Downing Street Memo - Additional Documents

Additional Documents

Previous to the appearance of the Downing Street Memo, six other British (Blair) Cabinet papers originating around March 2002 were obtained by Michael Smith and used in two Daily Telegraph stories published on 18 September 2004. The documents describe issues relating to the meetings held between Bush and Blair at Bush's Crawford, Texas, ranch in April 2002. They are:

1. Iraq: Options Paper, prepared by the Overseas & Defence Secretariat in the Cabinet Office, dated 8 March 2002, describing options available for pursuing regime change in Iraq
2. Iraq: Legal Background, prepared by the Foreign & Commonwealth Office Legal Department, dated 8 March 2002
3. a report from David Manning to Tony Blair on his meeting with Condoleezza Rice, dated 14 March 2002
4. a report from Christopher Meyer to David Manning on his meeting with Paul Wolfowitz, dated 18 March 2002
5. a memo from Peter Ricketts, Political Director, Foreign & Commonwealth Office, to the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, dated 22 March 2002, with background and opinion for Straw's advice to Tony Blair ahead of his meeting with George Bush in April
6. a memo from Jack Straw to Tony Blair, 25 March 2002 containing advice ahead of Blair's meeting with George Bush in April.

On receipt of the documents, in September 2004, acting on the advice of lawyers, Smith says he photocopied them and returned the originals to his source, then, after the Telegraph's legal desk secretary typed transcripts on an "old fashioned typewriter", the Telegraph destroyed their copies of the originals, in order to frustrate any future police investigation of the leaks.

The documents were widely quoted in the British press immediately following the Telegraph's story, for example in The Guardian and The Sunday Herald.

On 5 October 2004, a zipped file (leaks-brief.zip), containing facsimiles of these documents in PDF form, appeared on Cryptome, provided by Professor Michael Lewis of Cambridge University, who had also housed the file at Iraq expert Glen Rangwala's Middle East Reference website. The file derives ultimately from the typed transcript of the documents made by Smith and the Telegraph.

Interest in these documents was revived around 8 June 2005, following their appearance in a discussion thread at Democratic Underground and subsequently they began to be quoted in US media, after Rawstory and NBC verified their authenticity with Smith and British government sources.

The Los Angeles Times published an article on 15 June 2005, describing several of the "new" documents; the article says that "Michael Smith, the defense writer for The Sunday Times who revealed the Downing Street minutes in a story 1 May, provided a full text of the six new documents to the Los Angeles Times."

The six documents are available in PDF form from the Think Progress web site.

A further document, a 21 July 2002, cabinet office paper titled "Conditions for Military Action", which is a briefing paper for the meeting of which the Downing Street Memo is the minutes, was published (with the last page missing) by The Sunday Times on 12 June 2005.

Another document was the Rycroft email, showing the author of the Downing Street Memo actually believed that Saddam should be removed because of a threat by Iraq getting WMDs into the hands of terrorists.

The 18 September 2004, Daily Telegraph article contains the only known reproductions of the original memos (scanned from a photocopy). That article is called "Failure is not an option, but it doesn't mean they will avoid it".

On Thursday, 16 June 2005 Reuters mislabelled a photograph of what it claimed was "a copy of the Downing Street Memo".

It turned out to actually be a picture of a document found in an 28 April 2005 Guardian Unlimited story. (At this link, view this PDF: 07.03.03: Attorney general's full advice on Iraq war (pdf)) This PDF detailed Lord Goldsmith’s confidential advice on the legality of the Iraq war and does not match the text of any of the alleged Downing Street Memos. It's an entirely different document that describes legal authorisation for the invasion of Iraq under standing UN resolutions.