"the Permanent Cabinet Secretary—a civil Service official who
is also essentially the chief of British Civil Service—
records the official notes of every meeting. The Permanent
Cabinet Secretary's notes are presumed to be canonical, and
no other attendees notes, recollections, or memos have any
relevance at all."
About that "Downing Street Memo"
Posted by: Dale Franks
The QandO Blog
Monday, June 20, 2005
The Rocky Mountain News pooh-poohs the idea that the Downing Street Memo is of any signifigance.
<<<
So British Prime Minister Tony Blair met with aides on July 23, 2002, one of whom wrote a memo recording the gist of what was said.
It seems that Sir Richard Dearlove, an intelligence official, "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."
...By July 2002, in any case, the media were running many stories about U.S. preparations for a possible invasion of Iraq. Why is it a surprise that some officials, whether they wanted war or not, by then saw it as "inevitable"?
Ah, but the "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." Well, so says one man. But that's not what the 9/11 Commission and other probes have concluded. It's not what Bill Clinton's administration believed about Iraq's alleged possession of WMDs, or what the Germans or French thought, either.
The Downing Street Memo is an interesting document and more grist for historians. But it is no smoking gun.
>>>
There's another thing about this memo. The British Government has a firm policy about private memos, which is that, for official purposes, they simply don't exist. The British have long recognized that, at any cabinet meeting, or other policy confab, the recollections of the meeting's attendees may be wildly different. So, the Permanent Cabinet Secretary—a civil Service official who is also essentially the chief of British Civil Service—records the official notes of every meeting. The Permanent Cabinet Secretary's notes are presumed to be canonical, and no other attendees notes, recollections, or memos have any relevance at all.
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