Racial Profiling?

Slate's Fred Kaplan deconstructs the memo:

"When the scholars write the big tomes on this sordid saga, they'll want to base their findings on primary-source documents -- and here is one, flashing right before us. The Downing Street Memo will be a key footnote in the history books; it should have made front-page headlines in the daily broadsheets of history's first draft.

"In other respects, though, the memo doesn't make as strong a case against Bush as some have claimed. Read in conjunction with the six other British documents, the case weakens further. The memos do not show, for instance, that Bush simply invented the notion that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or that Saddam posed a threat to the region. In fact, the memos reveal quite clearly that the top leaders in the U.S. and British governments genuinely believed their claims.

"For instance, at one point during the July 23 meeting, the British ministers are discussing some of the risks of going to war. Saddam might 'use his WMD on Kuwait,' one official cautions. 'Or on Israel,' adds the defense secretary."

Salon's Joe Conason was the first major columnist to weigh in on May 6:

"Are Americans so jaded about the deceptions perpetrated by our own government to lead us into war in Iraq that we are no longer interested in fresh and damning evidence of those lies? Or are the editors and producers who oversee the American news industry simply too timid to report that proof on the evening broadcasts and front pages?"

Now Conason is charging a "press coverup."

Harry Shearer at HuffPost reacts to my Downing Street Memo piece yesterday:

"It's a sad litany of excuses Howard Kurtz pries out of the editors of mainstream newspapers as to why they gave the original Downing Street Memo such cursory, if any, attention. My favorite is Tim Russert's, who says he's learned that anything from the British press has to be vetted first. This is about a Times of London report, quoting, by name, the head of MI6, Richard Dearlove, issued during the height of the British election, at which point neither the Prime Minister nor any of his minions denies the authenticity of the published memo. Yeah, gotta do some heavy vetting.

"Why that and subsequent memos leaked out of Britain are, contrary to some of those editors' contentions, news is clear from the new batch published in the Los Angeles Times: in revisionist versions of the Iraq story, conservative opinionators now blame anti-war liberals for 'obsessing' about the issue of WMDs. But here is British foreign secretary Jack Straw in March of 2002:

" 'Colleagues know that Saddam and the Iraqi regime are bad,' he wrote. 'But we have a long way to go to convince them as to: The scale of the threat from Iraq, and why this has got worse recently; what distinguishes the Iraqi threat from that of e.g. Iran and North Korea so as to justify military action; the justification for any military action in terms of international law; and whether the consequences really would be a compliant, law-abiding replacement government.

" 'Regime change per se is no justification for military action; it could form part of the method of any strategy, but not a goal,' he said. 'Elimination of Iraq's WMD capacity has to be the goal.' "