The road to Downing Street goes through the basement

John Conyers, American hero, will re-convene hearings on the Downing Street memos. And he'll do so on Capitol Hill -- in a basement of the Capitol building. At least these important hearings will no longer be relegated to DNC headquarters, until recently the only venue available after the G.O.P.'s neo-Stalinists decided that congress could not hear from uncontrolled witnesses.

CSPAN will cover the hearings on Thursday, as will Pacifica. There will also be gatherings around the country, not to mention an overdue rally in support of Conyers himself, which will take place in front of the White House at 5:00 p.m. For more information, go here.

The mainstream press may be running out of reasons to avoid this story. Check out the Minneapolis Star-Tribune: "Editorial: Fig leaf for war/Paper indicates U.N. was misled":

Perhaps readers will recall that Bush's nominee for U.N. ambassador, John Bolton, recently was accused of orchestrating the 2002 ouster of Jose Bustani, head of the Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons, a U.N. agency. Why did Bolton want Bustani replaced? Because Bustani was aggressively seeking to reinsert chemical weapons inspectors into Iraq. The conclusion of many observers is that the United States did not want inspectors in Iraq because it undercut the U.S. case for an invasion.

Many Bush critics accused him of "using" the United Nations to justify war, rather than truly working to avoid military conflict. But they were naturally suspect because they oppose U.S. policy. The British briefing paper is especially significant because it comes from a government that is not only astute, but is also quite friendly to Bush's objective of invading Iraq. The unavoidable conclusion is that both British and American citizens were duped into hoping that the United Nations would make such a conflict unnecessary. In fact, Britain eagerly and the United States reluctantly went to the United Nations to get a fig leaf of respectability for a war on which they had already decided.

In the end, the Security Council refused to play its role, arguing that the weapons inspectors needed more time (actually ample time) to complete their mission. Then the United States threw up its hands, branded Security Council members a bunch of hand-wringing pansies, and went to war. As the British briefing paper makes clear, that was pre-ordained.

Also worthy of note is this piece from the overly-cautious Los Angeles Times:

In one memorandum, dated March 14, 2002, and labeled "secret — strictly personal," Blair's chief foreign policy advisor, David Manning, described to the prime minister a dinner he had had with Rice.

"We spent a long time at dinner on Iraq," wrote Manning, now the British ambassador to the U.S. "It is clear that Bush is grateful for your [Blair's] support and has registered that you are getting flak. I said that you would not budge in your support for regime change but you had to manage a press, a Parliament and a public opinion that was different from anything in the States. And you would not budge either in your insistence that, if we pursued regime change, it must be very carefully done and produce the right result. Failure was not an option."

Damn right the press in Britain differs from anything in the States. The British press has greater freedom, and British journalists understand that they do not address an audience of ninnies.

Another memo, from British Foreign Office political director Peter Ricketts to Foreign Secretary Jack Straw on March 22, 2002, bluntly stated that the case against Hussein was weak because the Iraqi leader was not accelerating his weapons programs and there was scant proof of links to Al Qaeda.

"What has changed is not the pace of Saddam Hussein's WMD programs, but our tolerance of them post-11 September," Ricketts wrote. "Attempts to claim otherwise publicly will increase skepticism about our case….

"U.S. scrambling to establish a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda is so far frankly unconvincing," he said.

And note this:

The paper said the British view was that any invasion for the purpose of regime change "has no basis under international law."

Right now, regime-change-for-the-sake-of-regime-change is the only argument Bush has left.