This may come across as tooting my own horn, but to heck with it.  If you’ve been reading this blog for a while (there may be two of you…Celeste and Mom) you know that I was a tad bewildered by the lack of attention the main stream media was giving the story that has now become "The Downing Street Memo Affair."

I first heard/blogged about the whole Downing Street thing on May 9, 2005 after reading on RawStory.com about 88 Congressmen who signed a letter asking the president to react to the London Times story of May 2, 2005 that started the whole thing.  At the time I didn’t find it too odd that I’d found the story from an online source, and I figured I’d read about it in the paper in the following days.

On May 12 I posted about it again wondering why no major outlet in the US, except for a brief headline on CNN.com had carried the story.  Granted the story had a UK genesis, but once the members of Congress sent the letter shouldn’t it have become at least mildly interesting to the press?

Now Jay Rosen at PressThink has put together a great piece that outlines how the non-starter of a story in the US became so big six weeks later.  The time-line of events, and the comments from editors who missed the story the first time, and regretted it, are interesting in and of themselves.  What’s more interesting to me is Jay’s hypothesis that unlike the old days there is now a "Court of Appeals" in news judgement.

As Jay points out, in the old days this story probably would have died.  But because of the noise that was generated online, some by bloggers and some by emails to the editors from pissed off citizens, the story wasn’t allowed to die (apparently it is still in the top 10 stories on the London Times site).  The media was forced to re-examine the story and eventually it picked up some steam.

Frankly I’m still shocked that this story was missed at all.  Some people are retrospectively saying it really wasn’t a story because the memos only confirmed what we already knew (the Bush administration had declared war on terror, they believed that Saddam Hussein was harboring terrorists and might give them WMDs, etc.).  I’m gonna call bullshit on that one.

What made the memo so stunning is that it points out that the administration, with the help of Blair’s boys, needed to "create" conditions to justify the war. It also made clear that in April, 2002 the Bush administration had secured Blair’s support for an invasion. That was a year before the start of the war and during a time when the Bush and Blair folks were all denying that war was afoot.  That’s what led to the Congressmen’s letter to the President, which asked these questions:

• Did you or anyone in your Administration obtain Britain’s commitment to invade prior to this time?
• Was there an effort to create an ultimatum about weapons inspectors in order to help with
  the justification for the war as the minutes indicate?
• At what point in time did you and Prime Minister Blair first agree it was necessary to
  invade Iraq?
• Was there a coordinated effort with the U.S. intelligence community and/or British
  officials to “fix” the intelligence and facts around the policy as the leaked document
  states?
• Do you or anyone in your Administration dispute the accuracy of the leaked document?
• Were arrangements being made, including the recruitment of allies, before you sought
  Congressional authorization go to war?

Now the memo COULD be hooey, although no one that attended the meeting from which the memo emerged has denied its accuracy.  For our purposes here it doesn’t matter whether or not it’s true.  What matters is that there was a damning document from a very important source that led to dozens of Congressmen to publicly calling out the President. That alone made it a story and the media certainly missed it.