Nearly 3 Weeks after Downing Street Memo Released NY Times Reports on it, but Oh So Weakly

On May 1, 2005 the Times of London released the Downing Street Memo that revealed evidence from senior British governmental officials that President Bush had already decided to invade Iraq by July of 2002 long before getting Congressional approval for such an act, and that he “had decided to justify this decision by the conjunction of terrorism and W.M.D” and that the “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” in spite of the fact that “the case was thin.” And that Bush's National Security Council, then headed by Condoleezza Rice, “had no patience with the U.N. route,” and that the NSC had “no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record.” For seven months until the war began Bush continued to claim that war was a last resort, and that diplomatic avenues were being tried. Two weeks after this news broke the Washington Times printed a small story buried on page 18, and now nearly three weeks after the fact the NY Times printed a weak story on it failing to point out the importance of these revelations. As usual for the Corporate-Owned Mainstream Media this was not published on the front page or anywhere near it. The ABC, CBS, and NBC evening news programs as well as PBS NewsHour have failed to report on this at all. CNN and Fox (read Faux) News if they reported on it at all did so in a dismissive manner. Both the Washington Times and the NY Post have admitted that prior to the Invasion of Iraq they deliberately down-played reporting on evidence contrary to the Bush Administrations position and mislead their readers into thinking that evidence of Weapons of Mass Destruction had been found in Iraq (the Bush Admin’s official weapons inspectors have concluded that WMDs were destroyed after the first Iraq War in 1991 or soon after). The NY Times new Public Editor had the cojones to claim that this was not further evidence of their self-censoring news critical of the Bush Administration from landing on the front page when the seriousness of the news warranted it. Columnists at the NY Times have been able to voice criticisms of Bush’s policy, but the news editors or their Corporate controllers have always managed to keep news that questions remain for much of this policy off the front page, and often off the pages of the NY Times.