John Kerry announced Thursday that he intends to present Congress with The Downing Street Memo, reported last month by the London Times.
The memo purports to include minutes from a July 2002 meeting with Tony
Blair, in which Blair allegedly said that President Bush's
administration "fixed" intelligence on Iraq in order to justify the
Iraqi war.
The Downing Street Memo is the leaked secret British document that
details the minutes of a 2002 meeting between top-level British and
American government officials. The memo states that George Bush "was
determined" to attack Iraq long before going to Congress with the
matter, and that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around
the policy."
So far neither government has disputed the accuracy of the memo.
The memo caused an uproar in Britain and made a significant impact
in the British national elections, but has recieved little attention in
American news.
The Boston Globe published an article by Ralph Nader,
Tuesday, in which Nader also called for President Bush's impeachment.
The story is being carried on Michael Moore's website and the
Democratic Underground.
Failed presidential candidate Kerry advised that he will begin the
presentation of his case for President Bush's impeachment to Congress,
on Monday.
Kerry said of the memo: "When I go back [to Washington] on Monday, I
am going to raise the issue. I think it's a stunning, unbelievably
simple and understandable statement of the truth and a profoundly
important document that raises stunning issues here at home. And it's
amazing to me the way it escaped major media discussion. It's not being
missed on the Internet, I can tell you that."
He questioned Americans' understanding of the war and the idea that
criticism equals disloyalty, saying, "Do you think that Americans if
they really understood it would feel that way knowing that on Election
Day, 77 percent of Americans who voted for Bush believed that weapons
of mass destruction had been found and 77 percent believe Saddam did
9/11? Is there a way for this to break through, ever?"
House Representative John Conyers has written to the President regarding the memo:
"...a debate has raged in the United States over the last year and
one half about whether the obviously flawed intelligence that falsely
stated that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction was a mere
'failure' or the result of intentional manipulation to reach
foreordained conclusions supporting the case for war. The memo appears
to close the case on that issue stating that in the United States the
intelligence and facts were being 'fixed' around the decision to go to
war."
There is a growing movement on the internet and in Congress for a
"Resolution of Inquiry" into issues surrounding the planning and
execution of the Iraq war, especially in regard to the Administration's
handling of intelligence.
John Dean, a key Watergate figure, wrote in a June 2003 column for a
legal website, that, "To put it bluntly, if Bush has taken Congress and
the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked...
Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence
data, if proven, could be a 'high crime' under the Constitution's
impeachment clause."
However, in practical terms impeachment in the U.S. Senate requires
a 2/3 majority for conviction, which is unlikely given that 55 out of
100 Senators are Republican.
When asked about the Downing Street Memo on May 23, White House
spokesman Scott McClellan said: "If anyone wants to know how the
intelligence was used by the administration, all they have to do is go
back and look at all the public comments over the course of the lead-up
to the war in Iraq, and that's all very public information. Everybody
who was there could see how we used that intelligence.
"And in terms of the intelligence, it was wrong, and we are taking
steps to correct that and make sure that in the future we have the best
possible intelligence, because it's critical in this post-September
11th age, that the executive branch has the best intelligence possible."
