Sites Holmquist trys, and often fails, to go no more than a couple of days without visiting (some of which Holmquist regularly swipes links from without attribution)
In one of the memos, British Foreign Office political director Peter Ricketts openly asks whether the Bush administration had a clear and compelling military reason for war.
``U.S. scrambling to establish a link between Iraq and al-Qaida is so far frankly unconvincing,'' Ricketts says in the memo. ``For Iraq, `regime change' does not stack up. It sounds like a grudge between Bush and Saddam.''
The documents confirm Blair was genuinely concerned about Saddam's alleged 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 pre-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 typed copy of a March 22, 2002 memo obtained Thursday by The Associated Press and written to Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.
``But even the best survey of Iraq's WMD programs will not show much advance in recent years on the nuclear, missile or CW/BW (chemical or biological weapons) fronts: the programs are extremely worrying but have not, as far as we know, been stepped up.''
...The AP obtained copies of six of the memos [that have become known as the "Downing Street Memos"] (the other two have circulated 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.
I'm surprised there hasn't been more speculation of the identity of the person leaking these memos. As for everything else, about the only thing that I see surprising me is Team Bush being honest. posted by micah holmquist at 6/18/2005 02:10:00 PM
