James Risen and the Downing Street Memo

You remember the Downing Street Memo, the "smoking gun" that pretty much proved Bush had been lying all along about war being the last resort for dealing with Iraq and Saddam Hussein.   Some claimed that it was evidence enough for impeachment,  but the mainstream media, meaning the New York Times, all but ignored it.

And you know about James Risen, the intrepid NYT reporter who broke the NSA wiretapping/eavesdropping story.   You may also be aware that he wrote the hot new best seller, State of War.

I haven't read it,and you probably haven't either.  But Jonathan Schwarz who writes the great blog, A Tiny Revolution, has.  And guess what?  He says the New York Times is still sitting on the Downing Street Memo story:

"Most of the attention given to James Risen's new book State of War has focused on Risen's reporting on warrantless spying by the NSA—and how the New York Times didn't publish it until State of War was about to come out.

"And of course that's important. But the book also contains critical new background on the Downing Street Memo. And incredibly enough, this information has NEVER been published by the New York Times."

So what's with the Times?  First they unleash Judith Miller to bang the drums of war in a series of articles based on shoddy intelligence.  Then they hold the NSA story that could have been published prior to the 2004 election.  And now they're saying nothing about the daylong summit meeting between the CIA and the British spy agency, MI6, which led to the Downing Street Memo.

Here's what Risen writes about the meeting between Richard Dearlove, the author of the Memo, and George Tenet:

"During the Saturday summmit, Tenet and Dearlove left the larger meeting and went off by themselves for about an hour and a half, according to a former senior CIA official who attended the summit. It is unclear what Tenet and Dearlove discussed during their one-on-one session. Yet Dearlove's overall assessment was reflected in the Downing Street Memo: the CIA chief and other CIA officials didn't believe that the WMD intelligence mattered, because war was coming one way or another.

" 'I doubt that Tenet would have said that Bush was fixing the intelligence,' said a former CIA official. 'But I think Dearlove was a very smart intelligence officer who could figure out what was going on. Plus, the MI6 station chief in Washington was in CIA headquarters all the time, with just about complete access to everything, and I am sure he was talking to a lot of people.' "

That sounds like news fit to print.