The Downing Street Memo

Original link available here.

SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL – UK EYES ONLY

DAVID MANNING
From: Matthew Rycroft
Date: 23 July 2002
S 195 /02

cc: Defence Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Attorney-General, Sir Richard Wilson, John Scarlett, Francis Richards, CDS, C, Jonathan Powell, Sally Morgan, Alastair Campbell

IRAQ: PRIME MINISTER’S MEETING, 23 JULY

Copy addressees and you met the Prime Minister on 23 July to discuss Iraq.

This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents.

John Scarlett summarised the intelligence and latest JIC assessment. Saddam’s regime was tough and based on extreme fear. The only way to overthrow it was likely to be by massive military action. Saddam was worried and expected an attack, probably by air and land, but he was not convinced that it would be immediate or overwhelming. His regime expected their neighbours to line up with the US. Saddam knew that regular army morale was poor. Real support for Saddam among the public was probably narrowly based.

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. 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.

CDS said that military planners would brief CENTCOM on 1-2 August, Rumsfeld on 3 August and Bush on 4 August.

The two broad US options were:

(a) Generated Start. A slow build-up of 250,000 US troops, a short (72 hour) air campaign, then a move up to Baghdad from the south. Lead time of 90 days (30 days preparation plus 60 days deployment to Kuwait).

(b) Running Start. Use forces already in theatre (3 x 6,000), continuous air campaign, initiated by an Iraqi casus belli. Total lead time of 60 days with the air campaign beginning even earlier. A hazardous option.

The US saw the UK (and Kuwait) as essential, with basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus critical for either option. Turkey and other Gulf states were also important, but less vital. The three main options for UK involvement were:

(i) Basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus, plus three SF squadrons.

(ii) As above, with maritime and air assets in addition.

(iii) As above, plus a land contribution of up to 40,000, perhaps with a discrete role in Northern Iraq entering from Turkey, tying down two Iraqi divisions.

The Defence Secretary said that the US had already begun “spikes of activity” to put pressure on the regime. No decisions had been taken, but he thought the most likely timing in US minds for military action to begin was January, with the timeline beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections.

The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force.

The Attorney-General said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action. There were three possible legal bases: self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case. Relying on UNSCR 1205 of three years ago would be difficult. The situation might of course change.

The Prime Minister said that it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors. Regime change and WMD were linked in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD. There were different strategies for dealing with Libya and Iran. If the political context were right, people would support regime change. The two key issues were whether the military plan worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military plan the space to work.

On the first, CDS said that we did not know yet if the US battleplan was workable. The military were continuing to ask lots of questions.

For instance, what were the consequences, if Saddam used WMD on day one, or if Baghdad did not collapse and urban warfighting began? You said that Saddam could also use his WMD on Kuwait. Or on Israel, added the Defence Secretary.

The Foreign Secretary thought the US would not go ahead with a military plan unless convinced that it was a winning strategy. On this, US and UK interests converged. But on the political strategy, there could be US/UK differences. Despite US resistance, we should explore discreetly the ultimatum. Saddam would continue to play hard-ball with the UN.

John Scarlett assessed that Saddam would allow the inspectors back in only when he thought the threat of military action was real.

The Defence Secretary said that if the Prime Minister wanted UK military involvement, he would need to decide this early. He cautioned that many in the US did not think it worth going down the ultimatum route. It would be important for the Prime Minister to set out the political context to Bush.

Conclusions:

(a) We should work on the assumption that the UK would take part in any military action. But we needed a fuller picture of US planning before we could take any firm decisions. CDS should tell the US military that we were considering a range of options.

(b) The Prime Minister would revert on the question of whether funds could be spent in preparation for this operation.

(c) CDS would send the Prime Minister full details of the proposed military campaign and possible UK contributions by the end of the week.

(d) The Foreign Secretary would send the Prime Minister the background on the UN inspectors, and discreetly work up the ultimatum to Saddam.

He would also send the Prime Minister advice on the positions of countries in the region especially Turkey, and of the key EU member states.

(e) John Scarlett would send the Prime Minister a full intelligence update.

(f) We must not ignore the legal issues: the Attorney-General would consider legal advice with FCO/MOD legal advisers.

(I have written separately to commission this follow-up work.)

MATTHEW RYCROFT

(Rycroft was a Downing Street foreign policy aide)

[emphasis added]

Notes regarding the document’s validity:

“The newly disclosed memo, which was first reported by the Sunday Times of London, hasn’t been disavowed by the British government. The British Embassy in Washington did not respond to requests for comment.

A former senior U.S. official called it “an absolutely accurate description of what transpired” during the senior British intelligence officer’s visit to Washington. He spoke on condition of anonymity.

A White House official said the administration wouldn’t comment on leaked British documents…”

• Memo: Bush manipulated Iraq intel,
Newsday, May 9, 2005

“British officials did not dispute the document’s authenticity…”

• Bush asked to explain UK war memo,
CNN, May 12, 2005

“Since Smith’s report was published May 1, Blair’s Downing Street office has not disputed the document’s authenticity. Asked about them Wednesday, a Blair spokesman said the report added nothing significant…”

• Indignation Grows in U.S. Over British Prewar Documents,
LA Times, May 12, 2005

Summary of the War in Iraq (interesting)

Galloway vs. The US Senate: Transcript of Statement
George Galloway, Respect MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, delivered this statement to US Senators today who have accused him of corruption

“Senator, I am not now, nor have I ever been, an oil trader. and neither has anyone on my behalf. I have never seen a barrel of oil, owned one, bought one, sold one – and neither has anyone on my behalf.
“Now I know that standards have slipped in the last few years in Washington, but for a lawyer you are remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice. I am here today but last week you already found me guilty. You traduced my name around the world without ever having asked me a single question, without ever having contacted me, without ever written to me or telephoned me, without any attempt to contact me whatsoever. And you call that justice.

“Now I want to deal with the pages that relate to me in this dossier and I want to point out areas where there are – let’s be charitable and say errors. Then I want to put this in the context where I believe it ought to be. On the very first page of your document about me you assert that I have had ‘many meetings’ with Saddam Hussein. This is false.

“I have had two meetings with Saddam Hussein, once in 1994 and once in August of 2002. By no stretch of the English language can that be described as “many meetings” with Saddam Hussein.

“As a matter of fact, I have met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him. The difference is Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns and to give him maps the better to target those guns. I met him to try and bring about an end to sanctions, suffering and war, and on the second of the two occasions, I met him to try and persuade him to let Dr Hans Blix and the United Nations weapons inspectors back into the country – a rather better use of two meetings with Saddam Hussein than your own Secretary of State for Defense made of his.

“I was an opponent of Saddam Hussein when British and Americans governments and businessmen were selling him guns and gas. I used to demonstrate outside the Iraqi embassy when British and American officials were going in and doing commerce.

“You will see from the official parliamentary record, Hansard, from the 15th March 1990 onwards, voluminous evidence that I have a rather better record of opposition to Saddam Hussein than you do and than any other member of the British or American governments do.

“Now you say in this document, you quote a source, you have the gall to quote a source, without ever having asked me whether the allegation from the source is true, that I am ‘the owner of a company which has made substantial profits from trading in Iraqi oil’.

“Senator, I do not own any companies, beyond a small company whose entire purpose, whose sole purpose, is to receive the income from my journalistic earnings from my employer, Associated Newspapers, in London. I do not own a company that’s been trading in Iraqi oil. And you have no business to carry a quotation, utterly unsubstantiated and false, implying otherwise.

“Now you have nothing on me, Senator, except my name on lists of names from Iraq, many of which have been drawn up after the installation of your puppet government in Baghdad. If you had any of the letters against me that you had against Zhirinovsky, and even Pasqua, they would have been up there in your slideshow for the members of your committee today.

“You have my name on lists provided to you by the Duelfer inquiry, provided to him by the convicted bank robber, and fraudster and conman Ahmed Chalabi who many people to their credit in your country now realize played a decisive role in leading your country into the disaster in Iraq.

“There were 270 names on that list originally. That’s somehow been filleted down to the names you chose to deal with in this committee. Some of the names on that committee included the former secretary to his Holiness Pope John Paul II, the former head of the African National Congress Presidential office and many others who had one defining characteristic in common: they all stood against the policy of sanctions and war which you vociferously prosecuted and which has led us to this disaster.

“You quote Mr Dahar Yassein Ramadan. Well, you have something on me, I’ve never met Mr Dahar Yassein Ramadan. Your sub-committee apparently has. But I do know that he’s your prisoner, I believe he’s in Abu Ghraib prison. I believe he is facing war crimes charges, punishable by death. In these circumstances, knowing what the world knows about how you treat prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison, in Bagram Airbase, in Guantanamo Bay, including I may say, British citizens being held in those places.

“I’m not sure how much credibility anyone would put on anything you manage to get from a prisoner in those circumstances. But you quote 13 words from Dahar Yassein Ramadan whom I have never met. If he said what he said, then he is wrong.

“And if you had any evidence that I had ever engaged in any actual oil transaction, if you had any evidence that anybody ever gave me any money, it would be before the public and before this committee today because I agreed with your Mr Greenblatt [Mark Greenblatt, legal counsel on the committee].

“Your Mr Greenblatt was absolutely correct. What counts is not the names on the paper, what counts is where’s the money. Senator? Who paid me hundreds of thousands of dollars of money? The answer to that is nobody. And if you had anybody who ever paid me a penny, you would have produced them today.

“Now you refer at length to a company names in these documents as Aredio Petroleum. I say to you under oath here today: I have never heard of this company, I have never met anyone from this company. This company has never paid a penny to me and I’ll tell you something else: I can assure you that Aredio Petroleum has never paid a single penny to the Mariam Appeal Campaign. Not a thin dime. I don’t know who Aredio Petroleum are, but I daresay if you were to ask them they would confirm that they have never met me or ever paid me a penny.

“Whilst I’m on that subject, who is this senior former regime official that you spoke to yesterday? Don’t you think I have a right to know? Don’t you think the Committee and the public have a right to know who this senior former regime official you were quoting against me interviewed yesterday actually is?

“Now, one of the most serious of the mistakes you have made in this set of documents is, to be frank, such a schoolboy howler as to make a fool of the efforts that you have made. You assert on page 19, not once but twice, that the documents that you are referring to cover a different period in time from the documents covered by The Daily Telegraph which were a subject of a libel action won by me in the High Court in England late last year.

“You state that The Daily Telegraph article cited documents from 1992 and 1993 whilst you are dealing with documents dating from 2001. Senator, The Daily Telegraph’s documents date identically to the documents that you were dealing with in your report here. None of The Daily Telegraph’s documents dealt with a period of 1992, 1993. I had never set foot in Iraq until late in 1993 – never in my life. There could possibly be no documents relating to Oil-for-Food matters in 1992, 1993, for the Oil-for-Food scheme did not exist at that time.

“And yet you’ve allocated a full section of this document to claiming that your documents are from a different era to the Daily Telegraph documents when the opposite is true. Your documents and the Daily Telegraph documents deal with exactly the same period.

“But perhaps you were confusing the Daily Telegraph action with the Christian Science Monitor. The Christian Science Monitor did indeed publish on its front pages a set of allegations against me very similar to the ones that your committee have made. They did indeed rely on documents which started in 1992, 1993. These documents were unmasked by the Christian Science Monitor themselves as forgeries.

“Now, the neo-con websites and newspapers in which you’re such a hero, senator, were all absolutely cock-a-hoop at the publication of the Christian Science Monitor documents, they were all absolutely convinced of their authenticity. They were all absolutely convinced that these documents showed me receiving $10 million from the Saddam regime. And they were all lies.

“In the same week as the Daily Telegraph published their documents against me, the Christian Science Monitor published theirs which turned out to be forgeries and the British newspaper, Mail on Sunday, purchased a third set of documents which also upon forensic examination turned out to be forgeries. So there’s nothing fanciful about this. Nothing at all fanciful about it.

“The existence of forged documents implicating me in commercial activities with the Iraqi regime is a proven fact. It’s a proven fact that these forged documents existed and were being circulated amongst right-wing newspapers in Baghdad and around the world in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Iraqi regime.

“Now, Senator, I gave my heart and soul to oppose the policy that you promoted. I gave my political life’s blood to try to stop the mass killing of Iraqis by the sanctions on Iraq which killed one million Iraqis, most of them children, most of them died before they even knew that they were Iraqis, but they died for no other reason other than that they were Iraqis with the misfortune to born at that time. I gave my heart and soul to stop you committing the disaster that you did commit in invading Iraq. And I told the world that your case for the war was a pack of lies.

“I told the world that Iraq, contrary to your claims did not have weapons of mass destruction. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to al-Qaeda. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to the atrocity on 9/11 2001. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that the Iraqi people would resist a British and American invasion of their country and that the fall of Baghdad would not be the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning.

“Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 people paid with their lives; 1600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies.

If the world had listened to Kofi Annan, whose dismissal you demanded, if the world had listened to President Chirac who you want to paint as some kind of corrupt traitor, if the world had listened to me and the anti-war movement in Britain, we would not be in the disaster that we are in today. Senator, this is the mother of all smokescreens. You are trying to divert attention from the crimes that you supported, from the theft of billions of dollars of Iraq’s wealth.

“Have a look at the real Oil-for-Food scandal. Have a look at the 14 months you were in charge of Baghdad, the first 14 months when $8.8 billion of Iraq’s wealth went missing on your watch. Have a look at Halliburton and other American corporations that stole not only Iraq’s money, but the money of the American taxpayer.

“Have a look at the oil that you didn’t even meter, that you were shipping out of the country and selling, the proceeds of which went who knows where? Have a look at the $800 million you gave to American military commanders to hand out around the country without even counting it or weighing it.

“Have a look at the real scandal breaking in the newspapers today, revealed in the earlier testimony in this committee. That the biggest sanctions busters were not me or Russian politicians or French politicians. The real sanctions busters were your own companies with the connivance of your own Government.”

負けず嫌い

「負けず嫌い」の「ず」って否定ですよね?ってことは、意味は、「負けないのが嫌い」ってことじゃないの?????

この「ず」は打ち消しではなく、「む」の仲間の「むず」=「んず」の古風な表記です。「むず」の説明は次の通りです。
動詞、一部の助動詞などの未然形につく。推量の助動詞「ん(む)」+助詞「と」+動詞「す」からできた「んとす(むとす)」がさらに変化したものと言われる。「むず」とも書く}意味は「ん(む)」とほぼ同じであるが、それを強調する気持ちがこめられる。
よって、負けないことではなく負けることという意味です。知らず知らずのうちに、忘れてしまった昔の言葉を用法で我々は使っているのですね。おもしろいものです。

referenced from here.

Binary Numbers


Yes
. I know this is my first post.
Yes. I know it is about binary numbers.

David: Guess what I did today?
You Guys: What?
David: I taught myself how to read binary numbers.

So here it goes:

Binary Numbers work on the base 2 system. We are used to counting with a base 10 system. For example:

12 has two numbers. A 1 and a 2. 2 is in the first column. The “one” column.
Every column to the left of this goes up by a multiple of 10 (base 10).
Hence, 12 has ONE ten and TWO ones.

So far so good right? Now for binaries.

Binary numbers can only be 0 or 1.
The first column is the “one” column.
Every column to the left of this goes up by a multiple of 2 (base 2).
Hence, 11 in binary is equal to 3.
11 has ONE two and ONE one.

Got it? Good. So when dealing with computers (usually 8-bit binaries)

128 64 32 16 8 4 2 1
—————————-
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 = 0
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 = 255 (128+64+32+16+8+4+2+1)

OK. Then what about 10101010?

128 64 32 16 8 4 2 1
—————————-
1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 = 170 (128+32+8+2)

What about going the other way?? Easy. Let’s take 159.

Divide 159 by 2. (base 2, remember?) = ONE 128 with 31 remaining.
Divide 31 by 2. = ONE 16 with 15 remaining.
Divide 15 by 2. = ONE 8 with 7 remaining.
Divide 7 by 4. = ONE 4 with 3 remaining.
Divide 3 by 2. = ONE 2 with 1 remaining.

Therefore it must be:

128 64 32 16 8 4 2 1
—————————-
1 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 = 159 (128+16+8+4+2+1)

To summarize, here is a chart I pulled.

Base 2 = Base 10
0 = 0
1 = 1
10 = 2
11 = 3
100 = 4
101 = 5
110 = 6
111 = 7
1000 = 8
1001 = 9
1010 = 10
1011 = 11
1100 = 12
1101 = 13
1110 = 14
1111 = 15

Interestingly enough, and this IS a tangent, it really comes into play with subnet masks.

There are a couple intresting things about subnet masks. They don’t really behave like you would initially expect them to. The numbers of a subnet mask count ip addresses that are not there. This means higher the numbers of a subnet mask are the less ip addresses belong to it.

For example:
255.255.255.255 = There are no ip addresses in this range.
0.0.0.0 = This is the range of all ip addresses.

The rest of this article is also pulled.

Lets take one of the most basic subnets the 255.255.255.0 one, and see how many addresses are in it’s range. The first step is to put the subnet into binary. Let go ahead and do that now. If you don’t know how to put something into binary read Binary Numbers for more information.

11111111.11111111.11111111.00000000 = 255.255.255.0

So how do we find out how many ip addresses are in this group? Well its rather simple actually. Just count the number of zeros, and then take 2 to the number of zeros power. In this case it would be 2^8 = 256. Another way to do it is to multiply 2 times itself 7 times. 2*2*2*2*2*2*2*2=256 So we have two hundred and fifty six ip addresses in that range! Another thing that is intresting to know. Subnets will always be all ones on one side, and all zeros on the other. I mean that they will always look like 111111000000 and never like 1010101101.

Lets take a closer look at what a group of ip addresses looks like. Using the 255.255.255.0 subnet from above let me make a table.

192.168.1.0 – Subnet Address
192.168.1.1 – usually the gateway
192.168.1.2
192.168.1.3
192.168.1.4
192.168.1.5
192.168.1.6

192.168.1.252
192.168.1.253
192.168.1.254
192.168.1.255 – Broadcast Address

Every group of ip addresses, has a Subnet Address, Broadcast Address, and Gateway. Both the Subnet Address ip address and the Broadcast Address ip address are used to send information to every ip address in the group. The Gateway acts sort of like the group’s controller. For instance, let’s say that your computer is on the ip address 192.168.1.3. When you send send information to the internet, your computer sends data to the gateway. Then the gateway sends that data on to the internet. The same thing is true when you get data from the internet. The internet sends data to the gateway, and then the gateway passes that information on to your computer. The gateway can be on any ip address in the range. Usually it is on the second ip address in the range, or the second ip address from the end of the range. The Subnet Address is always on the first ip address in the range, and the Broadcast Address is always on the last one in the range.

Okay I’m going to change our subnet from 255.255.255.0 to 255.255.255.240. Lets say the ip address of our computer is 192.168.1.132. How many ip addresses do we have? Well lets convert the subnet to binary. You should get the following binary subnet.

11111111.11111111.11111111.11110000

Okay, we have four zeros. So take 2^4 which equals 16. Alternatively 2*2*2*2 equals 16 as well. We have 16 ip addresses in our range. Well lets draw out our table. We can’t draw our ip address table without knowing where the range starts. This is how you figure that out. We take our subnet and AND it to our ip address converted into binary. Go ahead and conver our ip address into binary. You should get the following.

11000000.10101000.00000001.10000100 = 192.168.1.132

Now we AND that with our subnet. It is easy to think of ANDing as finding the truth of two numbers. Every 1 is true and every 0 is false.

True and true is true! 1 and 1 is 1.
True and false is false. 1 and 0 is 0.
False and true is false. 0 and 1 is 0.
False and false is false. 0 and 0 is 0.

So lets line up our subnet and our ip address.

11000000.10101000.00000001.10000100 = 192.168.1.132
11111111.11111111.11111111.11110000 = 255.255.255.240
———————————–
11000000.10101000.00000001.10000000

So look at the first column. We have a 1 and a 1. 1(true) and 1(true) = 1(true) The next column is the same thing. The thrid column is a 0 and a 1. 0(false) and 1(true) = 0(false). Continue doing that for the whole number. Now that we have our result lets take it and convert it back to base 10, so we can get the first ip address in our range.

11000000.10101000.00000001.10000000 = 192.168.1.128

Great! Now that we have our first ip address and we know that we have 16 ip addresses, we can make our table.

192.168.1.128 – Subnet Address
192.168.1.129 – Gateway
192.168.1.130 –
192.168.1.131 –
192.168.1.132 – Our computer!
192.168.1.133 –
192.168.1.134 –
192.168.1.135 –
192.168.1.136 –
192.168.1.137 –
192.168.1.138 –
192.168.1.139 –
192.168.1.140 –
192.168.1.141 –
192.168.1.142 –
192.168.1.1

43 – Broadcast Address

Makes you think.
That is all.