The Funny Farm

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BuzzFlash: ... you are focusing on what has become known as the Downing Street Memo, which was written in July of 2002, but only came forth in the Times of London a few weeks ago. And you were asking for people to join you and 88 other members of Congress in writing President Bush to hold him accountable for what it says in the Downing Street Memo. So can you tell us a little bit more about why the memo is important, and also how many Americans have joined you thus far in signing on to the letter?

Congressman Conyers: Well, this has been one of those projects that comes to your attention, and you begin to express some surprise that nobody has inquired into it before. This Downing Street declassified British intelligence memorandum wasn't the result of weeks of hard investigation and deep research on the part of our staff. It appeared in a newspaper and was being widely circulated in the media around Europe. A number of countries in Europe, their newspapers, their television and radio, were all full of it.

And so we were surprised that there had been almost a wall of silence here in the United States that we couldn't get through, that was blocking us out. And to some extent, we've been able to get through this porous wall of silence so that we've finally gotten down to the fact that we know that according to the meetings that were going on, that President Bush had enlisted Mr. Blair into a plan to start a war with a country with which we had very little reason to go to war with. And the notion was to find out why they did this and why was the President of the United States denying that it was his intention to go to war when it was very clear among the Bush Cabinet and Mr. Blair and his organization that that was exactly what they were going to do.

And so we have a couple of pretty important questions that leap up at one immediately. And the first was: why did the President deny to the Congress that he was planning to go to war, when at the same time he was implementing plans to go to war? And that is a very disturbing feature. The second thing that comes to mind right away is that if the Congress had known that the President was already laying plans for war, would they have given him additional military authority? The debate would have been quite different, I would presume. I would not give him that authority. I would use his intentions and desire to start a war with another country as an additional reason not to give him the power. And I think a number of other people would have rethought their positions. It would have been a much, much different debate.

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BuzzFlash: Paul O'Neill said that from the day Bush was inaugurated, he was talking about attacking Iraq. We know that the people in the Bush Administration who were responsible for the war in Iraq were primarily composed of the signers of the PNAC letter to President Clinton in '98 asking him to attack Iraq. The Downing Street Memo is called a smoking gun, but it's hardly as though this is the only piece of information. It's kind of the culmination of all this voluminous corroboration that we were lied into war.

Congressman Conyers: Exactly, what you're saying indicates that the more we look around, the more we investigate and research, and the more information that comes forward, it all supports the declassified British intelligence document that was the subject of at least two articles in the Times of London. And now more and more begins to come out as we think about it, as we review, as we think about what happened to weapons inspectors and the jeopardy that one of the wives – a CIA operative was put in – that as O'Neill said himself, everybody in the top circles of the Bush Administration knew that we were going to go to war with Iraq. It was just a matter of time.

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