On May 1, The Sunday Times revealed a secret British cabinet document indicating US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair agreed at Crawford, Texas, in April 2002 to attack Iraq and to create certain conditions and shape public opinion to support their illegal enterprise.

In an earlier commentary, I referred to this secret agreement as the Crawford Agreement.

On June 12, The Sunday Times revealed another secret document, which confirmed the central implication of what came to be known in the American press as the Down Street Memo: That Bush was determined to attack Iraq and "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy".

The latest document titled Conditions for Military Action confirms such plan. It states: "When the Prime Minister discussed Iraq with President Bush at Crawford in April he said that the UK would support military action to bring about regime change, provided that certain conditions were met: efforts had been made to construct a coalition/shape public opinion."

It also confirms the Anglo-American war planners wanted an excuse to justify their war and discussed provoking Saddam Hussain.

"It is just possible that an ultimatum could be cast in terms which Saddam would reject … failing that (or an Iraqi attack) we would be most unlikely to achieve a legal base for military action by January 2003."

Formal letter

The evidence suggests, David Swanson and Jonathan Schwarz wrote in the Baltimore Sun (on June 15), "that Mr Bush has lied to Congress and to the American people about the justifications for war.

"It includes a formal letter and report that he submitted to Congress within 48 hours of launching the invasion in which he explained the need for the war in terms that appear to have been intentionally falsified, not mistaken".

Despite the extraordinary nature of these revelations and their implications, the influential American media have either ignored them or minimised their importance.

A recent survey by Media Matters for America, which covered the period from May 1 to June 15, concluded that "the editorial pages of four of the five largest US newspapers USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times have remained conspicuously silent about the controversy surrounding the document".

When challenged, the editors of the influential media gave odd explanations. Phil Taubman, The Times's Washington bureau chief, explained his lack of interest in the British memo thus: "The minutes did not say that Mr Tenet [CIA director] had told… [M16 chief] Lord Dearlove [that the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy]". (May 24)

According to this logic The New York Times would have paid more attention to the British memo if the CIA director had told the chief of M16 something like this: "By the way, we here in Washington are fixing the facts around the policy".

To insist on setting the standard of proof so implausibly high, allowing for nothing less than a direct admission from the suspect himself, before giving attention to the extraordinary nature of the Downing Street memo is astounding.

It denies the chief of British intelligence any sense of independent judgment and any value as a directly involved party in the illegal enterprise.

If one of the conspirators admitted that his co-conspirator was manipulating the facts, this would be very damning evidence by any reasonable standard of proof.

On June 15, the editors of the Washington Post explained their lack of interest in the leaked Downing Street memos thus: "The memos add not a single fact to what was previously known about the administration's prewar deliberations. Not only that they add nothing to what was publicly known in July 2002."

This means that the Washington Post knew that, by April 2002, Bush had decided to attack Iraq and to justify his illegal enterprise by fixing the intelligence and facts around the pre-determined policy.

Yet, the Post continued to support the case for war. This logic amounts to recognition the Post was complicit in the deception.

When a reporter recently asked Bush and Blair if they had fixed the intelligence and facts around their war policy, Bush said: "There's nothing farther from the truth."

This led one critic to observe that Bush "lied then and he lies today on this matter and somehow this isn't considered a news story." (Tom Engelhardt, Mother Jones, June 20)

Anti-war organisations

Yet, anti-war organisations, members of the Congress and members of the families of fallen American soldiers, as well as ordinary Americans are rejecting the logic of their prestigious press.

The public editor of The New York Times, acknowledged he had received a "flood of reader e-mail criticising The Times's coverage of the so-called Downing Street Memo".

One frustrated reader, decrying the Times's "self-censorship" wrote: "Once again, The NYT is failing to give its readers the full story of how we got into the present disaster. Increasingly, we must turn to the foreign press and the internet for critical information and analysis." (May 24, 2005)

On June 16, the Congressman John Conyers, the top democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, held an informal congressional hearing about the Downing Street memos.

After the hearing, he and congressional colleagues, delivered to the White House a petition signed by 122 congressmen and over half a million Americans, demanding answers from Bush about the British revelations.

Congressman Conyers said at the hearing that the British memo "means more than 1,600 brave Americans and hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis would have lost their lives for a lie".