On May 18, Bob and Gina Fesmire of Sunnyvale opened www.downingstreetmemo.com, a website dedicated to sharing information on the British documents that outline the British and United States' government's efforts to justify war in Iraq.

The Fesmires' website has kept the memos in the limelight when mainstream media gave them little coverage.

On May 1, 2005, the Sunday Times newspaper in London printed the first memo, which stated in one section: "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 neighbors, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran."

The revelation received moderate mainstream attention, but the blogosphere was abuzz with discussion of the memo and its ramifications.

One of those conversations, on www.dailykos.com--a political forum--proposed a website about the memo. The Fesmires were involved in the blog discussion, and in less than two weeks, web designer Gina Fesmire, 46, had the site up with the help of her husband and a handful of other dailykos.com regulars.

The main document includes transcribed minutes of a July 23, 2002, meeting of Prime Minister Tony Blair and his cabinet. The memo describes the United States' efforts to justify the Iraq war.

Seven similar documents have since been revealed in London. According to downingstreetmemo.com, these memos "paint a picture of a President [George W. Bush] intent on invading Iraq and a loyal ally [Blair] troubled both by how it could be justified and by what it would bring."

At a time when mainstream media is transfixed with celebrity, coverage of the war has been relegated to back pages, and follow-up on the memos that appeared in the Times all but disappeared.

In an effort to keep media coverage of the memos alive, the group at downingstreetmemos.com posted the text of all of them on the website along with analysis and public comments.

The website has since received national media attention. New York Times columnist Paul Krugeman mentioned the site in his May 16 column and as a result, it got more than 70,000 visits in a single day.

Bob Fesmire--who became the spokesman for www.downingstreetmemo.com because of his background in communications for a high-tech firm--has conducted interviews for television, print and radio formats, but he says the website hasn't gotten much attention from such major outlets as FOX News, CNN or Comedy Central's The Daily Show.

While the media was watching them, the Fesmires and their team were watching the media. Every day in July, the Fesmires posted three media contacts--reporters, editors and broadcasters from outlets such a the Wall Street Journal or CNN--for website readers to write to to demand more coverage of the memos.

According to Bob Fesmire, 37,"the memos show that Bush was dead-set on war, that Blair had committed to helping him and that his [Blair's] cabinet had to find a way to do it."

Specifically, the first memo describes President Bush's desire to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Sir Richard Dearlove, director of the Foreign Intelligence Service, told Blair that "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." Other statements in the memo show U.S. plans to create justification for the use of force.

In addition to pushing coverage of the memos, Gina Fesmire said they hoped to bring about a change in the way ordinary people such as themselves get involved in politics and national issues.

"I would love other people to see this as an example of what they can do too," she said. "This whole thing literally came out of an online conversation on the afternoon of May 11."

The Fesmires says 95 percent of the attention they have gotten has been from supporters, as reflected in their perpetually full email box.

"We've had emails that say 'You guys are real patriots.' I never thought that it would touch me the way it has," Gina Fesmire said.

But there are the people who read the site and disagree.

In an email to the site, Mark Koenig wrote, "Studying the memo and your enterprising opinions ... I submit thus ... a lot of what ifs and maybes ... no hard evidence that Bush knew in advance WMDs were not in pre-war Iraq. That would have to be proved, i.e. ... White House documents, emails, etc ... spin and opinion isn't evidence."

But not all of their detractors are eloquent.

"Usually the negative emails are all caps with lots of exclamation points at the end of every sentence," Bob Fesmire said.

Much of the initial deluge of attention has subsided, and Bob Fesmire says they are now shifting their attention to investigations into the allegations in the memos. At the top of their site is a tracker counting the days since Congress requested an investigation; nothing has happened since.

Fesmire has contacted Sen. Dianne Feinstein's office about the memos; she is on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. He doesn't know if his call to the office made an impact on the senator. What he does know is on Aug. 2 Feinstein sent a letter to Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, the chairman of the select committee.

In part the letter said: "In addition to the terms set out early last year, the committee should address the significant issues raised by the so-called 'Downing Street Memo' --whether the 'intelligence and facts were being fixed' to support the policy of using military force against Iraq."

Many people seem to want the site to get involved in overtly political, partisan efforts, such as Moveon.org, the group that campaigned heavily against Bush's reelection. So far, the entire www.downingstreetmemo.com team has tried to avoid explicitly joining a side in the political battle.

"The objective here is truth," Bob Fesmire said. "I have about 500 better things to do with my time that maintain a website fighting to get Bush out of office." He says he is a registered independent who identifies ideologically for the most part with the Republican Party. He was raised Republican.

The Fesmires have also avoided getting involved in other causes or using the site as a fundraising tool.

"I'm weary about raising money because as soon as you do that, the opposite side is going to follow the money train and say that whoever is funding us owns us," he said.

"We're not full time activists, we're just a few people who saw something that needed to be fixed," he said. "This site could have been started by anyone. I hope it's empowering, because six people can make a difference."