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Without pausing to comment, let alone to refute, the report continues with Mr. Conyers and colleagues delivering 'bundles they said contained the names of more than 560,000 Americans gathered on the Internet who had endorsed his letter to the president demanding answers to questions raised by the memo.' The 'they said' casts doubt on the list, but the reporter gives no evidence that Conyers fabricated the names or did not gather them on the Internet. If the count is doubted, he could have inspected the bundles himself, counted the names on one page, estimated the number of pages, and then multiplied the figures to arrive at his own estimate. The White House's fake rebuttal, that Conyers voted against the war, is quoted verbatim. Conyers probably voted against the war, but -- making the rebuttal fake -- his vote is irrelevant to what the memo says or whether Bush lied. Even granting the fake rebuttal a comment, the reporter could have refuted it by stating how many of the 122 Congressional co-signers voted for the war.
The article explains nothing more of the memo's contents. The last paragraph mentions that another document -- the briefing paper -- warned of a long 'nation-building exercise'. Careful, America, do not let your helping impulse (building nations) put you into the soup!
6. SUMMARY
The _NYT_ articles -- masterpieces of delay, indirection, distraction, fake rebuttals, and elegant omission -- keep readers ignorant of the lies and the lying liars who tell them. No wonder so many Americans still support this gangster war.
No _NYT_ article comments on perhaps the most revolting revelation of the memo. The UK Defence Secretary thought that the US military 'timeline 30 days before the US Congressional elections.' Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi die so that Americans elect a crowd of pirates perched on the rotting platform of the war of terror.ZNet