20/20 Relevance
The Washington Post's editorial today tackles the Downing Street Memo/Minutes with a bit of a blasé tone:

Three summers ago the pages of this and other newspapers were filled with reports about military planning for war to remove Saddam Hussein and Mr. Bush's determination to force a showdown. "Debate over whether the United States should go to war against Iraq," we stated in a lead editorial on Aug. 4, "has lurched into a higher gear." Concern that the Bush administration was not adequately prepared for a postwar occupation -- another supposed revelation of the British memos -- prompted widely reported public hearings by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee starting on July 31, 2002. One observation in the memos is vague but intriguing: A British official is quoted as saying that the "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." Yet it was argued even then, and has since become conventional wisdom, that Mr. Bush, Vice President Cheney and other administration spokesmen exaggerated the threat from Iraq to justify the elimination of its noxious regime.

But Salon's War Room comes back with a defense:

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. [...] It's also important to consider just exactly what the memo revealed. The memo reaffirmed, in the view of Britain's intelligence chief, that "Washington" saw war as inevitable by July 2002, and that "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." We didn't need a secret memo to know this, as the L.A. Times' Michael Kinsley pointed out over the weekend with a look back at media coverage from that time forecasting war on the horizon. And the memo doesn't actually prove Bush had decided on war by July 2002, any more than it shows he'd decided on it in the days immediately after the Twin Towers crumbled (as Rumsfeld apparently had, according to Bob Woodward's book). What is perhaps most important about the memo is that it puts key questions back on the table, in compelling terms, as to why and how the administration marched the nation into a war -- one that is increasingly costly and unpopular.

As does former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, who was interviewed today on the Democracy Now radio show (with Amy Goodman); Daily Kos diarist SusanHu has the goods on it, but here are some highlights:

RAY McGOVERN: Now, we veteran professionals, we professionals that toil long and hard in the intelligence arena are outraged at the corruption of our profession, but we are even more outraged by the constitutional implications here because as Congressman Conyers has just pointed out, we have here a very clear case that the Executive usurped the prerogatives of Congress of the American people and deceived it into permitting, authorizing an unauthorizeable war. And, you know, when you get back to how our Constitution was framed by those English folks that were used to kings marching them off to war blithely for their own good, of course, those framers of our Constitution were hell-bent and determined and wrote into the very first Article of our Constitution that the power to make or authorize war would be reserved to the representatives of people in the Congress, not in the Executive. [...] AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, who had said that there were no weapons of mass destruction, cited by western officials, U.S. officials, for many other reasons, but they never brought up that issue. Can you talk about the significance of this? RAY McGOVERN: Yes. This gentleman's name was Hussein Kamel. He was one of Saddam Hussein's sons-in-law. And he defected in 1995 and was thoroughly debriefed by U.N. and U.S. and U.K. debriefers. He had quite a story to tell, because he was head of the missile, chemical, biological and nuclear programs in Iraq. And he was able to finger some of the things that the U.N. inspectors did not know, and what he told them turned out to be quite right. He also told them that the chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs and weapons were destroyed at his order in July of 1991, right after the Gulf War. That's in black and white. It's in the debriefing report. An enterprising British researcher went to Vienna. I don't know how he got access to the debriefing report, but he did, and he found out that Kamel also said, as I said, that all those weapons were destroyed at his order. Of course, he was in charge. Now, curiously enough, that seemed to escape our leaders. It was never cited, although Hussein Kamel himself was held up as the paragon of a reliable source. Dick Cheney, himself, in his major speech of 26 August, 2002, held Hussein's son-in-law as one of our most lucrative, reliable sources, but he never told us that this source, this wonderful source, also told us that all those weapons had been destroyed in July of 1991 at his order.