We need to turn up the heat over British memo.

Byline: GUEST VIEWPOINT By Jack Dresser For The Register-Guard

On May 1, the Sunday Times of London published a leaked `UK eyes only' transcript of minutes from a meeting of Prime Minister Tony Blair and other top British officials on July 23, 2002, now known as the Downing Street Memo.

On May 5, 2005, Rep. Peter DeFazio joined Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., and 87 other members of the U.S. House of Representatives - including Oregon Congressmen David Wu and Earl Blumenauer - as signatories to a letter to President Bush posing five questions arising from the memo. To date there has been no White House response. The mainstream U.S. media are largely ignoring the story.

During the Downing Street meeting, a participant identified as `C' reported from recent talks in Washington that `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' - to sell the case for war to the American public. There was `no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record,' C continued, and `there was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.'

Discussion ensued. The British defense secretary said that the U.S. had already begun "spikes of activity" (reported elsewhere as multiple air strikes designed to provoke an Iraqi military response providing an excuse to attack).

Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said `it seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action' although `the case was thin' since `Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.'

The British attorney general said that `the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action,' and Blair stated that `it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the U.N. inspectors." Saddam, of course, avoided this trap by admitting the inspectors.

Conyers' letter states that a separate secret briefing for the meeting said that the U.S. and U.K. had to `create' conditions to justify a war. This was eight months prior to the invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003, while the Bush administration continued its public declarations that it was pursuing diplomatic efforts to avoid `the last resort' of war. Neither the British nor the American governments has disputed the authenticity of the memo or the truth of its contents.

These lies and deceptions (which were transparent to me and many others at the time - including DeFazio, who voted against the resolution authorizing war) misled Congress and public into approving a war resulting to date in the deaths of some 1,700 Americans, thousands more physically and/or psychologically injured, and Iraqi deaths reliably estimated at over 100,000 by a peer-reviewed study led by Johns Hopkins University researchers and published in Britain's prestigious medical journal, The Lancet. In his book "Worse than Watergate," former Nixon presidential counsel John Dean describes this as a clearly impeachable offense.

Conyers now has 94 congressional and some 250,000 citizen signatories to his letter, which he intends to present again, in person, to the White House this week. He has also scheduled hearings to investigate the information revealed in the memo.

DeFazio is pessimistic about articles of impeachment emerging from the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, but public outrage could very well shift the balance of control in 2006 and enough public outrage might influence some Republican members facing re-election challenges even before that. Let us encourage DeFazio to actively support the Conyers investigation, wherever it may lead.

Jack Dresser of Springfield is a behavioral research scientist who worked as an Army psychologist during the Vietnam War. He helped organize the recent Memorial Day display at Skinner Butte Park. University of Oregon Professor Frank Stahl and former U.S. Rep. Jim Weaver will speak about the Bush administration and the Downing Street Memo at 4 p.m. Friday in Room 128 of Chiles Hall on the UO campus.