The right wing would love it if they were. They are fomenting a controversy akin to the CBS/Rather one in order to put the memos and their information in dispute. Michael Isikoff today on Air America hinted that they were fake since no government official had authenticated them. Actually one did, sort of,
He forgot to add that no British government offical had come forward to say they were fake.
more, below the fold
MediaChannel.org sent me this link.
Blogs question credibility of reporter who typed copies, destroyed originals
[…]Many of the same blogs that successfully challenged Dan Rather’s documents are now questioning whether the Downing Street memos are for real.
With Times of London reporter Michael Smith admitting the memos he used in his stories are not originals, but copies he retyped, the controversy seems to be reaching a fever pitch.
“Until tonight … no one questioned the authenticity of the documents provided by the Times of London,” said CaptainsQuartersBlog, one of the sites behind the Rather scandal. “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 Smith, who has written about them in The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Times. […]
Smith told its interviewer: “I was given them last September while still on the [Daily] Telegraph. I was given very strict orders from the lawyers as to how to handle them. I first photocopied them to ensure they were on our paper and returned the originals, which were on government paper and therefore government property, to the source.”
Does this make you doubt the authenticity of the Smith memos or does it make you reconsider the authenticity of the Killian memos?
Update [2005-6-20 16:27:40 by sybil]: from Raw Story
Confirming the Downing Street documents by Larisa Alexandrovna
New documents from across the Atlantic paint a picture of a President bent on war and administration officials determined to deliver war in Iraq at any cost.
Against the backdrop of the Bush Administration’s public statements, the documents raise questions about whether the Blair and Bush administrations covered up earlier actions after the invasion.
The original Downing Street Memo, initially reported by the Times Online on May 1 of this year, includes the transcribed official minutes of a 2002 meeting among British Prime Minister Tony Blair, members of British intelligence, MI-6 and various Bush officials.
Looks like the rightie blogs falling over themselves breathlessly declaring the memos fakes will begin to look rather silly.
Developing…
Hinderaker:
Why would anyone do that? Beats me,
Michael Smith explains, as posted above:
But Hinderaker goes on to say he doubts they are fake. Maybe because no British officials who were at the meetings have come forward to deny them or maybe because they match the existing minutes of the meetings on the original documents?
Michael Smith points out in the ‘Hardball’ interview you’ve linked to that Tony Blair answered a question at a joint press conference with Bush by saying that this was an old document: ie acknowledging it is real.
People in government are usually very careful not to lie about small and specific facts [like whether a document is real] that can be proven wrong in public.
Politicians’ lies are usually about much bigger, more subjective matters which can be reinterpreted afterwards if they prove embarrassing. (For example, the existence of WMD in Iraq: well they used to have WMD; they used WMD in the past; they had the capacity to produce WMD; we were informed by intelligence they had WMD; all the evidence pointed to it at the time etc etc.)
The result of this rule of thumb is that if something is untrue it will be denied as such, and if it is true there will either be silence/obfuscation (as in the current case) or, with intelligence matters, a resort to the old ‘it is government’s longstanding practice to neither confirm nor deny matters to do with the operation of our intelligence agencies’. When you hear this last one, you know that the allegation they are refusing to comment upon has some truth to it.
Funny how the nutjobs cry “Where’s the evidence?” regarding high crimes of the president, but seem to think that mere suspicion is enough to destroy the lives of thousands of men and women rounded up, locked up, interrogated, tortured and never tried for any crimes.
No kidding. As if we don’t already have enough evidence against Bushco…
I read about this tonite on the Captain’s Quarter’s blog and actually e-mailed the Times to see if Michael Smith had a comment about these claims of fakery. I doubt very much that I’ll get an answer, but all in all, I’d say the right-wing knows they’re in trouble here and will try anything it can to discredit the minutes and Smith. What proof do they have? Simply that Smith said they were photocopied? Big deal. No IBM Selectric here, folks.
I saw M.S. interviewed on Hardball. It’s a great site if
you can get streaming video.
http://www.dembloggers.com/
Scroll down to “Hardball, Downing Street Memos”
and you can watch the interview with Michael Smith
where he explains why he had to copy, type, shred etc.
There was no mention of ‘fakery’ just that explanation.
As Isikoff intimated, “not one British Official authenticated them,” but he lied.
Thanks. I didn’t ralize DemBloggers carried MSNBC stuff too. I don’t get that channel. Well, I won’t pay to get that channel. 🙂
Thanks for the link. How can the naysayers possibly dispute that (unless they use the usual tactic of pulling stuff out of their butts).?
The Michael Smith interview is worth watching but be warned the segment is 7.2MB of download for WMP.
Smith was on MSNBC tonight on hardball but not Matthews, he said that they photo copied, sent back the originals to source, then had typist type out the papers, then when the story went to press the originals photo copies were destroyed, so that the paper could then say the documents were not owned by the government or something to that effect, I gathered that is was some type of legal protection to prevent suit by government….details are hard to relay here.
He was very convincing, and the papers are with the source, maybe put back into the files, ????
There were two necessary levels of protection that he outlined.
The first was photocopying the documents and returning the originals so that he no longer possessed the illegally obtained government property. Whether this would work as a protection depends a bit on the case law, I would imagine: I wouldn’t mind betting that the information the documents contained would be considered the intellectual property of the government.
The second was retyping the documents and destroying the photocopies because the copies could be used to trace the source of the leak. My understanding is that there are two risks here: one is the copies may disclose any marks made on the document that was leaked. These marks may be unique to the particular copy because someone has written on it or because it itself was a photocopy when first distributed and bears traceable/unique marks from a photocopier. The other risk is that it is possible to produce limited distribution classified documents with subtle changes to the font, spacing etc so that every copy is unique, but only in ways that the originator can detect. If the originator can get hold of a leaked copy, they can determine whose copy it was. This technology is used for printing Australian Cabinet papers.
Having said all that, and seen or been involved in a number of leak inquiries over the years, I’d have to say almost nobody gets caught.
I always thought that was what was done to the CBS/Rather memos. They were retyped to protect the source. I will never understand why the Democrats ‘rolled over’ on that one. Possibly it was because the originals were no longer extant, unlike this case here.