By the way

If you spend most of your news viewing watching FOX news...or CNN...or MSNBC...or read the New York Times...or the Washington Post—you probably haven’t heard much about the Downing Street Memo or that Congressman John Conyers and 88 other Congress critters have asked the American people to join them in demanding that the President respond to a letter that they sent him on May 5 requesting that he answer questions regarding the Downing Street Memo.

What is the Downing Street Memo, you ask?

The Downing Street “Memo” is actually a document containing meeting minutes transcribed during the British Prime Minister’s meeting on July 23, 2002—a full eight months PRIOR to the invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003. The Times of London printed the text of this document on Sunday, May 1, 2005, but to date US media coverage has been limited. This site is intended to act as a resource for anyone who wants to understand the facts revealed in this document.

The contents of the memo are shocking. The minutes detail how our government did not believe Iraq was a greater threat than other nations; how intelligence was “fixed” to sell the case for war to the American public; and how the Bush Administration’s public assurances of “war as a last resort” were at odds with their privately stated intentions.

When asked, British officials “did not dispute the document’s authenticity.” and a senior American official has described it as “absolutely accurate.” Yet the Bush administration continues to simultaneously sidestep the issue while attempting to cast doubt on the memo’s authenticity.

Why should you care, you wonder? Ask yourself if you’d care a little more if you were the parent or child of one of the nearly 1700 service members who have been killed in Iraq. Or the parent or child of one of the more than 12,000 service members who have been grievously injured in Iraq. Or because this is not the way things are supposed to be done in a democratic government with rules that prohibit such indecent lies.

We have a right to be pissed off about it and if we don’t speak up and do something about it, it will not stop. My child and your child are most certainly at risk of becoming another statistic if we permit this to continue. In case you forgot, we are the government. They, who believe themselves to be the government, are there to serve us. They are accountable to us. We and they should never forget that. Because, if we do forget that, then we are no longer America.