Billmon: Hard Evidence

Dick Polman, the national political writer for my local paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, drops this disheartening line into an otherwise encouraging column on the Downing Street memo:

This [the memo] is one of the few pieces of hard evidence that supports critics who contend that Bush hyped a nonexistent threat -- Hussein's purported weapons of mass destruction -- as his justification for waging war.

Thus demonstrating, in a concrete way, the self-reinforcing nature of journalistic self-suppression. As anyone who's been following the story knows, there is plenty of "hard evidence" of the administration's determination to use an illusory WMD threat as a pretext for war -- ranging from the case of the aluminum tubes that were not atomic centrifuge parts, to the uranium-from-Niger fraud, to the fanciful tales peddled by the Iraqi defector appropriately code named "Curveball" -- stories that were recklessly recycled by the administration despite clear warnings from Curveball's German handlers.