The Big Brass Alliance

The Big Brass Alliance is a coalition of bloggers agitating to get the Main$tream Media to wake up about the Downing Street Memo, and incidently, John Bolton's role in suppressing intelligence in the lead up to the Iraq war.

One way we're doing this is to try to get everyone in America- who's with us- to sign John Conyer's letter asking the President to respond to 89 members of Congress over this issue: was there a disinformation campaign that led up to the war in Iraq as several sources now indicate?

Today Billmon gives an excellent summary of the state of the situation and some additional contact numbers you can use if you want to be a crank yanker about this.

He says: ...The corporate media is already predisposed against this story and will respond to public pressure the way it usually does -- by letting the flackcatchers (the omsbudsman or public editor, or whatever the hell he/she is called) catch it for them.

Unless (and this is a big unless) there are fresh developments in the story, or the editorial herd can be persuaded there are unexplored angles that can be developed into fresh stories. Big stories. The only reason the Nixon-era press eventually decided it had gotten Watergate wrong was because Woodstein kept pumping out the exclusives -- each one potentially more explosive than the last.

Whether that same potential exists with the Downing Street memo story isn't clear. Actually, strike that -- it's perfectly clear, but only if the focus is widened to include the entire policymaking process that led up to the invasion. The memo itself may be the smoking gun, but the story is the crime, or crimes rather -- the manipulation of the intelligence, the deliberate efforts to sabotage a diplomatic solution, the use of strategic disinformation (i.e. lies) against a domestic audience, the possible forging of evidence, and, perhaps most importantly of all, the cover up afterwards, which is still in progress.

Josh Marshall explores our national denial about Iraq, and suggests Bolton wasn't the only player out there trying to cover up the real situation about Saddam's lack of weapons of mass destruction.

The Memo itself has created relatively little stir in this country. And I suspect the reason is that if we're honest with ourselves -- across the political spectrum -- it's just not news, by the conventional definition. We already know it's true.

Similar in my mind is the Senate Intelligence Committee's hardly-discussed decision to end its promised inquiry into possible political manipulation of the intelligence that led to war. More recently there was the news that the Army intel analysts responsible for the biggest piece of bad intelligence -- the notorious aluminum tube story -- have gotten performance awards for each of the last three years.

(From my own reporting on the issue, I know that whole sections of last year's Senate Intel report contained knowingly-deceptive, up is down, portrayals of key events -- something that was impossible to see unless you knew what was under key redactions and important details that went unmentioned entirely.)

I'm with Josh. This makes the Senate Inetelligence Committee part of the cover-up. Warbucks are good for all the fat cats, Wrepublican or DINOcrat, non?

Juan Cole also agrees, and discusses some communications involving Wolfowitz and others.

Shakespeare's Sister, the woman who got the Alliance rolling in the first place, reports Conyers has scheduled Congressional hearings on the Memo.

But we're still waiting for John Kerry to make good on his promise.