The Iraq Smoking Gun

Several weeks ago, The London Times published a leaked British memo that shows Blair and Bush met in July 2002 to plan for the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. The contents of the memo are quite disturbing, showing that the UK and U.S. agreed long before the invasion to "create" conditions to justify the invasion invasion. Today CNN reported on the memo and the White House refutation of it:

According to the minutes cited by the Times, a British official identified as "C" said that he had returned from a meeting in Washington and that "military action was now seen as inevitable" by U.S. officials.

"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, according to the newspaper.

Predictably, the U.S. press has been dragging its feet on publicizing this. But the Mainstream Media(MSM) are beginning to pick this up, after pressure from the blogosphere. On May 5,
Raw Story reported that John Conyers sent a letter signed by 88 members of Congress asking for Bush to explain the memo. The letter can be read here.

The LA Times finally picked up the story 11 days after it came out,
reporting growing U.S. indignation over the memo.

The fact that the White House took the time to deny the memo shows that they at least care about it mildly. And it is important to note that White House Press Spokesman Scott McLellan said he has not actually read the memo. It will be interesting to see if this story has legs. It is possible it will be the smoking gun on Iraq. But it is just as possible that it will simply get lost in the shuffle.