The Downing Street Memo: Up in Smoke

I'm beginning to think that the media is running around in circles.

Back in early May, the Times of London broke the story of the Downing Street Memo (hereinafter "DSM")--a document apparently written by a high-ranking official in the British Foreign Ministry recounting a meeting held with the Bush administration in Washington in mid-2002. The message the media took away from this "secret" memo was that Bush had decided to attack and invade Iraq long before the resumption of UN weapons inspections, and indeed that the case to justify such an attack was weak.

Much was made of the following items in particular (emphasis mine):

C [a British official whose identity is currently unknown] reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action...The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin.

Let's put this in context: what we have here, assuming this memo is even genuine, is a composition by a Mr. Matthew Rycroft based on notes he took during a meeting with "C," who recounted his trip to Washington. Elements on the left have argued that the DSM is, in reality, the "minutes" from a high-level administration meeting, but the document doesn't read that way; and anyway, you'd think that a meeting's minutes would be composed by someone who was actually at the meeting. But I'm not going to try to convince you--go read the document and see what you think.

The White House has been pressed for comment on the DSM, but the mainstream media has made a great deal out of the fact that Bush and Blair are not making vocal denials. The media would do well to remember what should be about lesson 2 or 3 of basic reporting: the absence of a denial does not mean an allegation is true. Let's say someone walked up to you on the street and asked, "Are you a child molester?" and you responded, with appropriate shock, "What are you talking about? Get away from me!" Suppose the questioner was a reporter--how could he then go ahead and publish a story with the title "[Your Name]: A Child Molester"?

But the story of the DSM doesn't stop there...indeed, it's taken a weird turn. It turns out that the reporter who broke the story "protected the identity of the source he had obtained the documents from by typing copies of them on plain paper and destroying the originals." In short, he destroyed the evidence, along with any reasonable chance of authenticating the documents. All that we have now is reporter Michael Smith's word and the affirmation of an anonymous source who says that the "content" appeared authentic.

Does this sound familiar? It should: it's the CBS Bush/National Guard story redux. In the "Rathergate" case (take a walk down Memory Lane here), established Bush basher Bill Burkett claimed to have received the original memos from a "Lucy Ramirez," who asked that she be kept out of things. Burkett took the documents to a local Kinko's, copied them, and then (in that very parking lot) burned the originals. Or so he says. Then he showed the copies to CBS producers:

"He said, ‘Well, what do you think about this?’" Mr. Smith recalled. "It contained a lot of the elements that had happened with Bush. We read it and our jaws dropped: ‘Wow, that’s exactly what we heard happened.’ So we were stunned when he pulled this document out."

So reads a recollection originally published in the New York Observer, though the linked page was as close as I could come to the original.

CBS called the White House, which did not immediately deny the documents' authenticity, and the network, now convinced, ran with the story. We all know where that ended up.

So here's another case: someone finds some documents that, in the media's mind, say "all the right things" and therefore seem genuine. An anonymous source says the content seems right. The White House has not denied them outright. The DSM and related memos are not even photocopies of the originals, but the reporter says he retyped them faithfully. The allegations must be true!

Either I'm going crazy, or the mainstream media is. And I don't think it's me.