Downing Street Memo to get moment at the Capitol

Stay tuned because there are exciting hearings in Washington, breaking down the fake case for war... John Conyers and a host of others have scheduled minority hearings, because of course the Republicans don't want to talk about this. More later......

Democracy Now: The Downing Street Memo Comes To Washington; Conyers Blasts "Deafening Sound of Silence":

Tomorrow in Washington, Congressmember John Conyers of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, will convene a public hearing on the so-called Downing Street Memo and other newly released documents that Conyers says show the administration's "efforts to cook the books on pre-war intelligence." Conyers also says that he plans to raise new documents that back up the accuracy of the Downing Streets memo, which is actually the classified minutes of a July 2002 meeting of Tony Blair and his senior advisers.

The minutes, which were published May 1 by the Sunday Times of London, paint a picture of an administration that had already committed to attacking Iraq, was manipulating intelligence and had already begun intense bombing of Iraq to prepare for the ground invasion. This was almost a year before the actual invasion officially began. The minutes are from a July 23, 2002 briefing of Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top national security advisers by British intelligence chief Richard Dearlove. The minutes contain an account of Dearlove's report that President George W. Bush had decided to bring about "regime change" in Iraq by military action; that the attack would be "justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD" (weapons of mass destruction); and that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

Meanwhile, this past weekend, The Sunday Times of London had another expose, showing that British cabinet members were warned that the UK was committed to taking part in a US-led invasion of Iraq and they had no choice but to find a way of making it legal. The memo was written in advance of the Downing Street meeting that produced the Downing Street Minutes.

[Former top CIA officer] RAY McGOVERN: Well, Amy, we Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity had been saying for three years that the intelligence and the facts were being fixed to support an unnecessary war. We never in our wildest dreams expected to have documentary proof of that under a SECRET label: “SECRET: U.K. EYES ONLY” in a most sensitive document reserved just for cabinet officials in the Blair government. And so, what we have now is documentary proof that, as that sentence reads, the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.

The Washington Post this morning is still at it. They quote that sentence, and they say, “Well, this is vague, but intriguing.” Well, there's nothing vague about that at all, and it's not at all intriguing. It's highly depressing. Now, we veteran professionals, we professionals that toil long and hard in the intelligence arena are outraged at the corruption of our profession, but we are even more outraged by the constitutional implications here because as Congressman Conyers has just pointed out, we have here a very clear case that the Executive usurped the prerogatives of Congress of the American people and deceived it into permitting, authorizing an unauthorizeable war.

Huzzah! I wonder if the TV networks will cover all this up tomorrow, or if it's just gotten too embarrassing to keep stepping around.