TomDipatch.com presents a through overview of the importance of the Downing Street memo and the gutless US media’s failure to cover the story.
Imagine that the Pentagon Papers or the Watergate scandal had broken out all over the press — no, not in the New York Times or the Washington Post, but in newspapers in Australia or Canada. And that, facing their own terrible record of reportage, of years of being cowed by the Nixon administration, major American papers had decided that this was not a story worthy of being covered. Imagine that, initially, they dismissed the revelatory documents and information that came out of the heart of administration policy-making; then almost willfully misread them, insisting that evidence of Pentagon planning for escalation in Vietnam or of Nixon administration planning to destroy its opponents was at best ambiguous or even nonexistent; finally, when they found that the documents wouldn’t go away, they acknowledged them more formally with a tired ho-hum, a knowing nod on editorial pages or in news stories. Actually, they claimed, these documents didn’t add up to much! because they had run stories just like this back then themselves. Yawn.
This issue of TomDispatch also has an exchnage between reporter John Walcott and Mark Danner, author of the The New York Review of Books article “The Secret Way to War.”
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