The Memo Comes In From the Cold

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...0801519_5.html

(Gold9472: Now it seems documents are springing up all over the place. People are FIGHTING BACK. Remember, it was the Washington Post that broke Watergate. This could be a "historical" newstory...)

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By Dan Froomkin
Wednesday, June 8, 2005; 2:09 PM

After six weeks in the political wilderness, the Downing Street Memo yesterday finally burst into the White House -- and into the headlines.

The memo, which dates back to 2002, conveys a British intelligence official's conclusion that President Bush was manipulating intelligence to build support for war with Iraq -- and that he was already set on invasion long before acknowledging as much in public. The Sunday Times of London first published a leaked version on May 1.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair was visiting with Bush yesterday, and when a question about the memo came up at their abbreviated joint press conference -- the first time Bush has been asked to comment about it -- Blair threw himself at its potentially explosive allegations in an attempt to muffle the damage.

Bush then followed, insisting that he had tried to resolve the standoff with Saddam Hussein peacefully, but that in any case the world is better off with Hussein gone.

But the hard-to-explain memo today is making headlines far and wide, after more than a month during which the American press largely kept its silence on the issue.

It remains unclear how big of a blowup the memo represents for the White House. Bush partisans consider it either old news, or flatly wrong, or both.

And the American press still demonstrates no intention of aggressively following it up.

But even if the memo doesn't detonate, there are suddenly several other potential scandals sputtering away in the press today to cause the White House worry.

· The New York Times is reporting that a White House official with ties to the oil industry repeatedly edited government climate reports to play down global warming issues.

· The Guardian reports on new State Department documents suggesting that Bush's decision not to sign the Kyoto global warming treaty was partly a result of pressure from ExxonMobil.

· The Texas Observer and the Associated Press are reporting that two Indian tribes working with Jack Abramoff, the lobbyist now under criminal and congressional investigation, paid $25,000 each to a conservative tax-exempt group to underwrite an event that got tribal leaders a private meeting with President Bush.

· And The Washington Post reports that senators are asking for more information about the involvement of White House officials in pushing for a $30 billion air-tanker deal now considered the most significant military contracting abuses in several decades.

All this comes as a new Washington Post/ABC News poll shows a slew of sinking numbers for Bush, including a dramatic loss of support on his ace-in-the-hole issue, the war on terror. And the public has apparently concluded that the war in Iraq was not worth it and has not made the United States safer.

So it's perhaps no coincidence that Bush's patience with the press appeared to run out yesterday in the East Room.

Tradition necessitated a joint press availability with the visiting prime minister, but Bush nevertheless abruptly invoked the two-question-from-each-side rule that normally only applies to Oval Office photo ops.

And Bush was evidently in such a hurry to get out of there that he hastily called the conference to a close before Blair could respond to the final question.

Elisabeth Bumiller writes in the New York Times: "President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain presented a united front on Tuesday against a recently disclosed British government memorandum that said in July 2002 that American intelligence was being 'fixed' around the policy of removing Saddam Hussein in Iraq."

Dana Milbank brings everyone up to speed on the issue in The Washington Post.

"The issue caused quite a fuss in Britain when the Times of London published the memo last month on the eve of Blair's reelection. Here at home, the memo provoked outrage from liberals but did not become a major news event -- until yesterday. . . .

"Blair, as he has done on a full range of issues over the past four years, leaped to Bush's defense. Well, I can respond to that very easily,' he said, before Bush could open his mouth. 'No, the facts were not being fixed, in any shape or form at all.'

"Bush started out by suggesting that the memo wasn't credible because British media had 'dropped it out in the middle of his [Blair's] race.' Skipping any discussion of the intelligence, Bush said he had not settled on war from the start. 'There's nothing farther from the truth,' he asserted. 'My conversations with the prime minister was, how can we do this peacefully?' "

The question about the memo came from Reuters White House correspondent Steve Holland. As I noted yesterday , any reporter asking about the memo was eligible for a $1,000 reward being offered by a group of liberal Web activists .

But Milbank writes: "Holland, a consummate professional, wasn't trying to satisfy the wing nuts -- 'good grief,' he said when told later about the prize money -- and won't be collecting. But his query ended a slightly strange episode in the American media in which the potentially explosive report out of London had become a seldom acknowledged elephant in the room."

Mark Memmott , writing in USA Today, acknowledges the widespread reticence among the media -- including his own newspaper -- to cover the story until now.

"The memo is said by some of the president's sharpest critics, such as Democratic Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, to be strong evidence that Bush decided to go to war and then looked for evidence to support his decision. . . .

"USA TODAY chose not to publish anything about the memo before today for several reasons, says Jim Cox, the newspaper's senior assignment editor for foreign news. 'We could not obtain the memo or a copy of it from a reliable source,' Cox says. 'There was no explicit confirmation of its authenticity from (Blair's office). And it was disclosed four days before the British elections, raising concerns about the timing.' "

My washingtonpost.com colleague Jefferson Morley shared his thoughts about the lack of coverage in his Live Online yesterday.

Andrew C. Revkin writes in the New York Times: "A White House official who once led the oil industry's fight against limits on greenhouse gases has repeatedly edited government climate reports in ways that play down links between such emissions and global warming, according to internal documents."

Reminds me quite a bit of this 2003 story by Revkin and Katharine Q. Seelye .

John Vidal writes in the Guardian: "President's George Bush's decision not to sign the United States up to the Kyoto global warming treaty was partly a result of pressure from ExxonMobil, the world's most powerful oil company, and other industries, according to US State Department papers seen by the Guardian. . . .

"In briefing papers given before meetings to the US under-secretary of state, Paula Dobriansky, between 2001 and 2004, the administration is found thanking Exxon executives for the company's 'active involvement' in helping to determine climate change policy, and also seeking its advice on what climate change policies the company might find acceptable. . . .

"Until now Exxon has publicly maintained that it had no involvement in the US government's rejection of Kyoto. But the documents, obtained by Greenpeace under US freedom of information legislation, suggest this is not the case.

" 'Potus [president of the United States] rejected Kyoto in part based on input from you [the Global Climate Coalition],' says one briefing note before Ms Dobriansky's meeting with the GCC, the main anti-Kyoto US industry group, which was dominated by Exxon."

Lou Dubose writes in the Texas Observer: "Four months after he took the oath of office in 2001, President George W. Bush was the attraction, and the White House the venue, for a fundraiser organized by the alleged perpetrator of the largest billing fraud in the history of corporate lobbying."

Or, somewhat less breathlessly, as Suzanne Gamboa writes for the Associated Press: "At the behest of a lobbyist now under criminal investigation, two Indian tribes paid $25,000 each to a conservative tax-exempt group to underwrite an event that scored tribal leaders a private meeting with President Bush.

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