While speculation about the authenticity of the Downing Street memo(s) has been bubbling on the Internet for several days, Captain’s Quarters kicked it up a notch yesterday, after reading an AP report describing how Michael Smith, the London Sunday Times reporter who first broke the story, protected the identity of his source by typing copies of the original documents on plain paper and destroying the originals.
CQ, unsurprisingly, points out the similarities (such as there are) to the infamous “Killian memos” that kicked off the whole “Rathergate” episode last year — missing original copies, anonymous sources, etc. BummerDietz takes it one step further, leaping not just onto the bandwagon but entirely over it and into the ditch, speculating darkly that Michael Smith of the London Sunday Times might be the same “Michael Smith” that CBS producer Mary Mapes hired in Texas to help her out on her ill-fated story.
And just where was this so-called Michael Smith (can there possibly be more than one?!) when Deep Throat was stalking parking garages in the DC metro area in the early ’70s? That’s what we’d like to know. Can this alleged Michael Smith also be traced to the CIA operative that John Kerry allegedly ferried into Cambodia? The mind reels.
Strata-Sphere notes that “the coincidence [of having two Michael Smith’s] is interesting.” In shades of the “60 Minutes” screw-up, the blog’s AJStrata drives into some mind-numbing analysis of PDF formats and copies of typewritten pages (Smith says he received the documents in September 2004, copied them, then destroyed the originals and typed copies on blank paper) to try and prove that the memo is a forgery.
And just to make sure that the whole affair comes full circle, AJ asks “Is there any coincidence that Sep 2004 is the time of Dan Rather’s forgeries-as-fact story? Hmmmm.”
There are some notable instances of people actually putting some thought into the issue, however. Tattered Raincoat points out that officials in both the American and (more importantly) British governments have said the memos are authentic. Heck, even Tony Blair, when asked about them at a joint press conference with President Bush a few weeks back, answered the question directly, without calling the documents into question. In fact, no one involved has disputed the authenticity of the Downing Street memo — not Blair; not Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of British intelligence who wrote it; not the CIA; not the FBI; not the Defense Department; not the White House. And they’ve all had seven weeks in which to do so.
So while we applaud bloggers for thinking critically about important matters, we have to point out that sometimes a memo really is just a memo.
We’re not trying to paint the entire right-leaning blogosphere with the same brush here — in fact many, including Powerline, accept the memos as-is, while correctly pointing out that they don’t really say much of anything we didn’t already know.
In keeping with an Iraq-themed blog report today, but coming back to the cold, hard ground of what to do now that the occupation is over two years old, Suzanne Nossell of the excellent DemocracyArsenal blog comes up with a list of five things the U.S. should and should not do in Iraq. She notes that there has been some heavy intellectual lifting recently looking at the range of realistic options available to policymakers:
Given the importance of the Middle East to America’s security and what we have put at stake in Iraq, there are at least a few more tacks to try before walking away. Phil Carter and Richard Clarke talk about the permanent damage to our military if we stay in, but there’s also harm in pulling out: the almighty American military bested by a ragtag insurgency in its most important ambitious and important mission in decades.
As preposterous as it was for Bush to declare that we’re fighting terrorists in Iraq so they won’t make it here, that message enlarges the meaning of defeat. That’s not to say the time to seriously consider a swift pull-out won’t come, but there are enough sound measures we haven’t yet exhausted to make that call just yet.
Now that’s refreshing — a reasoned analysis by someone who has actually put some thought into an issue, rather than trying to connect dots in a story that don’t exist.
–Paul McLeary
Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.