Downing Street Memo in the New York Times

Rolling, rolling, rolling…keep that story rolling…

The New York Times is on it, too, and with a slightly better story than the WaPo’s it’s-a-nonstory-story:

President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain presented a united front on Tuesday against a recently disclosed British government memorandum that said in July 2002 that American intelligence was being "fixed" around the policy of removing Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

"There's nothing farther from the truth," Mr. Bush said in his first public comments about the so-called Downing Street memo, which has created anger among the administration's critics who see it as evidence that the president was intent to go to war with Iraq earlier than the White House has said.

[…]

Mr. Blair, standing at Mr. Bush's side in a joint news conference in the East Room of the White House, said, "No, the facts were not being fixed in any shape or form at all."

The statements contradicted assertions in the memorandum, which was first disclosed by The Sunday Times of London on May 1 and which records the minutes of a meeting of Mr. Blair's senior policy advisers more than half a year before the war with Iraq began.

[…]

The two expressed common ground most emphatically on the Downing Street memo, which was written by Matthew Rycroft, a top aide to Mr. Blair.

In particular, it reports that Sir Richard Dearlove, the chief of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, had been in talks in Washington and had told other senior British officials that Mr. Bush "wanted to remove" Mr. Hussein "through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and W.M.D.," or weapons of mass destruction.

[…]

The White House has always insisted that Mr. Bush did not make the decision to invade Iraq until after Secretary of State Colin L. Powell presented the administration's case to the United Nations Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003, which relied heavily on claims, now discredited, that Iraq had illicit weapons. But as early as Nov. 21, 2001, Mr. Bush directed Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to begin a review of what could be done to oust Mr. Hussein.

Pretty good, pretty good. Not too shabby at all. Come on media, keep it rolling…

Keep that story rolling…trip em up, screw em good, screw em good, trip em up…THEY LIED!