A star is born

Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review.

While clowning around downtown this weekend, Dave Foto and I came across a free publication called the Red Star.

It’s a slick little magazine—long on attitude and style—that features social commentary, cultural coverage and bold graphics. Cool format. More information can be found at www.redstarpulp.com.

Come on in, folks, the water’s fine. There’s plenty of room for independent media and thought in Northern Nevada.

Along other lines, in last week’s column about the Newsweek retraction, I mentioned the Downing Street memo. I didn’t think it needed a lot of introduction, but I guess many folks aren’t reading the blogs and other non-mainstream media around the planet. A few people asked me about it, so here goes:

Shortly before the recent election in Great Britain, a document containing meeting minutes transcribed during a British Prime Minister’s meeting on July 23, 2002, was leaked to the media. It detailed the plans for invasion of Iraq, including the paragraph: “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. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.”

This is the smoking gun the public was looking for exposing the Bush administration’s lies and manipulations of “intelligence” to gain the support to send our troops back to the Gulf—written nearly a year before we invaded.

The British people didn’t care enough to boot Tony Blair, and the American people don’t care enough to get offended at having been played for fools. I guess that’s why this “bomb” fizzled and has had such a short news life. More information can be found at www.downingstreetmemo.com.