The Downing Street Memo

From the July 23, 2002 leaked memo of a meeting between Britain's head of MI-6 and the Bush administration:

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

This is fairly damning considering that the administration maintains that it was not committed to military invasion of Iraq until March 2003. As of yet, the White House has not commented on this memo, and the media has shown a disturbing lack of interest in this story. Does not the public deserve to know if they were being lied to or not?

"But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

No administration that functions on this basis has a right to call itself democratic or use the rhetoric of freedom and democracy as a justification for action, for such is a pervision of the very principle of democracy. In a liberal democracy policy is supposed to be fixed around intelligence and facts, not vice versa.