(Cross posted from DKos)

It seems like many weeks since I sat down and wrote the sort of diary that I like writing. The one straight from the heart, where you want to say something that matters to you personally and that you want to share.

The trouble is that I have got too immersed in the mechanics of the world of blogging, too involved with the day to day worrying about how to get site visits up on New European Times, how to define its role better, how to attract some of you great posters to put up topics on there. Then we got infiltrated by someone running an experiment on our interaction there as if we were rats in an internet forum maze and I had all the issues of how does a liberal blog handle that sort of situation and was the banning process appropriate for an interesting guy.

This is not why I started writing on my first ever forum, Daily Kos, those long six or more months ago. Something was going askew somewhere.
It is true that during this time I was able to write two or three diaries that did matter to me. Things were happening in the UK that my senses said were building up to something big. A quiet election campaign was suddenly transformed by events that will remain long after it reaches conclusion and will have repercussions that will reverberate after the vote count tomorrow.

I wanted Kossacks to know about and to recognise that in the right hands of the right people, the events that were occurring could have an impact on George Bush and United States opinion.

It concerned, of course, the evidence about the legality of the Iraq war that was demonstrated in the leaked paper prepared by the Attorney General.

Then came the even more devastating revelation of the minutes of the Prime Minister’s meeting where the decision to go to war was acknowledged as having been taken by the US way before any of the charade on decision-making took place in out own Parliament, your Congress or in front of the wretchedly reduced world forum of the United Nations.

A great lie was enacted upon our people and the evidence is now available as the proof that even deep conviction needs if it is to overturn the power of the media control of those who perpetuated this shameful untruth.

Many people responded to those diaries that urged that this could have political significance in your own country. A number of  Kossack said that they would be emailing their political representatives of whom Congressman Conyers was one. We will never know if this had an effect. As I have written before, in this sort of situation you never know what effect you may have, you can only do what your conscience says is right. And do it loudly and as often as you can.

Many of you saw the BBC Question Time programme when the leaders of the three main UK political parties had to sit and face real questions from real people. The most penetrating questions came, as it happens, from three women. The camera captured one of these, about whom I will add a comment to this diary when it is published, full on as she responded to an answer from Tony Blair “If you weren’t fraudulent, then you were criminally negligent”.

Did she, by this sharp and direct response, change anything? Did she help create a climate in the country by this lucid and precise statement, on the most widely watched election debate that we have had, and help make the rest of the media wake up and have the bravery to do what they have now done? I don’t know and she will not either. She did what she felt in her heart what she needed to do.

Now I have not started this diary to write about these issues. Yet I cannot move on before I say something else in regard to them.

One of the difficulties I had in those diaries was coping with those who would shrug them off and say the bulk of the American people would be unmoved by the events to which they referred.  It was said that they had no relevance, that we should get Blair in handcuffs before expecting the States to take any heed and did anyone really expect this to happen. I needed and got help from many of you, including Armando to whom I am grateful, to keep those diaries afloat and on track.

Well, now Congressman Conyers has taken up the mantle more effectively than I ever could. His questions to Bush are questions with which he confronts the American people:

We have of course known for some time that subsequent to the invasion there have been a variety of varying reasons proffered to justify the invasion, particularly since the time it became evident that weapons of mass destruction would not be found. This leaked document – essentially acknowledged by the Blair government – is the first confirmation that the rationales were shifting well before the invasion as well.

This is the first step before the Congressman and his colleagues can address the issue of the legality of the war for which again London has now provided vital evidence.

Trust his judgement that there is not just political capital to be gained here but something much more fundamental. It is to do with the rights of Congress and the upholding of the Constitution. It is just not about recognising yesterday’s wrong but about preventing another tomorrow.

Yesterday, he got overwhelming support. He will need it tomorrow and he will need it for the next few months. Even within our own ranks he hs been forced to justify himself:

One commenter stated that, if I am the only signatory on the letter, it is “just a drop in the ocean”.  Not sure I agree but it doesn’t really matter.  I am not alone and with your help many, many Members of Congress will sign on to the letter and many, many media contacts will hear about this report.  One strategy of the right wing is to make you feel powerless and that your efforts do not matter.  You must not and cannot allow that to happen.

A corollary to that is the view, reflected by many commenters, that this is “old news”.  I agree that many of us have known and believed for a long, long time that the case for this war was a deliberate lie.  The worst mistake in politics, however, is to assume that everyone else knows what you know.  Many, many of our fellow Americans have not come to this realization yet.  We need to continue to get this information out to them.

Please,let this not be just today’s issue that sinks down the recommended list as the next breaking story takes our  attention. For this story to strike home, for it to take hold in the minds of that 1.8% that you need for 2006 and 2008, it needs your sustained activism. Put it on a yellow sticky on your monitor and don’t take it down until the Republicans, not just George Bush, are out of office – everywhere.

So I want to move on, but I do not want to let go. It is all part of the same coat of shame that covers our elected governments. The issue is this: an illegal war, now demonstrated, was started in our name based upon untruths, now revealed, that, and this is the next step, cynically and deliberately exposed a nation of men, women and children to unnecessary death and grievous injury.

You have known that for some time? You have evidence for that astounding indictment of your own government?  Good, but does Congressman Conyers have to come on here and say again:

The worst mistake in politics, however, is to assume that everyone else knows what you know.  Many, many of our fellow Americans have not come to this realization yet.  We need to continue to get this information out to them

Knowing and saying is not enough. We can only get others to see by presenting he searing evidence to strip away the layers of accumulated Fox News disinformation from the eyes of those whom we need to address. We cannot wait in the hope that a leaked memorandum of a meeting in London will do it for us.

Think about what we are saying. Our countries decided on a policy knowing that a consequence would be the deaths of innocent civilians not as a collateral to a bomb or a shell that was necessarily fired in order to secure the safety of our sons and daughters in the military but as a part of a coldly calculated strategy.

I will tell you right now, I do not know if this statement is supportable. I do know that I could only argue at this time from conviction to a Republican that is so, and not from clear evidence.

Every bomb that goes off, and there are more and more of them every day, that kills the men and women and children in Iraq is an insurgents bomb – it is an atrocity committed by Iraqis against Iraqis; a terrible and ignominious harm against their own people. It is with just that truth that is how Fox News lets your countrymen and my countrymen sleep more easily at night.

There is another truth and I believe we must gather the evidence. The other truth is that we made this happen, but not through stupidity, or mistakes or by misjudgement in the way that we have characterised these events. Characterisation now willingly encouraged by the White House “I think, yes, on balance, with hindsight, it was a mistake to disband the Iraqi army and the police”.

It has happened because we calculated that it would happen. It is taking place because it was there in our Pentagon model and we decided it was acceptable collateral that we would plan to and allow for in our post-war occupation strategy.

Is it worth taking this next step that will clutter up DKos with diaries which attempt to gather and display such evidence as may be out there? Is it “old news”, made tired by repetition here? Are those of us concerned to take the laser down right to the end of this rotten war with a vigour, if without the resources, applied to investigating Gannon, going to be told it has no relevance and no interest for the bulk of the American people?

Tell me and save my time. I have a three week old DKos alumni site in its infancy, “New European Times”, that needs nurture, support and encouragement.