Kaplan on the memo(s)

Fred Kaplan of Slate asks, "What's really in the Downing Street memos?" Actually, he notes not one memo, or two, but seven, including the "famous" memo/minutes of the UK ministers' meeting; the secret Cabinet Office briefing paper written two days before that meeting (see here and here for London Calling's take); and "five eyes-only memos, written around the same time, about various official British meetings with President Bush, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz." These new documents, described by John Daniszewski in yesterday's Los Angeles Times, have, notes Kaplan, been available in full for a while on the Think Progress Web site. These newly revealed documents "help flesh out" the background to the DSM, notes Daniszewski.

The additional materials provide more evidence for duplicity by both Blair and Bush - but Kaplan questions whether it's an open-and-shut case. He's staying skeptical, and draws on Michael Kinsley's "Officer Barbardy" skepticism ("what's New Here?") in a Sunday Washington Post article. In fact, Kaplan suggests the new memos' emergence "weakens" the anti-Bush case. He contends that the "memos do not show, for instance, that Bush simply invented the notion that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or that Saddam posed a threat to the region. In fact, the memos reveal quite clearly that the top leaders in the U.S. and British governments genuinely believed their claims." He's pushing it to say the Brits "quite clearly" bought the WMD argument. But worse, Kaplan does not address the legality issue; he does not use the term "legal" or "illegal" in his article. (American commentators just seem not to want to deal with the fundamental issue that the war was almost certainly illegal in international law!)

Kaplan then seems to get caught up in some tortured reasoning over the supposed meaning of "policy" being "fixed" versus "fixed around" the intelligence. He asks, "Does this distinction [between the two terms] matter? If all you want to know is whether Bush was deceptive, no; he was deceptive. If you want to know how government works, how officials make bad mistakes, yes; it matters a lot." (So does it matter, Fred? Make a clear decision.)

Anyway, my prime concern is over the MSM's conspiracy of silence up to now. And at least on this point, Kaplan makes a concession:

When the scholars write the big tomes on this sordid saga, they'll want to base their findings on primary-source documents—and here is one, flashing right before us. The Downing Street Memo will be a key footnote in the history books; it should have made front-page headlines in the daily broadsheets of history's first draft.

I should be clear on this. My prime concern is not over a right-left spin war over the memos (which are finally getting some media attention, thanks as well to the unstinting efforts of John Conyers in the House). My concern is that most of the apologist spin is coming from major news media figures - "Officer Barbradys" such as Kinsley and David Sanger - who didn't do their job. These are serious journalists. I expect Hannity, O'Reilly, Hume and John Gibson to underplay or dismiss the issue, but not Kinsley and Ifill and Matthews. Instead of engaging with this UK-originated issue, they try instead to cover their tracks. I don't put Kaplan in this camp - not quite - but he's not helping much to clarify the issue either.