A headline in Sunday’s Daily Mail  is not only instructive regarding what is wrong with the current state of the mainstream media, but how a news organization looking to bury one politician can completely miss the far bigger story about another.

“Smoking gun emails reveal Blair’s ‘deal in blood’ with George Bush over Iraq war was forged a YEAR before the invasion had even started,” the headline screamed. “A bombshell White House memo has revealed for the first time details of the ‘deal in blood’ forged by Tony Blair and George Bush over the Iraq War,” the story opened. “The sensational leak shows that Blair had given an unqualified pledge to sign up to the conflict a year before the invasion started. It flies in the face of the Prime Minister’s public claims at the time that he was seeking a diplomatic solution to the crisis. He told voters: ‘We’re not proposing military action’ — in direct contrast to what the secret email now reveals.”

Fortunately for more discerning readers, the Mail printed copies of those emails. The first is a missive from Colin Powell to George W. Bush with regard to Blair’s intentions. The first sentence of the final paragraph reveals just how far afield a media entity is willing to go to advance its agenda. To wit:

“On Iraq, Blair will be with us should military operations be necessary.” (Italics mine.)

Nonetheless, the Mail persisted. “The classified document also discloses that Blair agreed to act as a glorified spin doctor for the President by presenting ‘public affairs lines’ to convince a sceptical public that Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction — when none existed. In return, the President would flatter Blair’s ego and give the impression that Britain was not America’s poodle but an equal partner in the ‘special relationship’.”

Note a couple of things. First, the Mail expected Blair to know that weapons of mass destruction did not exist prior to invading Iraq and removing Saddam Hussein. Thus Blair was apparently expected to ignore Bush CIA Director George Tenet, who called it a “slam dunk,” backed up by all fifteen agencies involved in gathering intelligence for the U.S., the intelligence agencies of Britain, Germany, Russia, China, Israel and France, as well as several Democrats, all of whom would like to rewrite history, including Bill and Hillary Clinton, Clinton Defense Secretary William Cohen, Clinton National Security advisor Sandy Berger, John Kerry, the late Ted Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi, and Barbara Boxer.

Second, ironically, or perhaps quite tellingly, the Daily Mail’s effort to paint Blair as the bad guy caused them to commit journalism’s mortal sin, better known as “burying the lede.” The hint is contained in the first three words of that same paragraph calling Blair a glorified spin doctor, as in “The classified document.”

How did the Mail get that classified document? “The documents, obtained by The Mail on Sunday, are part of a batch of secret emails held on the private server of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton which U.S. courts have forced her to reveal,” the paper reports.

Perhaps one might accuse this writer of committing the same mortal sin, but that remains to be seen. As of this writing, no mainstream American news organization has seen fit to explore the implications of this revelation, despite the reality the court ordered that release in August. The FBI seized the server, but it defied that order. As for Clinton herself, the New York Times inadvertently reveals the duplicity behind her assertion( she has been “as transparent as possible” with regard to those emails. “The process of setting up an electronic system to manage more than 50,000 pages of documents that the committee has assembled is still not complete, meaning that staff members sometimes have to search through boxes to find critical pieces of paper — an almost comical task, staff members said.”

In other words, Clinton submitted paper copies of electronic emails, which is a transparent effort all right — to drag this process out as long as possible, allowing the hacks at the New York Times to bemoan a process that’s taken “longer than the Watergate investigation lasted.”

Yet far more important than the emails themselves published by the Mail are the markings they contain. The top right hand corner and the bottom middle of one email contains the phrase “SECRET/NOFORN.” Secret is self-explanatory. Noforn means that none of this material can be shown to foreigners, like, say, the entire British public, courtesy of the Mail. In other words, despite Clinton’s assertions there were no classified documents on her server, subsequently "clarified" by her as not being marked classified at the time she sent or received them, this particular memo reveals that Clinton may have found an even more clever way to amend her already amended statement. More important still, note that these classified emails were neither addressed to, or sent by, Clinton herself. Thus a critical question arises:

What in the world were they doing on her server? Powell sent the email in 2002 and it shows up on Hillary’s server in 2012? Sundance at theconservativetreehouse.com wonders the same thing, and offers some ideas in that regard. “Why was Hillary Clinton transferring/extracting data from secure, and monitored, classified State Department data bases, into her non-secure private email server?” he writes. “What else was data-mined and extracted from government accounts, that could/would be discovered with a thorough forensics investigation into the private server? She wasn’t just reading them, she was extracting them. Why would she be doing this, if not to build a shadow file for use at a later date?” (Bold in the original).

A shadow file on whom? Considering Hillary’s track record of sleaze, lying and utter indifference with regard to the deaths of ambassador Christopher Stevens, Navy SEALs Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods, and diplomat Sean Smith, which she and Obama initially blamed on an “offensive video” — even though they knew it was a bald-face lie — the bet here is that Hillary’s got files on anyone and everyone she perceives as a threat to her coronation. “Who was sent to examine and extract classified information from State Department archives?” asks American Thinker columnist Thomas Lifson. “Huma? Presumably, the FBI is investigating this point.”

Perhaps, but don’t bet on it. The story revealing the agency was “upset” with Obama’s assertion during a “60 Minutes” interview that Hillary’s server didn’t pose a “national security problem" is a bit convenient, when one considers the stench of corruption that has tainted the entire Department of Justice, from its executive-order-protected role in the Fast and Furious gun running scandal, to its collaboration (along with the FBI) with the IRS’s effort to target tax-exempt conservative entities. In other words, the notion that this time they are conducting an honest investigation must be taken with a dollop of well-earned doubt.

One last thing. It is time to bury the disinformation campaign regarding Hillary’s excuse that former Secretary of State Colin Powell also used a private server. Like most assertions Hillary and her backers make, the truth is a bit more detailed. Powell did have a private server. He also had a public server for classified info. "I had two machines on my desk,” Powell stated in a Sept. 6 “Meet the Press” interview with Chuck Todd. “I had a secure State Department machine, which I used for secure material, and I had a laptop that I could use for email.”

Clinton is scheduled to testify before the House committee on Benghazi on Oct. 22. In the meantime, she is running an ad denouncing it. This column is being written on Oct. 19. It will be illuminating to see, between now and then, which, if any, mainstream media entities focus on the real bombshell contained in the Mail’s latest revelation. Sadly, that would be a bombshell in and of itself.

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