The following is an email I wrote to my colleagues last week. The corporate media has yet to address the memo in a manner befitting its importance.
Dear Friends,
You are receiving this email because I respect you and want to let you know about a very important matter. Several weeks ago a British memo was leaked to the London Times. This document, now widely known as the "Downing Street Memo", was comprised of the minutes of a meeting between Britain's Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and his advisors in the summer of 2002. I have attached this document in PDF format for your perusal. The text details the coordination between the US and UK for a war in Iraq that had not at that point been approved by our Congress. The following is a paragraph from the memo, with an interesting part bolded:
C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.
To me, and a lot of other people, "facts being fixed" implies constructing false proofs to support false claims, such as the one about Iraq having WMD that could threaten our country. As I hope you all know, no WMD were ever found in Iraq.
So far, no one in the British government has disputed the authenticity of this memo. Yet I haven't seen any mention of it in the media, except hidden on later pages of the newspaper. Many people don't read newspapers anymore because they don't have the time or inclination. I still read the newspaper, but I don't watch TV news because I have found that I get accurate information far more quickly by scanning a few select websites and listening to KPFA (94.1 FM) and Air America Radio (960 AM in the Bay Area). I have linked to some worthy sources on my website.
I believe that the corporate domination of the media is harming our ability to function as an informed democracy. The only information that is allowed to be published must be approved and in line with what the corporate heads want. Right now, all the media is controlled by a handful of powerful entities, and they are profiting from the war and occupation in Iraq and future wars we will almost certainly enter with the "leadership" of this administration.
How can a populace remain informed when the information is skewed? They can't, and haven't been. For a long time, polls were showing that Americans linked 9/11 with Saddam Hussein, which, as I hope you all know, he wasn't. Where could they be getting such an idea? The answer is that our government is constantly seeding the willing media with disinformation and propaganda. This is not unlike the experience of citizens in post-WWI Germany, who were constantly barraged with the message that Jews were the cause of their troubles.
Folks, we have a problem. The longer our comrades stay misinformed, the more tragedy we will induce. Besides the 1600 dead US soldiers (whose coffins the Pentagon forbids us to photograph), there are over 100,000 dead Iraqis, most of whom were innocent bystanders. This number did not come out of my ass - a study by Johns Hopkins University researchers confirming this toll was published in The Lancet, a well-respected British medical journal. This is like having our eye plucked, and then lying about who did it so we can pluck the eye of the guy we don't like.
There is nothing remotely Christian about President Bush. He has more in common with an Anti-Christ. How can anyone call themselves pro-life while killing so many? It is time to expose the hypocrisy and demand an impeachment. Everyone seems paralyzed by fear, so we must be the ones to break free and demand the truth. It's laughable that they tried to get rid of arguably the best president because of oral sex, only to replace him with the worst president, a mass murderer.
This administration has squandered our wealth, our reputation, and most importantly, any shred of morality that this nation once possessed. If that's not impeachable, then maybe we should rewrite the Constitution, because I don't want to be a member of such a lowly state. I urge you to sign up on Representative John Conyer's letter to the "President" demanding the truth. We need to speak the truth in every venue; we need to fight for the soul of this nation. Don't be afraid.
Patriotically Yours,
Aigeanta