by Patricia Goldsmith

On June 14, Andrea Mitchell, NBC’s chief foreign affairs correspondent, gave her take on mainstream media (MSM) coverage of the Downing Street Memo (DSM). She said, “There have been anti-war groups and anti-Bush groups who’ve tried to generate this [coverage] on the Internet, but . . . there’s no smoking gun here,” because “if you go back to Bush’s own comments [in 2002], you had to be brain-dead not to know what he was up to.” On June 15, The Washington Post took the same position, even more emphatically: “The memos add not a single fact to what was previously known about the administration’s prewar deliberations.” This might come as a surprise to George Bush and Tony Blair, who were claiming as recently as last week that war with Iraq was, as they claimed in July, 2002, a last resort undertaken only after all other options were exhausted. In their joint press conference on June 7, George Bush answered his first question about the DSM saying, “And somebody said, well, you know, we had made up our mind to go to use military force to deal with Saddam. Nothing could be farther from the truth. . . . Look, both of us didn’t want to use our military. Nobody wants to commit military into combat. It’s the last option.”...

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/June05/Goldsmith0618.htm