screw my self-imposed ban, this is too important

Ok, I found this on a blog called captins quarters, I haven't even read the Downing Street Memos, (I plan to later today) and I will do some investigating of my own to see if there is any credibilty to this. You know FACTS (such a dirty word eh liberals?) to back up STATEMENTS. Smells like Rathergate II though...

http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/
June 19, 2005

The media and the Leftists have had a field day with the Downing Street memos that they claim imply that the Bush administration lied about the intelligence on WMD in order to justify the attack on Iraq. Despite the fact that none of the memos actually say that, none of them quote any officials or any documents, and that the text of the memos show that the British government worried about the deployment of WMD by Saddam against Coalition troops, Kuwait and/or Israel, the meme continues to survive.

Until tonight, however, no one questioned the authenticity of the documents provided by the Times of London. That has now changed, as Times reporter Michael Smith admitted that the memos he used are not originals, but retyped copies (via LGF and CQ reader Sapper):

The eight memos — all labeled "secret" or "confidential" — were first obtained by British reporter Michael Smith, who has written about them in The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Times.
Smith told AP he protected the identity of the source he had obtained the documents from by typing copies of them on plain paper and destroying the originals.

The AP obtained copies of six of the memos (the other two have circulated widely). A senior British official who reviewed the copies said their content appeared authentic. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of the secret nature of the material.

Readers of this site should recall this set of circumstances from last year. The Killian memos at the center of CBS' 60 Minutes Wednesday report on George Bush' National Guard service supposedly went through the same laundry service as the Downing Street Memos. Bill Burkett, once he'd been outed as the source of the now-disgraced Killian memos, claimed that a woman named Lucy Ramirez provided them to him -- but that he made copies and burned the originals to protect her identity or that of her source.

Why would a reporter do such a thing? While reporters need to protect their sources, at some point stories based on official documents will require authentication -- and as we have seen with the Killian memos, copies make that impossible. The AP gets a "senior British official" to assert that the content "appeared authentic", which only means that the content seems to match what he thinks he knows.

This, in fact, could very well be another case of "fake but accurate", where documents get created after the fact to support preconceived notions about what happened in the past. One fact certainly stands out -- Michael Smith cannot authenticate the copies. And absent that authentication, they lose their value as evidence of anything.

Besides, as the AP report makes clear, the two governments sincerely worried about the deployment of WMD despite the allegations of those who fixate on one sentence of one memo. The latest issue coming from the memos, according to its proponents, is the alleged statement by Blair that WMD programs had not progressed. However, it also points out why 9/11 made all the difference in the approach to Iraq:

The documents confirm Blair was genuinely concerned about Saddam's alleged weapons of mass destruction, but also indicate he was determined to go to war as America's top ally, even though his government thought a pre-emptive attack may be illegal under international law.

"The truth is that what has changed is not the pace of Saddam Hussein's WMD programs, but our tolerance of them post-11 September, " said a typed copy of a March 22, 2002 memo obtained Thursday by The Associated Press and written to Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.

"But even the best survey of Iraq's WMD programs will not show much advance in recent years on the nuclear, missile or CW/BW (chemical or biological weapons) fronts: the programs are extremely worrying but have not, as far as we know, been stepped up."

All of the Western nations had intelligence that matched with the Bush/Blair determination that Saddam had not disposed of his WMD stocks. Prior to 9/11, the Western approach of waiting Saddam out appeared adequate. After 9/11, the existence of those WMD stocks clearly was intolerable, given Saddam's involvement with terrorist groups in the past -- including hosting an al-Qaeda convention, of sorts, in 1999.

Even if these memos could be authenticated, they're still meaningless. They could only excite the kind of idiots that would hold mock impeachment hearings with four witnesses and no authority whatsoever.