Some slightly related from Technorati and Google.

[the red arm chair] Downing Street: The United States entered the War with Iraq in March of 2003, the memo you are about to read and see excerpts from, is from a meeting at Downing Street between Prime Minister Tony Blair, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, the head of MI-6, and others, a full list is available at the site.

[The Museum of Left Wing Lunacy] MORON.ORG calls Downing memo a "Smoking Gun": The book UNFIT FOR COMMAND, and swiftboatveteransfortruth all showed Kerry to be incosistent. These were former vets, who had no personal interaction to the point they had grudges, but witnessed Kerry. Some are now high ranking officers in the military.

[The Road To Surfdom] Downing Street Memo: What the Downing Street memo confirms for the first time is that President Bush had decided, no later than July 2002, to "remove Saddam, through military action," that war with Iraq was "inevitable"—and that what remained was simply to establish and develop the modalities of justification; that is, to come up with a means of "justifying" the war and "fixing" the "intelligence and facts...around the policy." The great value of the discussion recounted in the memo, then, is to show, for the governments of both countries, a clear hierarchy of decision-making. By July 2002 at the latest, war had been decided on; the question at issue now was how to justify it—how to "fix," as it were, what Blair will later call "the political context." Specifically, though by this point in July the President had decided to go to war, he had not yet decided to go to the United Nations and demand inspectors; indeed, as "C" points out, those on the National Security Council—the senior security officials of the US government—"had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusi-asm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record." This would later change, largely as a result of the political concerns of these very people gathered together at 10 Downing Street.

 [National Debunker] Is US Media Finally Paying Attention to UK 'Iraq-gate' Bombshell?: After weeks of silence on the subject, the US corporate media have finally begun to report, albeit timidly and well below the fold, on a series of leaks that surfaced in the UK before the British elections -- leaks that exposed the Blair government's lies and deceptions in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. What makes it such an important story for here is that the revelations also expose the lies and deceptions carried out by the Bush administration, particularly as to when the decision to go to war was made and whether claims of WMD were exaggerated, even fabricated.

[Radio.weblogs.com] gc.dd Radio Weblog: Initiating the “gc.dd Radio Weblog”. We are the Global Collaborative on Denuclearization Design.

 [Stuarthomfray.co.uk] SubRosa Blog...: "And yet in more than 10,500 articles on Iraq, its recent history, its problems, its apparently endless suffering, Halliday [former UN humanitarian coordinator, Denis Halliday - responsible for setting up the UN's 'oil for food' programme in Iraq] has been mentioned twice in the Guardian and Observer this year. Chief Unscom weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, who described Iraq 90-95%, or "fundamentally", disarmed of WMD by December 1998, has been mentioned 13 times in these 10,500 articles."

 [Letsroll911.org] schitauri's blog :: Post a Reply: The political strategy proved to be arguing Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) posed such a threat that military action had to be taken. However, at the July meeting Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, said the case for war was “thin” as “Saddam was not threatening his neighbours and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran”.

[Polizeros.com] Politics in the Zeros: "Transcripts of a private conversation between Jack Straw and Colin Powell expressing serious doubts about the reliability of intelligence on Iraq's banned weapons programme are being circulated in western government circles where there is a growing feeling that officials were deceived into supporting the Iraq war.

 [Rwoolly.dailykos.com] Daily Kos :: Mehlman: North Korea never invaded South Korea:  Iran and North Korea hadn't, in the same way that Saddam Hussein had, been paying off suicide bombers in Israel and in the Palestinian territories.  Iran and North Korea are serious challenges.  So was Saddam Hussein, and removing him makes the world safer, makes America safer.

Reflected tags on Technorati: Blog, Iraq, Iraq Reviews