No Swarm Here

Did you see the London Sunday Times story of a leaked Downing Street memo from July 2002 detailing the Blair government’s agreement with the Bush administration to invade Iraq and depose Saddam before there was any public discussion in that country or this one? Although it was too early for a stated justification for the invasion--the press wasn’t talking WMDs yet, and Powell didn’t go to the UN until February 2003--they were working on it. The memo states, “The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

Everybody’s talking about this: James Wolcott, Daily Kos (writing in The Guardian), Kevin Drum, Atrios. Everybody, that is, except the liberal media. I didn’t do an exhaustive search, but I couldn’t find the story on the home pages of CNN, MSNBC, ABC News, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, or USA Today. According to Raw Story, Rep. John Conyers is gathering signatures for a letter to the President asking for an investigation. In an accompanying statement, Conyers criticized the media: "Unfortunately, the mainstream media in the United States was too busy with wall-to-wall coverage of a 'runaway bride' to cover a bombshell report out of the British newspapers. . . . This should not be allowed to fall down the memory hole during wall-to-wall coverage of the Michael Jackson trial and a runaway bride."