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Saturday, June 18, 2005

Saturday Ego Blogging
Posted by Jill | 7:28 AM

BBC says we're making a difference:

Since early May, left-leaning blogs have been trying to get mainstream media to pay attention to one - and now two - leaked secret memos from meetings that Prime Minister Tony Blair had with key cabinet members and intelligence figures in the summer before the war in Iraq.

The bloggers believe the memos, leaked to the Sunday Times, show that the Bush administration had made up its mind to attack Iraq and then went about trying to justify it.

With the release of the second memo, blogs can take some credit in raising the profile of the story in the US media.

And Mr Bush's Democratic opponents sense a political opening to attack a now seemingly vulnerable president.

Blog blockbuster

The Sunday Times wrote about the first memo in May. It is the transcript of a Downing Street meeting from July 2002.

In the memo, "C", the head of MI6, said that based on meetings in Washington there had been a shift in attitude and that "military action was now seen as inevitable".

President Bush wanted to remove Saddam Hussein from power and would do so "justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD," the memo said.

Opponents of Mr Bush in the blogosphere have latched onto the next line: "But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

The website Technorati tracks the most talked about news stories in weblogs.

Usually, the torrid pace of the 24-hour news cycle means that stories pass quickly in and out of the news listings, but not what has become known as the Downing Street memos.

Bloggers, keen to keep the pressure on the Bush and Blair governments, have tried to keep the memos in the limelight and put pressure on the mainstream media.

Based on bloggers linking to the Times, the story has rarely left the top five for much of the last month and a half.
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