Even More Documents

The Heretik has a list of British gov't documents from March, 2002, dealing with Iraq and Blair's pending visit to Bush's Crawford ranch—the tet a tet referred to in the Downing Street Memo. I can't vouch for the documents, but they read just like the DSM and Cabinet Office briefing paper; go here for the debate on their authenticity. [UPDATE: NBC has verified them.] Raw Story also has them, along with an Iraq War Timeline. The whole set of PDFs can be downloaded from Cryptome here.

Some highlights from a memorandum in the list. Written by Blair political director Peter Ricketts, the memo's dated Mar. 22, 2002.

3. By broad support for the objective brings two real problems which need discussing.

4. First, the THREAT. The truth is that what has changed is not the pace of Saddam Hussein's WMD programmes, but our tolerance of them post-11 September. This is not something we need to be defensive about, but attempts to claim otherwise publicly will increase scepticism [sic] about our case. I am relieved that you decided to postpone publication of the unclassified document. My meeting yesterday showed that there is more work to do to ensuer [sic] that the figures are accurate and consistent with those of the US. But event he best survey of Iraq's WMD programmes will not show much advance in recent years ont he [sic] nuclear, missile or CW/BW fronts: the programmes are extremely worrying but have not, as far as we know, been stepped up.

5. US scrambling to establish a link between Iraq and Al Aaida [sic] is so far frankly unconvincing. To get public and Parliamentary support for military operations, we have to be convincing that:

6. the threat is so serious/imminent that it is worth sending our troops to die for;

7. it is qualitatively different from the threat posed by other proliferators who are closer to achieving nuclear capability (including Iran).