www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/004746.php
Main June 19, 2005 Did Lucy Ramirez Find The Downing Street Memos? The media and the Leftists have had a field day with the Downing Street m emos that they claim imply that the Bush administration lied about the i ntelligence on WMD in order to justify the attack on Iraq. Despite the f act that none of the memos actually say that, none of them quote any off icials or any documents, and that the text of the memos show that the Br itish government worried about the deployment of WMD by Saddam against C oalition troops, Kuwait and/or Israel, the meme continues to survive. Until tonight, however, no one questioned the authenticity of the documen ts provided by the Times of London.
LGF and CQ reader Sapper): The eight memos all labeled "secret" or "confidential" were first obtain ed 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 th e 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 circulate d 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 ye ar. 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.
made c opies and burned the originals to protect her identity or that of her so urce. While reporters need to protect the ir sources, at some point stories based on official documents will requi re 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", wh ere documents get created after the fact to support preconceived notions about what happened in the past. One fact certainly stands out -- Micha el 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 worr ied about the deployment of WMD despite the allegations of those who fix ate 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 alleg ed 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 p re-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 type d copy of a March 22, 2002 memo obtained Thursday by The Associated Pre ss and written to Foreign Secretary Jack Straw. "But even the best survey of Iraq's WMD programs will not show much adva nce in recent years on the nuclear, missile or CW/BW (chemical or biolo gical 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/Bl air determination that Saddam had not disposed of his WMD stocks. Prior to 9/11, the Western approach of waiting Saddam out appeared adequate.
Rawstory: I first photocopied them to ensure they were on our paper and returned t he originals, which were on government paper and therefore government p roperty, to the source, he added.
It was these photocopies that I worked on, destroying them shortly befor e we went to press on Sept 17, 2004, he added. Before we destroyed them the legal desk secretary typed the text up on an old fashioned typewri ter. Why not just retype them on a computer, if you've already decided not to work from the originals? It looks like an attempt to fake people into believing that the documents produced by Smith were the originals. UPDATE III: Despite what Truck says in the comments, a lack of protest fr om Downing Street after being asked to authenticate retyped copies of al leged minutes of secret meetings does NOT constitute verification. The s ame exact argument came up with the Killian memos in Rathergate and the Newsweek Qu'ran-flushing report last month. In both cases, the documents or sources turned out to be fakes. It's the reporters' job to provide v erification, not simply a demurral by officials to opine on their authen ticity. If that isn't obvious, then centuries of evidentiary procedure i n American and English common law have gone for naught, as well as tradi tions of journalistic responsibility and professionalism. After all, thi s argument just means that reporters can type out anything they like and the burden of proof shifts from the accuser to the accused in proving t hem false -- hardly the process endorsed in libel and slander cases in t he US, at least.
port side of the blogosphere seems a bit unhappy to he ar that the DSM are fakes, but I'm not making this up. The reporter hims elf says that he retyped the memos on an old-style manual typewriter and destroyed either the originals (AP) or working copies from which he wor ked (Rawstory). In effect, he created mock-ups -- and that means the mem os provided by the Times in PDF format are fakes.
Power Line says that the memos would make more ridiculous cla ims if they were fakes. Giving Smith the full benefit of the doubt and assuming the orig inals really exist and that he transcribed them perfectly, they're fakes but the information could, indeed, be accurate. The problem is that we can't authenticate them, and a series of demurrals from Tony Blair and o ther British officials don't amount to authentication, either. It doesn' t help that Smith went to such weird lengths -- such as the manual typew riter and artificially aging the appearance through multiple copying -- to produce the information. The Killian memos were both fakes and frauds, as even CBS's expert stated in their final report, although laughingly Kevin's commentors continue to argue that they're neither. We know for certain the DSMs are fakes -- and because of that, we can't help but assume the DSMs are fraudulent a bsent positive authentication.
from Blogs for Bush Looks like the CBS standard applies to the Downing Street Memos: The eigh t memos all labeled secret or confidential were first obtained by Britis h reporter Michael Smith, who has written about them in The Daily Telegr aph and The...
Deep Throat and the role of sources from Windmills on the hill Which of course raises the sorts of issues explored by Epstein eg, Concea ling such information from the public amounts to a deliberate disguising of the event itself, since such a process hides all the interests that selected, shaped and possibly dis...
Furious from Hard Starboard UPDATE 6/18: Now it turns out that the so-called "Downing Street Memos" a round which Conyers & Co. centered their mock "inquiry" aren't the origi nals, but retyped copies: The eight memos all labeled "secret" or "con fidential" were ...
The Downing Street Memo Follies from The Right Place You've just got to LOVE the Moonbats who have taken over the Democrat Par ty! First, a group of partisan nut-jobs bow to pressure from their extre mist tin-foil headgear base and decide to hold make-pretend impeachment hearings in the basement of the ...
from The Strata-Sphere The stunning confession by the UK reporter who has those vague and unsurp rising Downing Street memos that he typed them from the originals, and t hen destroyed the originals, is too much. Smith told AP he protected the identity of the source he had ...
Newsweek and the facts (Copy that Memo) from Macmind - Conservativ e...
|
http://csua.com/feed/