Now I want you to pay attention here Moot...
"The media and the Leftists have had a field day with the Downing Street memos that they claim imply that the Bush administration lied about the intelligence on WMD in order to justify the attack on Iraq.
Despite the fact that none of the memos actually say that, none of them quote any officials or any documents, and that the text of the memos show that the British government worried about the deployment of WMD by Saddam against Coalition troops, Kuwait and/or Israel, the meme continues to survive.
Until tonight, however, no one questioned the authenticity of the documents provided by the Times of London. That has now changed, as Times reporter
Michael Smith admitted that the memos he used are not originals, but retyped copies:
The eight memos — all labeled "secret" or "confidential" — were first obtained by British reporter Michael Smith, who has written about them in The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Times.
Smith told AP he protected the identity of the source he had obtained the documents from by typing copies of them on plain paper and destroying the originals.
The AP obtained copies of six of the memos (the other two have circulated widely). A senior British official who reviewed the copies said their content
appeared authentic. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of the secret nature of the material.
Readers of this site should recall this set of circumstances from last year. The Killian memos at the center of CBS' 60 Minutes Wednesday report on George Bush' National Guard service supposedly went through the same laundry service as the Downing Street Memos.
Bill Burkett, once he'd been outed as the source of the now-disgraced Killian memos, claimed that a woman named Lucy Ramirez provided them to him -- but that he made copies and burned the originals to protect her identity or that of her source.
Why would a reporter do such a thing? While reporters need to protect their sources, at some point stories based on official documents will require authentication -- and as we have seen with the Killian memos, copies make that impossible.
The AP gets a "senior British official" to assert that the content "appeared authentic", which only means that the content seems to match what he thinks he knows.
This, in fact, could very well be
another case of "fake but accurate", where documents get created after the fact to support preconceived notions about what happened in the past.
One fact certainly stands out -- Michael Smith cannot authenticate the copies. And absent that authentication, they lose their value as evidence of anything."
Downing Street Memos are Fake?
Hmmmm....Bill Burkett....Now where have we heard that name.....?
"Burkett's claims about the origins of the documents have since changed several times. He admitted to lying to CBS about the origin of the memos when he said he got them from fellow guardsman George Conn,[6] then claiming that he received the Killian documents from a woman calling herself "Lucy Ramirez." To date, she has not been identified. The documents, purported to have been typed in the early seventies, are widely reported to have almost certainly been produced with a computer using Microsoft Word on default settings.[7] Burkett claims that he burned the originals after faxing copies of the documents to CBS.[8]
When asked about Burkett's role in the controversy, David Van Os, Burkett's lawyer, responded with the hypothetical that someone may have reconstructed documents that the preparer believed existed in 1972 or 1973.[9]
Bill Burkett - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
:lamo Good grief! Give me a break...You people want something so to be true that you make **** up to support your stupid claims....Do us all a favor, and stick to the topic will ya?