Blinded by HATE - The Donks are Relying on a FAKED Memo
The Captain's Quarters has a great post on the Downey Street Memo.
The Memos that all the Donks are ranting about are NOT the originals, so how can there be any authentication? And the Donks want to impeach the President based on a reporter’s COPIED Memos? Their hate has blinded them to any type of normal reasoning, to think that they can bring down a President on COPIES of a Memo that have not been confirmed as authentic or that the contents are REAL, let alone point out explicitly that the President lied to Congress. The Memos say nothing of the sort, it's a hype by haters and the MSM, and now the Memos are being outed to be COPIES. But will the MSM let this fact be known? This I doubt, since they are blinded by the same hate as the Donks. Again it will take the Blog-o-sphere (Thank You Captain Ed) to bring out the true story, and expect the Left to ignore it or "reason" it away, but that can't change the fact that the Memos are typed up by a reporter who then destroyed the originals. Something smells in Denmark, and I don't think it's fish, it smells more like Donkey excretement.
Mr Minority
The media and the Leftists have had a field day with the Downing Street memos that they claim imply that the Bush administration lied about the intelligence on WMD in order to justify the attack on Iraq. Despite the fact that none of the memos actually say that, none of them quote any officials or any documents, and that the text of the memos show that the British government worried about the deployment of WMD by Saddam against Coalition troops, Kuwait and/or Israel, the meme continues to survive.
Until tonight, however, no one questioned the authenticity of the documents provided by the Times of London. That has now changed, as Times reporter Michael Smith admitted that the memos he used are not originals, but retyped copies (via LGF and CQ reader Sapper):
The eight memos — all labeled "secret" or "confidential" — were first obtained by British reporter Michael Smith, who has written about them in The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Times.
Smith told AP he protected the identity of the source he had obtained the documents from by typing copies of them on plain paper and destroying the originals.
The AP obtained copies of six of the memos (the other two have circulated widely). A senior British official who reviewed the copies said their content appeared authentic. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of the secret nature of the material.
Readers of this site should recall this set of circumstances from last year. The Killian memos at the center of CBS' 60 Minutes Wednesday report on George Bush' National Guard service supposedly went through the same laundry service as the Downing Street Memos. Bill Burkett, once he'd been outed as the source of the now-disgraced Killian memos, claimed that a woman named Lucy Ramirez provided them to him -- but that he made copies and burned the originals to protect her identity or that of her source.
Why would a reporter do such a thing? While reporters need to protect their sources, at some point stories based on official documents will require authentication -- and as we have seen with the Killian memos, copies make that impossible. The AP gets a "senior British official" to assert that the content "appeared authentic", which only means that the content seems to match what he thinks he knows.
This, in fact, could very well be another case of "fake but accurate", where documents get created after the fact to support preconceived notions about what happened in the past. One fact certainly stands out -- Michael Smith cannot authenticate the copies. And absent that authentication, they lose their value as evidence of anything.
The Memos that all the Donks are ranting about are NOT the originals, so how can there be any authentication? And the Donks want to impeach the President based on a reporter’s COPIED Memos? Their hate has blinded them to any type of normal reasoning, to think that they can bring down a President on COPIES of a Memo that have not been confirmed as authentic or that the contents are REAL, let alone point out explicitly that the President lied to Congress. The Memos say nothing of the sort, it's a hype by haters and the MSM, and now the Memos are being outed to be COPIES. But will the MSM let this fact be known? This I doubt, since they are blinded by the same hate as the Donks. Again it will take the Blog-o-sphere (Thank You Captain Ed) to bring out the true story, and expect the Left to ignore it or "reason" it away, but that can't change the fact that the Memos are typed up by a reporter who then destroyed the originals. Something smells in Denmark, and I don't think it's fish, it smells more like Donkey excretement.
Mr Minority
