The Downing Street Memos: "The memos indeed show us nothing new. Simply from President Bush’s body language and obvious impatience in the summer of 2002, not to mention Vice-President Cheney’s dissing of Hans Blix and the UN weapons inspectors, I figured that they all had made up their minds for war. So it’s not surprising to see a meeting of the British government at that time trying to come to terms with what their large Atlantic brother was preparing to do.

The memos themselves give few specifics in terms of the exact words of one player or another, but taken together they show a clear pattern of fixing the intelligence (yes, as in fixing an election), developing ploys to justify attacking Iraq, and a lack of planning for what the war might yield.

The memos are the equivalent of the Pentagon Papers: not so voluminous, but definitive. Some brave (or fed-up) soul in the higher reaches of the British government is taking a tremendous risk to tell us the truth, not unlike Mark Felt, who played it differently than Daniel Ellsberg."

(Via WhirledView.)