Downing Street Memos Evoking Memories of the Cold WarChristopher Hitchens, who pursued the "October Surprise" like the Holy Grail back in the early 1980s
isn't buying this conspiracy theory:
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." A former CIA hand named Ray McGovern has challenged me to debate about the "smoking gun" contained in the Downing Street palimpsests, and I have agreed, in principle. 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. But perhaps both those theories are congruent: One wouldn't want to exclude any options if one were a Republican seeking to incinerate the downtown business HQ of capitalist globalization.Teflon at
Molten Thought links to another debunking of the memo's significance in the AmSpec and muses that for the left, this must be like the good old days of anti-anti-communism. I had
similar thoughts yesterday when Anthony Lewis returned to the pages of the Times.
