As background, recall that we and Seixon had shown the first round of memos were suspicious because they were typed on an old typewriter by Smith, then copied a few times for aging, then scanned into a PDF file for presentations. All this to avoid tracing back to his source. Like having them typed into MS Word wouldn’t accomplish the same thing?? We also found Smith to be a rabid ‘impeach Bush’ nutcase.

So here is Sexion’s updated information on the mysteriously whacky Mr. Smith (please go read the whole thing):

I have long asked why there are no retyped copies of the “second lot” of papers, the DSM and the Briefing Paper. I have contended that this is because they don’t exist, that Smith never had them retyped. Thus I was stunned at seeing Smith say this:

When I received the latest batch of documents I followed a very similar procedure, typing up the text and shredding the copies I had. At no point was I ever in possession of an original document, only photocopies of those original documents. Everything I did was designed solely to protect the source. That is a responsibility that every journalist has.

Alright. So where are these retyped copies? Why are there PDFs available of the retyped documents of the September Six, and not the DSM?

“Quagmire” is not a state of war but a state of mind. So the senator’s words aren’t necessarily wrong, they are merely irresponsible and potentially deadly — to U.S. interests and Middle East freedom.

When U.S. troops landed on Omaha Beach on D-day, they were pinned down by heavy fire and couldn’t move. If some wiseguy had grabbed a megaphone and announced, “I hate to tell you, but this invasion has been grossly mismanaged and we are now stuck in a quagmire,” he would not have been wrong. But luckily those soldiers decided that Omaha Beach was no quagmire. They fought their way inland and helped liberate Europe.

He goes on to point out that the public perception of a ‘quagmire’ deflates the solidiers’ interest to win. So what Kennedy is doing through word games is trying to convince the soldiers to give up, so Bush will give up. Of course giving up could be deadly to these same soldiers. It has been their fierce determination to win and dedication to the cause that has limited their casualties and thrown the enemy off balance.

What Kennedy appears to dream for is the second coming of Vietnam. Which is not what any sane American wants

Our defeat was catastrophic for Southeast Asia. Tom Wicker — a liberal New York Times columnist and leading critic of the U.S. role in Vietnam — summed things up four years after our final defeat. “What Vietnam has given us instead of a bloodbath [is] a vast tide of human misery in Southeast Asia — hundreds of thousands of homeless persons in United Nations camps, perhaps as many more dead in flight, tens of thousands of the most pitiable forcibly repatriated to Cambodia, no one knows how many adrift on the high seas or wandering the roads.”

We failed to follow through and Asians suffered.

And apparently the liberal democrats’ hatred of Bush now cannot be satiated without a severe loss in Iraq and the ME. Mr Gerernter’s call on Mr. Bush is a call on all of us who want to change the ME to the better and avoid another 9-11.

The Bush administration must explain to the nation that quagmires are created by politicians and pundits, not soldiers.

Consider this my small contribution to the effort.

Thanks to Bill Crawford at All Things Conservative for passing me a link to his post on a recent LA Times column by the strange Mr. Smith. Strange because he hunts up old typewriters to hide his sources when any old PC with MSWord would accomplish the same result.

As Bill said in his post, where do you start? Well I will start at the beginnig. Note to Bill: I wanted to read the article first and get my impressions down before reading and addressing your points – so bear with me please. My guess is we will come to a lot of the same conclusions.

Smith starts off with a highly improbably history:

The six leaked documents I took away with me that night were to change completely my opinion of the decision to go to war and the honesty of Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Bush.

They focused on the period leading up to the Crawford, Texas, summit between Blair and Bush in early April 2002, and were most striking for the way in which British officials warned the prime minister, with remarkable prescience, what a mess post-war Iraq would become. Even by the cynical standards of realpolitik, the decision to overrule this expert advice seemed to be criminal.

Who is he kidding? Everyone warned about the possible challenges with Iraq! Did Mr. Smith forget about the dire predictions of the time?

(1) A bloody ethnic civil war would erupt between the Shia, Kurds and Sunnis
(2) The ‘arab street’ would rise up and topple moderate friendly states because the west was invading a muslim country
(3) Israel would be attacked and the region would erupt into war across many states
(4) Saddam would use his WMDs on Turkey and Israel
(5) Turkey would disintegrate into civil strife because the Kurds would create a Kurdistan state on their border
(6) The US would be bogged down in an endless quagmire of urban fighting with tens of thousands of dead Americans

Where was the intrepid reporter when all of these possible outcomes and more were debated? And these memos of vague challenges post success are what finally turned him into a Bush hating zealot bent on riling up Americans to impeach their president? Well you do have to admit the guy has an enormous ego to think a second rate UK reporter could make America turn on the President who saw them through 9-11 and has kept us safe from attack since then.

Then he admits he is fronting for a political hacthet job by liberals who wanted to wound Blair politically and were likley against the war in any event:

The second batch of leaks arrived in the middle of this year’s British general election, by which time I was writing for a different newspaper, the Sunday Times. These documents, which came from a different source, related to a crucial meeting of Blair’s war Cabinet on July 23, 2002. The timing of the leak was significant, with Blair clearly in electoral difficulties because of an unpopular war.

At least he confirms what the blogosphere figured out (hat tip Seixon for being the one to figure this out) that the Downing Street Memos are two distinct sets, and the only ones the British government have vetted and confirmed are the first set – not the most infamous ones.

Then he apparently deliberately misquotes the memos to draw a charge he cannot back up:

It said that Blair agreed at Crawford that “the UK would support military action to bring about regime change.” Because this was illegal, the officials noted, it was “necessary to create the conditions in which we could legally support military action.”

The memos actually say there were doubts if the legal basis used PREVIOUSLY to attack Iraq for non-compliance (remember all those air strikes) could be used again. The quote he snips actually says they would have to make a good argument for legality of the action – not that it was illegal. If he can’t even read and comprehend the very documents he uses to make these baseless claims, why would anyone take this con artist seriously?

Then the tin foil hat came out:

But another part of the memo is arguably more important. It quotes British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon as saying that “the U.S. had already begun ‘spikes of activity’ to put pressure on the regime.” This we now realize was Plan B.

I honestly think MR. Smith was not on planet Earth during the run up to the war. Yes, the Bush administration was putting pressure on Hussein to prove he would not misuse his WMD TECHNOLOGY and could be trusted not to provide them into terrorist hands. And the first step was to pressure Hussein into revealing all his weapons capabilities for the world to see. The fact Bush (and me and 2/3rds of the planet) had little faith in Hussein to comply is not Plan B – it is common sense.

And he really shows off his ignorance with his final attempt at spinning:

The number of bombs dropped on southern Iraq by allied aircraft shot up to 54.6 tons in September alone, with the increased rates continuing into 2003.

The US started moving men and material into the region at this time. The bombings were to take out forward defensive and offensive battlements in order to make sure Saddam wouldn’t try and inflict damage on the troops gathering on his border.

Like I said – the guy is either a poor liar or simply ignorant of the times.

OK, he could be both.

Now to Bill’s incredible piece of analysis. Bill does the work I did not have time to find and transcribe the exact, complete statements which results in COMPLETELY different results. So Bill proves Mr. Smith lies through the altering of the record. Is this a standard part of the journalistic code of ethics? Must be, since no other journalists are calling him on this. They support these lies through their silence. Excellent work Mr. Crawford!

A few weeks ago, at an airport in Europe, I saw Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code staring at me across the bookstore bins. I had seen it many times before and averted my gaze, but I was facing a long delay, and I suddenly thought: May as well get it over with.

Well, of course I knew it would be bad. I just didn’t know that it would be that bad. Never mind for now the breathless and witless style, or the mashed-paper characters, or the lazy, puerile reliance on incredible coincidence to flog the lame plot along.
…
Over the past month, I have hardly been able to open my e-mail without a flood of similarly portentous tripe concerning the “Downing Street Memo(s).” This time, it is not the interior of a Templar Church but the style of a clerk in the British Foreign Office that furnishes “the key to all mythologies.”
…
Other correspondents have helpfully added other “smoking guns” as e-mail attachments. A man named Morgan Reynolds, a former chief economist at the Bush Labor Department and now an instructor at Texas A&M, has proof that the World Trade Center was laid low by a “controlled demolition” and not by the hijacked planes. This is a refreshing change from the Gore Vidal view that the Bush administration knowingly grounded all military aircraft in order to give the al-Qaida teams a clear shot.

Read the whole thing. It’s spot on.
Hat Tip to RealClearPolitics

Mark Coffey has thoughts on this provacitive article as well.

In this memo there is a very bizarre reference to Seymour Hersh – yes that Seymour Hersh.

Condi’s enthusiasm for regime change is undimmed. But there were some signs, since we last spoke, of greater awareness of the practical difficulties and political risks. (See the attached piece by Seymour Hersh which Christopher Meyer says gives a pretty accurate picture of the uncertain state of the debate in Washington.)

Now why would the British Ambassodor to the US, Sir Christopher Meyer, reference a fringe liberal writer as someone being accurate to the pulse of America at this time? For one thing Hersh has never been accurate in capturing the broad pulse of America, just the liberal enclaves in NY City. But let’s look at this closer. Here is a PBS interview with Sir Christopher Meyer on these very events and times, and listen to the tone of his comments about Bush, Blair and Iraq

Well, it was very different then. What you have to remember is that before 9/11, the issue really between Britain and the United States — and indeed for the whole Security Council – was, how do you make sanctions work better? The whole sanction system was going wrong for two reasons. One was it had become unbelievably cumbersome and there was this oil for food program, which was being partly hampered because the kinds of innocuous stuff that people were allowed to sell to the Iraqis was being held up by very cumbersome sanctions of the system.

The other thing, of course, was that the sanctions were beginning to leak more and more and [be] violated.
…
We finally got to the White House after this very emotional morning [in New York]. One of the issues was, were the Americans going to use 9/11, quite apart from hunting down Al Qaeda, to go after Iraq as well? Tony Blair’s view was, whatever you’re going to do about Iraq, you should concentrate on the job at hand, and the job at hand was get Al Qaeda. Give the Taliban an ultimatum, and everything else was secondary to that.

We arrived at the White House, … and immediately, the president took Blair by the elbow and moved him off into the corner of the room, where we all congregated, and he said, I believe, to the prime minister, “I agree with you that the job in hand is Al Qaeda and Taliban. Iraq, we keep for another day.”
…
I think Blair and Bush have come to the view that you have to deal with Saddam Hussein through very different paths. Blair was prime minister of the United Kingdom in 1997, 1998, when Saddam provoked the first crisis with the inspectors. So Blair has had experience from that time, formed a view at that time — a view which said the international community, one way or another, has got to deal with Saddam Hussein.

President Bush comes into government in January 2001 and is not immediately focused on Iraq from a war fighting point of view, to put it crudely. For Bush, the transforming moment as far as Iraq is concerned, is 9/11. … They have an earlier priority, which is the Taliban and Al Qaeda. But once they’re out of the way, more or less, then Iraq comes up front. And as it comes up front, the nexus, the two lines cross between the way in which Blair has first seized the issue and the way that Bush subsequently is.

They’re not coming from identical positions; they come from positions which intersect
…
Well, you’ve got to remember something about Tony Blair and this is something I’ve had to remind people of frequently, particularly those who have accused him of being “Bush’s poodle.” When we had the start of the crisis with Saddam Hussein in 1998, which then led to the expulsion of the previous set of inspectors, UNSCOM, Blair made a very interesting speech to I think it was members of the Labor Party in January 1998, in which idea for idea, proposition for proposition, he said about Saddam Hussein what he’s been saying in the last days, weeks and months. [He] challenged [the] international community [to] try and deal with it by diplomacy; if you can’t deal with it by diplomacy, it’s got to have a credible threat of force. …

Of course, in January 1998, he was a voice crying in the wilderness. But when this kind of policy thinking started in the White House in the first quarter of 2002, I think Blair was ready to start discussing seriously with the Americans what this meant, and if this was going to be pursued, how did you do it?
…
It may well be that that was Blair’s intuition. But certainly at that stage, it was not inevitable. I know that President Bush has always believed that Saddam Hussein was a leopard who would never change his spots, so that the U.S. administration — or at least the president — did not believe it was possible to disarm Iraq without removing Saddam Hussein. …

On the other hand, I think if you had questioned people in the White House all through that, yes, they would have preferred to see, if you like, the Iraqi regime implode under pressure from the outside and have Saddam removed by some internal process, which would have obviated the need for an invasion.

Does this sound like a man who would refer to Seymour Hersh as accurately reflecting the American position?????

What game is Michael Smith playing? Well obviously Sir Christopher Meyer could shed light on item in the Manning DMS. Maybe someone should ask him.

There are two exclusive sets of documents here. One is the package of 6 documents he wrote stories on in September 2004 (Daily Telegraph, September 18). These documents have been quoted by the Butler Commission, and are most likely authentic, even though I only found evidence of two of them being quoted or referenced in the Butler Commission Report.

The second set of documents is the DSM itself, and the Briefing Paper. These two documents have no typewriter-written PDFs, like the previous six. Why is that?

Which took me to this extensive posting on events leading up to the big DSM discussions.

The news stories Michael Smith ran in September 2004 cited all of these first six documents, yet not the latter two that surround the whole Downing Street controversy that started on May 1, 2005 when Smith published his article. Is it not conceivable that Smith would have cited the Downing Street Memo back in September 2004 if he had it in his possession at the time? Why wait almost 8 months to release the more potent documents? I think the answer is that the Downing Street Memo and accompanying Briefing Paper did not arrive into his possession until after the US election. Smith has not commented on when he received the Downing Street Memo, only referencing that he received “the memos” in September. What “the memos” means in this context is perhaps purposely unclear.

I was wondering why the one really controversial memo was not in PDF. I was not aware that the Daily Telegraph had partial photocopies of the originals. I had my suspicions, Sexion has the goods. Most people who dismiss these memos as fakes rely on the fact that the British government has never refuted them. But the question now is, out of all these memos which ones were the ones Blair’s government did not refute?

The “smokescreen” is trying to get people to think that the Butler Commission has quoted the DSM, that Jack Straw and others have vetted the DSM, and that the DSM was part of the original bundle of authentic documents in September. This is of course false, deceptive, and dishonest.

The shell game! When someone asks Blair or someone in his government to address the memos, they are thinking the six retyped memos and not the ones which stand out for their lack of even a complete PDF?

What in the world is Michael Smith playing at?

Read the rest of the post by Sexion

One knowledgeable official familiar with the memo cited by Durbin as well as other memos said the FBI agent made no such allegation and that the memo described only someone chained to the floor. Anything beyond that is simply an interpretation, the official said.

What is wrong with liberals that they need lie about reality to make slanderous points against America? Never mind, that was a dumb question.

Is it obvious now that we need to make sure Hollywood’s influence on the liberals and MSM does not get anymore out of control?

UPDATE: Hugh Hewitt has the original memos and they seem to be consistent with what Durbin said. OK, Durbin is simply a slimer, not a liar. Mark that down.

Manassas, VA: …I hope that your presenting this issue to the world helps the U.S. people change our leadership perhaps sooner than the next election. Do you feel this is grounds for us to do so, i.e., to impeach our current President (granted this may not be your area of expertise)?

Michael Smith: I personally believe there are grounds for it but not yet, not in the memos we’ve seen. It needs U.S. reporters to get to work to take the documents and their implications forward.
…
Orlando, FL: You have experienced reaction to the Bush/Blair mendacity on the Iraq run up on both sides of the pond.. How do you compare them?

Is there a chance Blair will eventual go with a vote of No Confidence (nice that you have it)..

Here, the chance of Bush being impeached seems slim… Thought the facts certainly justify it..

Michael Smith: I think Blair will go although I personally think Bush is much more at risk because there is an unstoppable public feeling against the continued presence of U.S. soldiers as targets for insurgents. The polls and the public pressure are not going Bush’s way. There is no doubt in my mind that the administration lied and distorted the truth, one Congress begins to realise the scale of it, Bush could be in serious trouble.
…
Cocoa, FL: ….A great number of voters are concerned and will our Congress have support for an investigation with what is known? Are there other facts we still don’t know publicly?

Michael Smith: Yes there are other facts you still don’t know and the media should be using these public documents as a base from which to find them out because it is those facts that will really damage Bush.
…
Washington, D.C.: I think the implications of all of this information is truly unknown. Our Post reporters chat with us here online saying that it’s not going to lead to impeachment. I am not so sure. But if not that far, I see this as causing a great deal of problems for our government. What do you think will be the consequences, if any, for Blair?

Michael Smith: I bow to their better judgment on impeachment. I do think that the pressure now is such that it could go that way but only with continued pressure from us journalists and you the people. I firmly believe that Congress will turn against this awful ill-conceived war.

And on and on it went. One has to wonder if Mr. Smith was so desparate to see Bush impeached he decided to ‘sex up’ the documents?

UPDATE:

Check out this excellent post at UNCoRRELATED on the art of forgery and similarities to the Downing St Memos. For the record, I am still not convinced the information in these memos is news at all and therefore these are forgeries, but Michael Smith may be end up being a very interesting news story himself.

Up front let me say I share Powerline’s skepticism regarding why anyone would go through the effort to forge such non-news. And the lack of any rebuttal from Blair’s administration is curious. But it is also curious why Mr. Smith had to find a typewriter and then not scan in the typewritten pages. Why did he not simply transcribe the contents into his PC? Maybe he will be forthcoming in the next days as to why he went through all these efforts. Therefore I see Capt Ed’s points as well. – AJStrata

I am bumping this to the top of the page – 6/19/06

The stunning confession by the UK reporter who has those vague and unsurprising Downing Street memos that he typed them from the originals, and then destroyed the originals, is too much.

Smith told AP he protected the identity of the source he had obtained the documents from by typing copies of them on plain paper and destroying the originals.

The AP obtained copies of six of the memos (the other two have circulated widely). A senior British official who reviewed the copies said their content appeared authentic. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of the secret nature of the material.

Why would one destroy the originals? You could copy them so as to hide incriminating evidence of who the UK government weasal is (and who should come forward on the record if he feels so strongly about this subject), but why destroy the originals. Was Dan Rather involved at all in this?

The only reason I hesitate to call the memos fake is the fact they are so innocuous. Why bother faking them? The memos talk about US and UK discussions 8 months out from the actual invasion, and unsurprisingly find US plans in flux and incomplete. The UK side is not keen on regime change, and many in this European country share the same biases about the US as their fellow Europeans. Big deal.

[OK. Concern about Bush's last flight physical in the TANG is trivial too, granted]

If there was something truly incriminating I would have my doubts about the authenticity of the memos. But we all know there were plenty of doubts about Iraq which were debated for the next 8 months that followed the events in these memos (circa March July 2002). 8 months that included President Bush calling on Congress to support him, which they did in October 2002. 8 months that included President Bush going to the UN to call for a last resolution for Hussein to come clean or else, which they did November 2002. 8 months in which Hussein defied the UN resolution, ending in invasion.

So why destroy the originals? I understand this liberal reporter thinks (more like fantasizes) he has some Pulitzer Prize making goods on Bush, so why destroy the one tie to reality? While the international, liberal MSM draws wild conclusions in their memory erasing zeal over these memos (I could have sworn they reported on all this doubt, concern and hesitation prior to the war, but maybe it was some other press), I will have to conclude they are rea – and trivial.

Unless someone can show alterations from the originals.

Now THAT would be a story.

UPDATE:

Unsurprisingly Ed Morrissey and Little Green Footballs see shades of 60 Minutes in all of this.

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey has updates on the original post above which expands on the ludicrous excuses given by Michael Smith, possibly a Dan Rather wannabe.

“It was these photocopies that I worked on, destroying them shortly before we went to press on Sept 17, 2004,” he added. “Before we destroyed them the legal desk secretary typed the text up on an old fashioned typewriter.”

UPDATE II:

As Morrissey properly asks, why a typewriter? Why not just type them into MSWord in a computer if you are worried about an evidentiary trail? The file name and date in the computer is as far back as anyone could track the information. Check out the PDF files at Rawstory and notice the attempt to make them look like copies of original typewritten documents – why the charade? Those are not copies of a new typewritten page, they have been put through the same multi-copy cycles as the Rathergate documents were to make them look old. But why? These are not from a few years ago? Why are these not scanned in with today’s basic technologies that are capable of clear reproductions of originals?

Obviously someone was trying to stage something. No one is going to use a typewriter in 2000 to document government records. And the fact these forgeries were copied multiple times to ‘age’ them shows a real ignorance about forging documents. Since the Smith admits these were typed this year, why the bogus aging? How does he explain that?

UPDATE III: These documents were scanned into PDF Sep 2004, the originals written circa July 2002. Again, why the poor quality unless there was a deliberate attempt to deceive the public?

UPDATE IV:

I guess the other questions are why hold these since Sep 2004, when they were scanned? Is there any coincidence that Sep 2004 is the time of Dan Rather’s forgeries as fact story? Hmmmm.

Thanks to Morrissey and USS Neverdock for their work on this.

Check out these blown up snaps from the documents and realize these were supposedly newly typed documents (per Smith’s claim) scanned in Sept 2004, and then ask yourself why do they look like they have been copied a few times over:

Image 1

Image 2

Why all the extra effort on the typewriter instead of transcribing them into his PC? Why not scan the typewritten pages into PDF instead of copies that look like they have been copied numerous times? Why all this extra effort when transcribed PC files provide no path back to his source – which he claims is his motive.

UPDATE V:

There is a good discussion at All Things Conservative [hat tip Powerline] on the subject.

UPDATE VI:

OK, Smith is a very common name so don’t take this too far – but hat tip to Little Green Footballs for pointing to a post at Scylla & Charybdis that recalls the reporter hired by Mary Mapes in the Rathergate story was also a Michael Smith. Of course the Mapes Smith supposedly lived in Texas, as I recall, and the DMS Smith is in the UK. But the coincidence is interesting.

Mark Coffey at Decision 08 has been doing a bang up job on keeping track of the total picture on this subject. He started with a great background piece that covers some history. His latest is on translating british english to american english. More here and here

One thing Mark has right – this is a huge waste of time. There is no “there” there.

But the MSM obssession to find a Bush conspiracy on Iraq seems limitless.