BuzzFlash Reviews

April 5, 2006

The Secret Way to War: The Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War's Buried History (Paperback)
by Mark Danner, Frank Rich (Preface)

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Except for some intrepid work on the web, the American mainstream press largely has ignored the infamous Downing Street Memo that confirmed Bush lied America into the Iraq War by "fixing the intelligence and facts...around the policy." And the Bush policy, from the beginning, was to invade Iraq.

The New York Review of Books, however, saw the significance of the Downing Street Memo and published a series of articles by Mark Danner that have now been republished in book form (released on April 4, 2006). It is entitled, "The Secret Way to War: The Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War's Buried History."

One of the few New York Times journalists who can write freely of the Bush betrayals is columnist Frank Rich. In his introduction to Danner's book, Rich praises the work of Danner's diligent reporting: "Danner understands the implications of every piece of the story, and, in these pages, lays out the history of the 'secret way to war' with devastating acuity."

After indicting the mainstream press for its full-throttled promotion of Bush Administration lies up to the Iraq War and its ignoring of the proof of the lies after the war (including first and foremost the Downing Street Memo,) Rich says of Danner that he "was among the first to separate the threads of reality from the Alice-in-Wonderland fantasies the American government and its well-oiled propaganda machinery would have us believe. No other writer has done it with remotely his precision and deadpan wit."

Danner is himself in a write of impeccable credentials when it comes to exposing the dark underside of American foreign policy. He has penned dozens of articles, but is most noted for two books: "Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror" and "The Massacre at El Mozote." BuzzFlash would call Danner the journalistic equivalent of a brilliant pathologist, journalistically probing the bloody corpse of an American foreign policy that kills and tortures in the name of democracy.

He is an award-winning writer for the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and the New York Times Sunday Magazine, among other publications. He is also a professor in the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

The American press has proven that only a revolution in the media will bring responsible mainstream media back to serving its responsibility of fully informing the American public and being a safeguard for democracy. The mainstream press suppression of the Downing Street memos was an unindictable crime, but a moral crime nonetheless.

Mark Danner tells us what should have been said. This is not a long book, but it is an immensely meaningful one. It proves that in the current journalistic climate, without the likes of Mark Danner and the Internet, there is barely a soul in the mainstream media who is interested in holding Bush accountable for his behavior.

The publisher of the book notes that "Danner explains how the memo clarifies the broader-and largely concealed-history of the events leading up to the Iraq war. He shows that the Bush and Blair administrations advocated the resumption of UN weapons inspections as a means not to avoid war but to ensure it. Most importantly, Danner argues that in the face of the memo's clear evidence of deception, the press, public, and Congress still have not held the administration responsible."

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