The Secret Downing Street Memo, the One Percent Doctrine, and the Politics of Truth: A Performance Text—Shelter from the Storm

Published in the Sunday London Times on 1 May 2005, the Downing Street Memo set off a fi restorm of controversy. The memo demonstrated that the American and British public had been mislead about the reasons for and the timing of the decision to go to war with Iraq, The secret document indicated that the Bush administration had committed itself to war with Iraq, at least a full eight months before the offi cial start of the war which was 19 March 2003. I want to interrogate this history, a history that involves the politics and pragmatics of truth, the manipulation of evidence and facts about the world by governmental offi cials.