http://www.dcexaminer.com/articles/2005/06/20/opinion/op-ed/45oped20ambrose.txtJune 20 '05
By Jay Ambrose
Published: Monday, June 20, 2005 1:24 AM EDT
The Downing Street memo has a new fan — Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass. — who recently said that the memo was a "stunning, unbelievably simple and understandable statement of the truth and a profoundly important document."
The problem for Kerry, however, is that there is another document that contradicts his view, a document that the defeated Democratic presidential candidate ought to remember.
No, I am not talking about the other official British documents disclosed since Kerry made that statement, although they do show just how silly it was for people to interpret the first memo — which contained meeting minutes — the way they did.
At that meeting in 2002, eight months before the invasion of Iraq, the head of British foreign intelligence was paraphrased as saying that it looked like a U.S.-led war to oust Saddam Hussein was inevitable and that the justification would be Saddam's possession of weapons of mass destruction. According to an army of frenzied, Bush-bashing bloggers and, later, some way-out congressional Democrats, the leaked minutes proved Bush lied about the existence of weapons of mass destruction and that he had decided on war long before he said he had.
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