San Jose, Calif. ? Gina and Robert Fesmire come across as the average couple next door, taking care of the home front in jeans and sweatpants, struggling to stay one step ahead of a hectic Silicon Valley life.

But they didn’t realize how crazy life could be until last month when Gina launched www.downingstreetmemo.com on a whim. The site, which has become a bona fide phenomenon, features secret British documents on the lead-up to the Iraq war, first leaked to the press in England.

The site has drawn 700,000 visits since going up May 11 with the goal of prodding U.S. media coverage of the documents. It has sparked political discussion around the country and quickly attracted attention from The New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.

Driving the frenzy is the Downing Street memo, the minutes of a meeting on July 23, 2002, in which British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top aides report on talks with Bush administration officials about Iraq. It was big news in Britain when the Sunday Times of London broke the story May 1, but generated few significant news stories in the United States.

Pundits disagree on whether the memo – written eight months before the war began – provides a “smoking gun” that proves the Bush administration lied about its intentions and manufactured a case for war. But Democratic politicians and bloggers on the left have jumped on it. A number of media commentators also have concluded that the memo deserved deeper coverage than it initially received.

Besides posting the memo – actually a series of leaked British government documents – the site has spearheaded a media campaign. It targets three media outlets daily and urges visitors to ask them to cover the memos.

“I think we won the opening battle,” Bob Fesmire said, crediting bloggers, other Web sites and politicians like U.S. Rep John Conyers with creating a din the press couldn’t ignore. “We got the media to pay attention.”

The nerve center for the site is a tiny spare bedroom converted to an office in their modest Sunnyvale tract home. On the front porch sits a sign, custom made by Gina, that reads “no solicitors or religious fanatics.” On the office door is a sticker that proclaims, “The Book of Revelation is not a policy manual.”

Bob, and Gina, share the labor for the site. Five others, from Oregon and Ottawa to Pennsylvania, also take part.

Downingstreetmemo.com was started with little forethought or planning.

It grew out of a discussion on the DailyKos, a lefty blog to which Gina admits addiction. Frustrated by American media coverage, some of the regulars talked about producing a TV ad or Internet video. Then someone suggested a Web site.

With her expertise in Web design, Gina jumped on it. She quickly secured the domain name and within hours had created a bare-bones site. That was May 11. Things really took off the following Monday, when New York Times editorial columnist Paul Krugman provided a site link in his column. That day, the site had 70,000 visits.

“That was our first taste of something, of being citizen journalists,” Gina said.