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"Never in our wildest dreams did we think we would see those words in black and white—and beneath a SECRET stamp, no less. For three years now, we in Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) have been saying that the CIA and its British counterpart, MI-6, were ordered by their countries’ leaders to "fix facts" to "justify" an unprovoked war on Iraq. More often than not, we have been greeted with stares of incredulity.

It has been a hard learning—that folks tend to believe what they want to believe. As long as our evidence, however abundant and persuasive, remained circumstantial, it could not compel belief. It simply is much easier on the psyche to assent to the White House spin machine blaming the Iraq fiasco on bad intelligence than to entertain the notion that we were sold a bill of goods.

Well, you can forget circumstantial. Thanks to an unauthorized disclosure by a courageous whistleblower, the evidence now leaps from official documents—this time authentic, not forged. Whether prompted by the open appeal of the international Truth-Telling Coalition or not, some brave soul has made the most explosive "patriotic leak" of the war by giving London’s Sunday Times the official minutes of a briefing by Richard Dearlove, then head of Britain’s CIA equivalent, MI-6. Fresh back in London from consultations in Washington, Dearlove briefed Prime Minister Blair and his top national security officials on July 23, 2002, on the Bush administration’s plans to make war on Iraq.

Blair does not dispute the authenticity of the document, which immortalizes a discussion that is chillingly amoral. Apparently no one felt free to ask the obvious questions. Or, worse still, the obvious questions did not occur."

The rest of the article is here.

And from the memo itself for people who are pressed for time:

"C 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. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action."

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A few days ago I found this article from the National Review online, where Deroy Murdoch claims that the only way to defend the lives of Americans is to limit access to our libraries to nice people. How we’d do this is to make sure the PATRIOT Act applied to libraries. The upshot is that librarians interested in defending our civil liberties are actually aiding and abetting terrorists.

Being an M.L.S., my first reaction is: get real. My second and third reactions are not that different, so I won’t bother writing them here. What I think is (short version) that Murdoch and his masters at the NRO are trying to freak out their readers to increase their daily ratings (call them "hits", "click-throughs", "eyeballs", they’re synonymous) and use the increased traffic to sell more ad space. Am I being a cynic? You bet, but that doesn’t mean I’m necessarily wrong (I worked in publishing too, once upon a time–and my wife works in publishing now, so maybe I’m not talking entirely out of my ass).

Even if Murdoch is correct and the Patriot Act really is the best law since the 1st Amendment, what he proposes is at best partial solution–remember there were 19 hijackers that day, and if 5 did their research here, 14 of them did not. If we ban every last Arab from our public buildings, well, that leaves the white Muslims, doesn’t it? My point is that this sort of thing doesn’t work in real life and we should know better than to try.

Anyway, my letter to Murdoch is behind the link.

[Read more…] about An Open Letter to Deroy Murdoch of the National Review Online