The story gets weirder...

Ok before people go on partisan attacks on me, I am not trying to prove the downing street memos false, I am trying to verify if they are legit in teh first place (remember rathergate and the bloggers that exposed it?). Once again, Captain Ed

Downing Street Memos were Destroyed

The authentic copies, if they existed, were retyed and then destroyed by Times Reporter Michael Smith. The AP reports,

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.

Captain Ed comments:
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.

Once again, the story gets more and more unusual. I smell smoke but don't see any fire yet but things are getting warm...