admits the memorandum is authentic when he says "And let me remind you that that memorandum was written before we then went to the United Nations." This leaves open the possibility that, no matter what was later done, at the time of the Memo's writing it was an accurate account of what was going on. Neither actually categorically denies this. In which case, both leader's have deliberately misled their people.

The next step, given that Blair has not said the Memo is a forgery, is to call Sir Richard Dearlove, the chief of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, to testify under oath either in the UK or in front of the U.S. Senate.

(You can monitor for yourself the latest stories on the Downing Street Memo at News Now. It refreshes every few minutes.)

postscript

USA Today has a pretty weaselly reason it hadn't covered the story until Bush and Blair denied it:

USA TODAY chose not to publish anything about the memo before today for several reasons, says Jim Cox, the newspaper's senior assignment editor for foreign news. "We could not obtain the memo or a copy of it from a reliable source," Cox says. "There was no explicit confirmation of its authenticity from (Blair's office). And it was disclosed four days before the British elections, raising concerns about the timing."

The Memo has been on the Times of London's website since word one. The Times is a staunchly conservative newspaper. What more reliable source could there be?

USA Today also reports, in an astoundingly bad piece of journalism:

Robin Niblett of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, says it would be easy for Americans to misunderstand the reference to intelligence being "fixed around" Iraq policy. " ‘Fixed around' in British English means ‘bolted on' rather than altered to fit the policy," he says.

Is this the best they can do - parrot spin from a rightwing mouthpiece? Maybe they should have asked a Brit. I am one, and I can tell the USA Today and Mr Niblett that, in fact, the term "fixed around" means exactly what it sounds like - warped to fit - on either side of the pond.

That will be your "liberal media" then.