Downing Street Memogate: Iraq-war Inquiry Still Needed - Des Moines Register

Can you hear the ice cracking? The ice jam of US corporate media censorship is going to break. The Des Moines Register editorializes...

Iraq-war inquiry still needed By REGISTER EDITORIAL BOARD Is it the "smoking gun" that proves President Bush misled the nation into war? Not quite. But it should be enough for Congress finally to see its duty and launch a formal, independent inquiry. What's come to be called the Downing Street Memo seems to confirm what opponents of the Iraq invasion suspected all along: that the president decided early on to overthrow Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, then tailored the intelligence to fit the preconceived course of action. The memo caused an uproar in Britain just before the recent election but has received little attention in the US, except as a hot topic in the blogosphere. (It's going to get a LOT Hotter!)... The memo, published by the Times of London on May 1, consists of secret minutes of a British cabinet meeting in July 2002, eight months before the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq. The minutes include a report on talks in Washington: "Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." The memo said that "the case was thin" for military action in Iraq. Two investigations in the United States concluded that the Bush administration did not pressure intelligence agents to change their assessments about Iraq to fit the administration's point of view. But both reports - one by the Senate Intelligence Committee, one by a presidential commission - ducked the next question: whether the administration exaggerated or made selective use of the available intelligence to justify an invasion decision that had already been made. Perhaps it doesn't matter. The lack of uproar in this country over the Downing Street Memo suggests that the public is more interested in completing the mission successfully than in rehashing how it began. Indeed, that's where the focus should be. Still, it's important to establish the truth of how the United States came to invade a country that posed no threat to us. It's important for the historical record and for better decision-making in the future. Congress, which authorized the invasion at the president's request, has an oversight responsibility to inquire and to report to the nation.