DEEP IRAQ THROAT
"Secret - Strictly Personal" for the
Prime Minister
Half
of Americans now believe Bush purposefully lied to bring
about the Iraq invasion/occupation.
57%
believe the Iraq War was 'Not Worth It'. And 42% believe if
the President lied about the war he should be impeached.
MER - MiddleEast.Org - Washington - 5
July: He was the big star in
the ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN Movie that made the Watergate scandal and
'Deep
Throat' famous. Now he is saying quite loudly that
President Bush is like
President Nixon but that the press is not doing its crucial
investigative
job as it should. Redford chose American Independence Day, the
4th of July,
to make his comments. And it was The Sunday Times two
Sunday's ago now
that published their tale of "Britain's Deep Throat":
ROBERT REDFORD has urged journalists to
investigate US President
George W. Bush's administration - because he sees strong similarities
between Bush's government and the events leading to the Watergate
scandal
which forced President RICHARD NIXON to resign.
Redford starred in 1976 movie ALL THE
PRESIDENT'S MEN alongside DUSTIN
HOFFMAN, as The Washington Post journalists BOB WOODWARD and CARL
BERNSTEIN,
who brought about the events that led to Nixon's resignation in 1974.
And Redford wasn't surprised when the
identity of the mysterious 'Deep
Throat' character who sparked the Watergate scandal was recently
revealed to
be former deputy FBI chief MARK FELT.
But the shock revelation has reminded
the actor of the power of the
media and the similarities between Bush's secret cover-ups and the
Watergate
affair.
He says, "There are deep similarities
going on but where is the press?
where is the press?"
"There is stone-walling, not telling the
truth, getting people under
wiretaps. The US public continues to be told things that are not true
and
what worries me is that we have these brave young American guys risking
their lives everyday.
"When Deep Throat was revealed, the
press came to me and wanted to
know what I thought. I said, 'Well, it's interesting that his name came
out
but is that the point?'
"My contribution was to come at a time
when journalism was at its high
point and the role I played was to save a testimony to the freedom of
speech. The media have changed, we see the ethics have changed. The
press is
more, I am sorry to say, celebrity oriented."
How the Leaked Documents Questioning War
Emerged from 'Britain's Deep
Throat'
By Michael Smith
The Sunday Times
UK
It started with a phone call and has now
swept across America: Michael Smith tells
the tale of his 'Downing Street memo'
scoop.
Sunday Times -
26 June: It began with a phone call from a friend
nearly 10 months ago - somebody well-placed who had given me a few
stories
before. But he wasn't really a journalistic source, though he has now
been
dubbed "the British Deep Throat" by some of the US press.
He was just a
friend. So I had no great expectations of the
meeting we arranged in a quiet West End bar. I was just expecting a
convivial drink, with the usual exchange of gossip, the catching-up on
how
our lives were going.
Almost
immediately it was clear that this time it would be
something more. The place was empty, but my friend chose the most
secluded
spot he could find. He was clearly nervous.
He wasn't sure
if I'd be interested in what he had, he said. It
was about the run-up to the war. "All the Butler stuff," he said,
referring
to Lord Butler, who had reported on the failures of intelligence over
Iraq.
He thrust two
sheets of paper into my hand. It was a "Secret -
Strictly Personal" letter from Jack Straw to the prime minister written
in
March 2002, a year before the invasion.
In the letter
the foreign secretary said there was no evidence
that Saddam Hussein had any weapons of mass destruction worth talking
about
and that, in part as a result of a lack of US preparation, post-war
Iraq was
likely to become a very nasty place.
It was, in
short, remarkably prescient and would make a pretty
good story, I said, with some understatement. Well, I've got five others
just like it from the same period, said my source. "Most say stuff just
like
that, or worse."
The documents
covered the period running up to a summit between
George W Bush and Tony Blair at the president's ranch in Crawford,
Texas, in
early April 2002. At that time the swift victory against the Taliban in
Afghanistan had left hawks in the US administration openly briefing that
Iraq was next.
Most of the
leaked documents were designed to brief ministers or
Blair on whether backing the US plans to get rid of Saddam would be
sensible
and legal. They set out the merits and dangers of taking part. Their
gist
was that there weren't many merits. The documents made it pretty clear
that
it wasn't sensible, it wasn't legal and it was very risky.
The document
that seemed to encapsulate the problems was another
"Secret - Strictly Personal" letter to Blair. It was written by his
foreign
policy adviser, Sir David Manning.
"I think there
is a real risk that the (US) administration
underestimates the difficulties," Manning wrote. "They may agree that
failure isn't an option, but this does not mean that they will avoid
it."
When I reported
these documents I was surprised to find that there
was no real interest in them in America. The story swiftly died away.
Then eight
months later, in the run-up to Britain's general
election, with the focus on the attorney-general's advice to Blair on
the
legality of war, somebody else gave me further, even more startling
documents. They concerned a meeting in Downing Street on July 23, 2002,
eight months before the invasion, when Blair was insisting to the public
that all options on Iraq were still open.
One leaked
document was a Cabinet Office briefing paper for a
crucial Downing Street meeting held on the day in question. It said the
prime minister had promised Bush at the Crawford summit that he would
"back
military action to bring about regime change". It added that ministers
had
no choice but to "create the conditions" that would make military action
legal.
The other
document was the minutes of the actual meeting, chaired
by Blair and attended by Straw; Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary; Lord
Goldsmith, the attorney-general; Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6;
John
Scarlett, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee; and Admiral Sir
Michael Boyce, chief of defence staff.
Dearlove, who
had just returned from Washington, said "military
action was now seen as inevitable . . . the intelligence and facts were
being fixed around the policy. There was little discussion in
Washington of
the aftermath after military action".
Straw agreed
with Dearlove. He said Bush had "made up his mind to
take military action. But the case was thin".
After reporting
these secret memos, which revealed the dubious
manoeuvrings of government, I expected the US press to react. Surely
there
would be a storm of anger over the way in which the American public had
been
deceived into going to war? But still there was no interest. Then slowly
something astonishing happened. People power took over.
The Sunday Times
website was inundated with ordinary US citizens
wanting to read the minutes of the July meeting. Bloggers set to work
passing the word.
Six ordinary,
patriotic citizens with no political axe to grind
were so outraged to discover the truth about the path to war that they
set
up their own website, naming it after the minutes, which had become
known as
the Downing Street memo.
The focus turned
to what may ultimately be the most important part
of the memo: the point where Hoon said that the US had already begun
"spikes
of activity to put pressure on the regime".
Ministry of
Defence figures for the number of bombs dropped on
southern Iraq in 2002 show that virtually none were used in March and
April;
but between May and August an average of 10 tons were dropped each
month,
with the RAF taking just as big a role in the "spikes of activity" as
their
US colleagues. Then in September the figure shot up again, with allied
aircraft dropping 54.6 tons.
If this was a
covert air war, both Bush and Blair may face
searching questions. In America only Congress can declare war, and it
did
not give the US president permission to take military action against
Iraq
until October 11, 2002. Blair's legal justification is said to come
from UN
Resolution 1441, which was not passed until November 8, 2002.
Last week one US
blogger, Larisa Alexandrovna of RawStory.com,
unearthed more unsettling evidence. It was an overlooked interview with
Lieutenant-General T Michael Moseley, the allied air commander in Iraq,
in
which he appears to admit that the "spikes of activity" were part of a
covert air war.
From June 2002
until March 20, when the ground war began, the
allies flew 21,736 sorties over southern Iraq, attacking 349 carefully
selected targets. The attacks, Moseley said, "laid the foundations" for
the
invasion, allowing allied commanders to begin the ground war.
The bloggers may
have found their own smoking gun.
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