RAY McGOVERN, rrmcgovern at gmail.com, raymondmcgovern.com
ANNIE MACHON, annie@anniemachon.ch, skype: annie.machon, www.anniemachon.ch
Machon is a former intelligence officer in the UK’s MI5 Security Service (the U.S. counterpart is the FBI), McGovern is a former U.S. Army Intelligence officer and CIA analyst. They just wrote a piece titled “Will Downing St. Memo Recur on Iran?”

They said today: “This week marks the tenth anniversary of a key meeting in the corruption of U.S. and British intelligence to ‘justify’ war on Iraq. Eight months before the ‘shock and awe,’ bombing campaign, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top advisers met to discuss how they might best support George Bush’s decision to achieve ‘regime change’ in Baghdad. The minutes of that briefing were leaked to London’s Sunday Times on May 1, 2005, but mainstream media, the vast majority of which had been cheerleading for the war, did not print them. The Washington Post waited a month and a half to allude to them, and then dismissed them as nothing new.

“The now infamous ‘Downing Street Minutes’ record the July 23, 2002 briefing by the head of British intelligence at 10 Downing Street three days after his trip to Washington to get the word on Iraq from one of Bush’s closest advisers, CIA chief George Tenet. Here is what the head of British Intelligence said:

“‘Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.’

“A decade after the ‘fixed’ intelligence for invading Iraq, there are signs that more fixing is been done, this time to make the case — whatever the facts — for a new war with Iran. The serving head of British Intelligence is exaggerating the ‘threat’ from Iran, which he says is just two years away from getting a nuclear weapon. And Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is echoing the Downing Street Minutes’ theme that war is ‘justified-by-the-conjunction-of-terrorism-and-WMD.’

“Blaming Iranian-backed Hezbollah for the terrorist attack in Bulgaria, Netanyahu asked viewers of Face the Nation and Fox News Sunday to imagine what would happen if the world’s most dangerous regime got the world’s most dangerous weapons. Asked how he knew who was behind the bombing in Bulgaria, Netanyahu said, in effect, Trust me. Sadly, but not surprisingly, most U.S. media are doing just that even though Bulgarian authorities and even the White House are urging caution until a full investigation has been completed.”

Machon and McGovern just appeared on The Real News: “10 Years Since Downing St. Memo: Is It Happening Again?”