One measure of the debacle is a "60 Minutes Wednesday" segment that millions of viewers now will now not see: a hard-hitting report making a powerful case that in trying to build support for the Iraq war, the Bush administration either knowingly deceived the American people about Saddam Hussein's nuclear capabilities or was grossly credulous. CBS news president Andrew Heyward spiked the story this week, saying it would be "inappropriate" during the election campaign.
The importance that CBS placed on the report was evident by its unusual length: It was slated to run a full half hour, double the usual 15 minutes of a single segment. Although months of reporting went into the production, CBS abruptly decided that it would be "inappropriate to air the report so close to the presidential election," in the words of a statement that network spokeswoman Kelli Edwards gave the New York Times.
The real reason, of course, was that because of CBS's sloppy reporting on the Bush National Guard story, the network's news executives believed they could no longer report credibly on the heart of the Iraq nuclear issue, involving another set of completely forged documents: those purporting to show that Iraq had purchased yellowcake uranium from the African country Niger.
Salon was given the videotape by CBS News on the condition that we report on it only shortly before it was to air. But after the network effectively spiked its own story (which was reported by Newsweek online and by the New York Times), we sent an e-mail late last week to CBS stating that we believed that the embargo no longer applied. We received no reply and therefore feel free to report.
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A source close to CBS said Bradley was furious with the decision to spike the report and angry that the reputation of the "60 Minutes" Sunday program has suffered because of the missteps of the Wednesday version of the show. Bradley did not return phone calls seeking comment. On Tuesday, his assistant said the correspondent was "swamped" after returning from a trip to the Middle East.
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Whatever the case, the CBS producers apparently decided to concentrate on what could be nailed down: the Bush administration had, either intentionally or with breathtaking credulity, relied on patently false intelligence to make the case for invading Iraq.
"Two years ago, Americans heard some frightening words from President Bush and his closest advisers," Bradley said in his introduction of the now-shelved report. "Saddam Hussein, they said, could soon have a nuclear bomb. Of course, we now know that wasn't true." Not only did Saddam not have a nuclear program, Bradley said, but "he hadn't for more than ten years. How could the Bush administration be so wrong about something so important?"
The answer, Bradley was to have told viewers, "has a lot to do with a single piece of evidence: A set of documents that appear to prove Saddam was secretly buying uranium ore." The mysterious surfacing of the forged Niger documents, Bradley said, helped "explain why President Bush and his cabinet delivered the frightening message we all heard in the early autumn two years ago." The broadcast then cut to video clips of Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice making public statements with eerily similar wording:
"We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons," Cheney said in an address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Cut to Rumsfeld: "We do now know that Saddam Hussein has been actively and persistently" pursuing nukes." Then, Rice on a television talk show, insisted: "We do know that he is actively pursuing a nuclear weapon."
By showing the video clips in rapid succession, the television piece conveyed, in a manner beyond the printed word, how deliberate and practiced was the administration's sense of urgency.
Bradley then interviewed Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. (No one from the Bush administration or any Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee would cooperate, Bradley told viewers.) Biden said in the run-up to the war, he had been perplexed by the remarks of Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice, because nothing he knew about Iraq's nuclear threat squared with their claims. Asked why he thought they were making such dire pronouncements, Biden said: "What's the one way to energize the American public to go to war? The threat of nuclear weapons."
Cut to Bush: "We cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." The expression on Bush's face as he speaks portentously was a look of concern. Yet, had the segment aired, the viewer would have understood that the president was not telling the truth.
The next scene: Bradley walks down a crowded sidewalk in Milan with Dr. Jafar Dhia Jafar, who had been Saddam's chief nuclear scientist. Jafar explains that Iraq dismantled its nuclear program after the Gulf War in the face of United Nations inspections. "So what was going on?" Bradley asks. "Nothing was going on," Jafar replies. He tells Bradley that the Bush administration was either "being fed with the wrong information" or "they were doing this deliberately."
In a voice over, Bradley asks: "So what information did the Bush administration have to support its argument that Saddam was rebuilding his nuclear weapons? They began hearing reports about one piece of evidence that, if true, would have been the smoking gun."
Cut to a man leading a camel down a crowded city street and a boy playing with a tire in the dirt. We are in Niger, the world's fourth-leading supplier of uranium yellowcake, Bradley explains, as he moves into an interview with former ambassador Joseph Wilson. The CIA dispatched Wilson to Niger in 2002 to investigate reports that Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium from the African nation. Wilson reported that he found no evidence to support the claim. But the Bush administration ignored him and the CIA. In his State of the Union address in January 2003, President Bush cited the supposed Iraqi nuclear threat, slyly attributing its sourcing to British intelligence, since discredited by the Senate Select Intelligence Committee report.
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In his closing, Bradley explains how fiercely the White House fought his report. Administration officials and Republicans in Congress turned down "60 Minutes'" requests for interview. So did former Rep. Porter Goss, the Florida Republican whom Bush has appointed as the new director of the CIA.
"60 Minutes" defied the White House to produce this report. But it could not survive the network's cowardice -- cowardice born of self-inflicted wounds.
Everyone associated with this travesty of a network should hang their head in shame. THe only patriotic thing for a CBS underling to do now is to leak the broadcast to Michael Moore, so he can append it to the DVD of Fahrenheit 911.