I’m not going to start hootin and backslappin yet but perhaps the concerted effort by some resistors to stay on message about the Downing Street Memo appears to be yielding dividends. Let’s hope that it ain’t a one trick pony. That is that there is some more messages to stay on, coming.
Two steps forward, one backwards It’s hard to ignore that the most passionate and vociferous threads this week at MoA have been the usual sort of self flagellation the left goes thru ie debating on whether or not the DNC chair has lost it. Please don’t see this as an reason to start the debate agin cause most know we’re better at debating with each other than we are at tackling “the other mob”.
The MSM being what it is ie liking to change the ‘story’ regularly but if possible effortlessly, by taking a ‘new’ look at an old story. That way journos don’t have to relearn new place names etc, perhaps the next topic to stay ‘on message’ about is the humilation and torture of humans at the gulags. New and previously unseen in the US, pictures are apparently available so it may be time to drag them out and give them a ‘spin’. Similarly there are lots of reports whose findings conflict with the sort of BS Rumsfield was spouting at the time the story broke why not get them going?
My sense of the state of the US psyche is a cynicism that hasn’t been apparent since the 1920’s and 30’s. People will hear these messages. They may not acknowledge it immediately but they will take stuff on board now they wouldn’t have considered in bygone days.
Who knows regurgitate/revisit enough and some careerist journo somewhere will short circuit the system and start digging up stuff for him/herself. Wouldn’t that be a change.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Jun 12 2005 23:04 utc | 3

Well it look like MoA was busy this weekend. The Howard dean thread is great. But on to other things. Jim S., I must agree wholeheartedly that Bushie is still a frat boy. The (fake) Texan blueblood is divorced from reality, but the Downing Street memo and the other news surrounding finally brings to mind my favorite word right now. Impeachment. It may not happen until after 2006 and the dems take congress, but the last two years of Bushie squirming will be a sight I have only just begun to dream of.
If the rethugs weren’t such political hacks they would do him in. But loyalty requires them to go down with their fearless leader. A few rats are jumping, but not in mass like I would like to see. When that happens and the disarray hits, it will be a pleasurable sight.
Froma Harrops column today was good. Someone with better computer skills that I should link it. Shes through Creators Syndicate.

Posted by: jdp | Jun 13 2005 1:17 utc | 5

Billmon,
What’s interesting to me about all these leaked documents is that they all point to a single obsession. They wanted to make an illegal act (regime change) appear as legal. All of the pre-war manoevering was directed towards that end. The point man on this is Lord Peter Goldsmith, the Attorney General.
You can see in these memos that his position was consistent and steadfast, just as Elizabeth Wilmshurst claimed. Goldsmith’s position in the July 2002 meeting is exactly the same as in his written opinion of March 7 2003. Regime change is illegal.
Yet on 17 March 2003 he stood up in the Lords and gave a statement that the war was lawful.
So what happened?
On 13 March he went to Downing Street to meet (Lord) Charlie Falconer and (Baroness) Sally Morgan. Falconer and Morgan have both been vested with royal prerogative powers, which neans they are empowered to speak for the Queen.
Following that meeting it was Falconer and Morgan that drafted Goldsmith’s revised “opinion” stating that war was lawful.
Suppose Falconer and Morgan told Goldsmith that his (7 March) opinion was displeasing to Her Majesty. Under thw Treason Felony Act the issuing of such an opinion IS ILLEGAL. Goldsmith was trapped. Once the revision had been announced he had no alternative but to go along.
Also of interest is that Sally Morgan was actually there for the “memogate” meeting of July 23.
The Treason Felony Act is at the start of the thread.
Now I know everyone wants to roll their eyes when I talk about the Windsors. But I assure you I have been in the belly of this beast (just like de Gaulle), and I understand modern capitalism (Harvard B School ’81 and then straight on to Bain & Co)
Billmon, the United States is behaving like the British Empire of old because it IS the British Empire.

Posted by: John | Jun 13 2005 2:23 utc | 7

Who cares about the details of the undulations that Brits went through? No one!! This crap is not relevant. They did what they were told to do. Team Blair delivered to Team America at great cost to itself, its government, its party and its nation. It raised meaningful objections, brought forward relevant advice and when it fell on deaf ears permitted itself to be bulldozed by kool-aid drinking hubris. “Maybe it would work!” they thought. “You never know with the yanks. Maybe they really see something we don’t.” What they took to be conviction was really the fervor resulting from the excessively strict happy pill regimes of the fantasy imperialists.
What is relevant is that Team Bush decided on the a war out of “thin air”; much as the current social security privitization appeared, forced our closest ally along, lied to the population of 2 sovereign nations, waged a holy war within our intelligence agencies doing serious harm to them, to manufacture support for these lies, and then had no plan to close the deal after they’d shoved it down the throat of the world. Team Bush demanded, cajoled, and forced this ridiculous overplay, managed it poorly, and now have run out of options. They gambled, quite stupidly, arrogantly against the advice and concerns of our closests ally, and our most capabale advisors and have screwed up, much as predicted. The line of credit has run out. The bill has come due and Team Bush must pay it.

Posted by: patience | Jun 13 2005 3:42 utc | 9

I’d like to know who’s leaking the Downing Street memoranda (for there must be more than one), and since I don’t happen to know the answer, I’ll take the liberty of offering a hypothesis that someone should be able to shoot down, and if they do, then we might, by a process of elimination, draw just a little closer to figuring the whole thing out. It’s my hypothesis, then, that Blair himself has leaked the memoranda. And indeed he stands to gain from this, for they show (a.) that he had no choice but to sign on, (b.) that he and his team were not fools–that they knew just how bad the Americans really were; and (c.), that they were prepared to play the only cards they had, and to play them rather wickedly.

Posted by: alabama | Jun 13 2005 4:08 utc | 11

It is interesting to note Mr. Blair’s pained facial expressions whenever he and Bush the Younger hold any sort of joint press conference. There’s always good ol’ boy pap spewing from behind one podium, and a deer in the headlights behind the other. It’s always looked to me like one of those exercises in high school debate clubs where Tony’s grade is hanging in the balance by how convincingly he can argue a patently ludicrous position that he is only just hearing for the first time, while silently cursing his debate partner for not having done his homework.

Posted by: Monolycus | Jun 13 2005 4:34 utc | 13

…while silently cursing his debate partner for not having done his homework.

Not done his homework, me like that! I you have always gotten everything you ever pointed at, you don’t do homework! As for the look on Blair’s face, it’s more like he’s trying to keep from puking on the stuff he has to swallow from Bush.
Is Blair the source of the leak? Not directly of course, and maybe a bit like fiction — but then the last four years have had a quality of surreal, if not fiction.
“The Gulag of our times…” was mentioned above. IMO, the TP on this is to point out that people are arbitrarily being disappeared to places where they are tortured and that Gitmo is but the tip of the achepegalo — THAT is what makes it a “gulag” (sorry, I think I’m starting to preach to the choir, as they say in Danish)

Posted by: BarfHead | Jun 13 2005 4:57 utc | 15

DickD (11:01pm)
You will find no reference to the Treason Felony Act. It is the dirty secret they want to remain secret, to the extent that they will NOT write the constitution down on paper.
The context that hit me between the eyes was the challenge by the Guardian which brought the matter to court. In general terms this law itself is used to prevent public knowledge of this law (a closed loop).
If you follow the second link you will find the actual hearing, which is most peculiar. The Attorney General does not respond to the Guardian; rather one of the Law Lords informs us of what he WOULD have said. So the Crown did not plead at all!
You will also find that one Law Lord was Hutton, the man whose name will forever be associated with the whitewash that was the Hutton Inquiry into the death of David Kelly.
Link
Link
The central point is that the people are not sovereign. The Queen is Sovereign (see the TFA above). The Queen herself is the “Fount of all justice”. And that is why the Burrell trial was abandoned when he revealed his intent to call the Queen as a witness.
That is the legal position. So when the legal system goes haywire (eg the Goldsmith “opinion”) the Crown is very definitely a potential source of interference.

Posted by: John | Jun 13 2005 10:16 utc | 17

On 13 March he went to Downing Street to meet (Lord) Charlie Falconer and (Baroness) Sally Morgan. Falconer and Morgan have both been vested with royal prerogative powers, which neans they are empowered to speak for the Queen.
Following that meeting it was Falconer and Morgan that drafted Goldsmith’s revised “opinion” stating that war was lawful.
Well then, to quote the Sex Pistols: Fuck the queen. (Although I suspect under the circumstances fuck Tony Blair might be more appropriate. Crown-in-Parliament, etc.)

Posted by: Billmon | Jun 13 2005 12:31 utc | 19

Link
Things ARE moving. Here we have together Elizabeth Wilmshurst (who resigned over the war), Lord Steyn (a Law Lord with balls) and Luzius Wildhaber, another of my correspondents.
They know the score.

Posted by: John | Jun 13 2005 12:47 utc | 21

Thanks for that update, Debs is dead (@ 3:00 AM), which certainly makes the more sense. I continue to wonder about the writing of a memo that carefully differentiates American folly from British impotence. Doesn’t this have a slightly self-serving, self-protective quality about it? If Blair and Bush have been revelling in a folie à deux (and that’s how we’ve seen it over here), then some of Blair’s less-enchanted colleagues (Straw and Dearlove, shall we say), if seeking to shield themselves from blame for the impending disaster, could only have done so by spelling out those British and American “differences” in a dated memo. Or at least a pro-Labour press could play it that way….

Posted by: alabama | Jun 13 2005 14:16 utc | 23

Well then, John, let’s call it a “dated” set of minutes. Wouldn’t it be the case that these folks might have been making points at the meeting with those very minutes in mind–i.e. with the expectation that they would eventually circulate, and with no possibility of their authenticity being denied? There’s always an opportunity to be had, and I really believe that Blair and his friends are, and always would have been, concerned with anticipating any eventuality, and with turning something like this to their advantage.

Posted by: alabama | Jun 13 2005 16:57 utc | 25

alabama,
Cynic that I am, I can’t credit them with that much foresight.
What IS interesting is the way they stopped taking formal minutes at these meetings. One of the criticisms made by the Butler Inquiry was about Blair’s adoption of a “sofa style” of government. Informal meetings with no written record. At least that is what we are told. Of course they keep minutes. I should imagine everything said in Downing St. is recorded. They probably stopped CIRCULATING notes.
Now what might cause a change like that? Maybe some of the minutes went walkabout, no one knows where. Perhaps they have known about these missing minutes for some time. That would certainly explain why they were able to react so well to a devastating exposure.
Let’s face it. The standard defence in politics is “I didn’t know” or, in the US, “I was out of the loop”. That line is no longer available ti the British Establishment.
Maybe I should write something on Tony Blair’s background, which is quite revealing.

Posted by: John | Jun 13 2005 19:22 utc | 27

Thank you, rapt.
Blair comes from a Scottish Tory family of lawyers.
He went to school at Fettes – an upscale Philips Academy. The school has strong liks to the Edinburgh Establishment and the Speculative Society (a den of Masonry of which Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh is a member).
After Fettes he went to Oxford (St Johns) and studied law. He showed no interest whatsoever in politics.
During his final year he was recruited into the chambers of Derry Irvine, a Scottish lawyer (who had just taken over from Sir Morris Finer, dead at 57 just before he completed a Royal Commission on the press).
AFTER GRADUATION FROM OXFORD BLAIR JOINED THE LABOUR PARTY.
While training with Irvine Blair acquired a working class upwardly mobile Irish wife from Liverpool.
Cherie also trained with Irvine. She later specialised in working for local councils AGAINST THEIR LOWEST PAID WORKERS.
Despite being Scottish and under the age of thirty, Blair was selected to be the Labour candidate for Sedgefield. THE SAFEST LABOUR SEAT IN ENGLAND.
Blair’s predecessor John Smith died a sudden death in 1994.
On the day Mr Blair became prime minister his wife was made a Queens Counsel. QCs have the right to deputise as a High Court judge – that’s real power.
The British people are unable to rid themselves of Mr Blair, whatever happens. He is being protected.

Posted by: John | Jun 13 2005 20:43 utc | 29

alabama,
Well blow me down! As if what you said hasn’t JUST HAPPENED. Jack Straw is getting his retaliation in first.
Bernhard has the link to the Raw Story over on the open thread.

Posted by: John | Jun 13 2005 22:07 utc | 31

John, I need some help here. I’ve noticed that the Guardian isn’t publishing much about the DSM, and neither is the Independent , while Murdoch’s Times is playing the story hard and well. Allowing, as you say, that the Guardian has had the material since November, then we’d have to suppose that they’ve kept it out of circulation to protect Blair, and that the Times is publishing it merely to hurt him (as they certainly did at election time). Which puts the liberal press in an odd position: it can’t plead ignorance, and can’t point to the DSM as a particularly lurid symptom of Bush’s violence and stupidty. A shame if so, since getting things out in the open can only help the just cause. The Guardian should be joining the Times in doing this, and certainly the Times is hurting Bush more than Blair–hurting him in particular with Republicans.

Posted by: alabama | Jun 14 2005 1:41 utc | 33