[Peace-discuss] Dowing Street Memo, Bloggers, Conyers, Impeachment

[David Green]

>From Juan Cole's Blog, Informed Comment

Think Progress, a progressive Web site, surveys the
whole batch of leaked British cabinet documents on war
decision-making, and concludes that they demonstrate a
full knowledge on the part of the Blair government of
the flimsiness of the pretexts being put forward for
going to war against Iraq. 

The bloggers have forced the issue into the corporate
media, and are helping create a real buzz around the
Conyers hearings scheduled for Thursday.

Conyers and his staff are well aware that ordinarily
hearings held by members of the minority party in
Congress (which therefore are unlikely to have teeth)
are routinely ignored by the corporate media. They are
placing their hopes in the blogging world to cover the
hearings and get the word out. They are planning to
release further documents corroborating the Downing
Street Memo.

This entire affair could be a harbinger of what is
coming in 2007. If the Democrats can take back the
Senate in 2006, all of a sudden they could schedule
real investigatory hearings at the Senate Intelligence
Committee, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and
the Senate Armed Services Committee, into Douglas
Feith's Office of Special Plans, into Cheney's
pressure on the CIA analysts, into the fabrication of
intelligence and the political lies that dragged this
country into the Iraq quagmire. Imagine what the
Republicans did to Bill Clinton for merely fibbing
about a desultory relationship (13 meetings) with a
young woman that did not even involve intercourse.
What would be the appropriate punishment for lying
about Iraq's non-existent nuclear weapons program? Or
launching a war of aggression in contravention of the
United Nations Charter? Bush knows very well he will
be a lame duck by January 2007. The real question is
whether he will end up being roasted duck.

Certainly, the end of the story will depend far less
on the contemporary equivalents of Katherine Graham
and Ben Bradlee, who gave Woodward and Bernstein their
heads in uncovering the Watergate scandal, than would
have otherwise been the case. Such members of the
press and editorial elite used to get to decide
whether to bury a scandal or pursue it. Now, that
power has been democratized by the world wide web.
Bloggers will help to decide the end of the story. 


		
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