I’ve come to the conclusion that in order to be a leftist, you have to accept on faith everything but George W. Bush being an honest forthright man. Why else would this “newfound” information over the fact that everyone is basing their “Downing Street Memo” stories on a secondhand source without verification?
Now it gets even weirder. In a story on Rawstory, we find this fine piece of knowledge:
“I was given them last September while still on the [Daily] Telegraph,” Smith, who now works for the London Sunday Times, told RAW STORY. “I was given very strict orders from the lawyers as to how to handle them.”
“I first photocopied them to ensure they were on our paper and returned the originals, which were on government paper and therefore government property, to the source,” he added.
The Butler Committee, a UK commission looking into WMD, has quoted the documents and accepted their authenticity, along with British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw. Smith said all originals were destroyed in order to both protect the source and the journalist alike.
“It was these photocopies that I worked on, destroying them shortly before we went to press on Sept 17, 2004,” he added. “Before we destroyed them the legal desk secretary typed the text up on an old fashioned typewriter.”
The copying and re-typing were necessary because markings on the originals might have identified his source, Smith said.
So first they get the documents, photocopy them and return them. Notice, they didn’t scan them with a computer or photograph them with a document camera. They photocopied them. Then, after they went to press, they destroyed the photocopies… BUT… Before they destroyed them, and this is where it gets really strange… They retyped them on an old-fashioned typewriter? Why?
That seems like odd behavior, doesn’t it?
And the funniest part is that Raw Story, with a straight face, posts a timeline, and bases them on the “retyped” versions that Smith came into posession of!
No one writing about this story has a first-hand copy of the source.
When I read the Yahoo story yesterday, I thought it was odd that he retyped the memos. Now it just gets even odder; why would you retype them on an old-fashioned typewriter, of all things? In order to accept the memos floating around as authentic, you’d have to suspend disbelief in a profound way on the authenticity of what everyone is holding in their hands.
Or, you could be a leftist and just presume that the lack of a formal denial is corroboration because in the leftist world, that’s how it works.
If I say something about you and you don’t deny it, it’s therefore true. Ignore the fact that the Government would then be forced to spend all day everyday issuing denials about mind control devices in microwaves and contact with space aliens.
Source: The Raw Story