The Fourth Estate Asleep at the Wheel

We'll join the chorus of skeptics about why this story isn't receiving more coverage in the U.S.

The Washington Post is one of the few American newspapers to follow the story, originally published in the Sunday Times of London, of recorded notes of a July, 2002, briefing in which British Prime Minister Tony Blair's top advisors were cautioned that U.S. intelligence was "being fixed around the policy" of overthrowing Saddam Hussein's dictatorship in Iraq.

" 'Military action was now seen as inevitable,' said the notes, summarizing a report by Richard Dearlove, then head of MI6, British intelligence, who had just returned from consultations in Washington along with other senior British officials. Dearlove went on, 'Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD [weapons of mass destruction]. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.'

" 'The case was thin,' summarized the notes taken by a British national security aide at the meeting. 'Saddam was not threatening his neighbours and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.'

[...]

"The notes of the Blair meeting, attended by the prime minister's senior national security team, also disclose for the first time that Britain's intelligence boss believed that Bush had decided to go to war in mid-2002, and that he believed U.S. policymakers were trying to use the limited intelligence they had to make the Iraqi leader appear to be a bigger threat than was supported by known facts."

Has the Iraq War just become that boring? Either the U.S. mainstream media believes that most Americans have already accepted that the White House cooked the intelligence or too many journalists are simply too afraid to be perceived as beating a dead horse on the subject of Iraq. Either possibility speaks poorly to the condition of journalism in our nation.