The Downing Street Memo and Bush Lies To Blair

As the Right flails about in an attempt to keep cheerleading for Bush, they have, as expected, decided that the Downing Street Memo story is a fabrication of the liberal media.

The trouble is, there could be nothing further from the truth. The original reporter is Michael Smith of the London Times, a newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch (go on, tell me Fox News and the Weekly Standard are part of the great liberal media!). He only joined the Times in the Spring and previously worked as senior defence and espionage reporter for the UK's Telegraph, another avowedly conservative paper.

Mr Smith is well qualified to report on this story. He was an intelligence operative for the British Army and has reported from behind enemy lines, when for instance he joined the Kosovo Liberation Army in Croatia to report on their fight against the Yugoslavian government. Further, he is the author of several well received books on espionage history. No doubt, it is his experience in these matters that led to his being selected by his anonymous source, a British "Deep Throat" who must be highly placed in the UK's intelligence community.

So Michael Smith is no fan of the Left. He even admits to voting Conservative his whole life.

Today, the Washington Post has a transcript of an online chat with Smith, which is a must-read for those who truly want to get to the truth of the Downing Street Memo. In it, Smith ridicules (as I have) the notion that "fixing the intelligence" means anything other than it does as well as having something to say about the nature of Sir Richard Dearlove's sources in Washington and the DSM being "old news":

There are number of people asking about fixed and its meaning. This is a real joke. I do not know anyone in the UK who took it to mean anything other than fixed as in fixed a race, fixed an election, fixed the intelligence. If you fix something, you make it the way you want it. The intelligence was fixed and as for the reports that said this was one British official. Pleeeaaassee! This was the head of MI6. How much authority do you want the man to have? He has just been to Washington, he has just talked to George Tenet. He said the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. That translates in clearer terms as the intelligence was being cooked to match what the administration wanted it to say to justify invading Iraq. Fixed means the same here as it does there. More leaks? I do hope so and the more Blair and Bush lie to try to get themselves off the hook the more likely it is that we will get more leaks.

and:

Edinburgh, U.K.: What do you think of the argument reported in Howard Kurtz's article that Sir Richard Dearlove may have came to his conclusion by reading the newspapers?
Michael Smith: This is the head of British intelligence, a man who has just had conversations with America's most senior intelligence and national security figures. He is reporting back at the highest level, to what is effectively a war cabinet and as I know to my own cost has no great regard for newspapers. He has made his own judgment, no-one better qualified to tell that meeting what was happening. No shadow of a doubt.
[Then later]
This is the documentary evidence from within the U.K. equivalent of an NSC meeting. It is one thing saying well The Post wrote this back then from our sources, but it is a very different thing to have the documents from the heart of government that prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Smith says that the Times (read Murdoch) will not let this go and that other revelations from his mysterious source are to be expected.

And for those who believe that this administration wouldn't lie about something so important, here's a report from the Independent newspaper. It seems that the Bush administration were quite happy to lie to the Blair government and their own populace about US use of napalm in Iraq.

Mr Ingram [Defence Minister] admitted to the Labour MP Harry Cohen in a private letter obtained by The Independent that he had inadvertently misled Parliament because he had been misinformed by the US. "The US confirmed to my officials that they had not used MK77s in Iraq at any time and this was the basis of my response to you," he told Mr Cohen. "I regret to say that I have since discovered that this is not the case and must now correct the position."
...
The confirmation that US officials misled British ministers led to new questions last night about the value of the latest assurances by the US. Mr Cohen said there were rumours that the firebombs were used in the US assault on the insurgent stronghold in Fallujah last year, claims denied by the US. He is tabling more questions seeking assurances that the weapons were not used against civilians.

One has to wonder. If the Bush administration will lie to their closest ally about weapons the Geneva Convention says are "inhumane" then what won't they lie about?