CBS News was so excited about its report featuring fraudulent documents a couple of weeks ago that it bumped another interesting item slated for the same episode. Proving once and for all that irony is far from dead, the bumped story was a half-hour segment about how the Bush administration was duped by forged documents that said Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from Niger.
I wish I were kidding. CBS had a story about the White House misusing bogus documents, but replaced it with a segment based in part on bogus documents about Bush. It’s days like this I wonder why I never started drinking.
The journalistic juggling at CBS provides an ironic counterpoint to the furor over apparently bogus documents involving Bush’s National Guard service. One unexpected consequence of the network’s decision was to wipe out a chance — at least for the moment — for greater public scrutiny of a more consequential forgery that played a role in building the Bush administration’s case to invade Iraq.
A team of “60 Minutes” correspondents and consulting reporters spent more than six months investigating the Niger uranium documents fraud, CBS sources tell Newsweek. The group landed the first ever on-camera interview with Elisabetta Burba, the Italian journalist who first obtained the phony documents, as well as her elusive source, Rocco Martino, a mysterious Roman businessman with longstanding ties to European intelligence agencies.
Although the edited piece never ended up identifying Martino by name, the story, narrated by “60 Minutes” correspondent Ed Bradley, asked tough questions about how the White House came to embrace the fraudulent documents and why administration officials chose to include a 16-word reference to the questionable uranium purchase in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union speech.
Tough questions about the White House and how it abused forgeries to sell the public on a war we didn’t have to fight? What a great segment that would have been.
But just hours before the piece was set to air on the evening of Sept. 8, the reporters and producers on the CBS team were stunned to learn the story was being scrapped to make room for a seemingly sensational story about new documents showing that Bush ignored a direct order to take a flight physical while serving in the National Guard more than 30 years ago.
The story has since created a journalistic and political firestorm, resulting in a colossal embarrassment for CBS. This week, the network concluded that its principle source for the documents, a disgruntled former Guard official and Democratic partisan named Bill Burkett, had lied about where he got the material. CBS anchor Dan Rather publicly apologized for broadcasting the faulty report. Today, CBS named a two-person team comprised of former U.S. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh and former Associated Press chief Louis Boccardi to investigate the network’s handling of the story.
“This is like living in a Kafka novel,” said Joshua Micah Marshall, a Washington Monthly contributing writer and a Web blogger who had been collaborating with “60 Minutes” producers on the uranium story. “Here we had a very important, well-reported story about forged documents that helped lead the country to war. And then it gets bumped by another story that relied on forged documents.”
Well, at least CBS still has the devastating story that the national press has generally ignored, right? 60 Minutes can just run the segment it should have run and still make Bush’s use of forged documents a big story, right? Wrong.
Some CBS reporters, as well as one of the network’s key sources, fear that the Niger uranium story may never run, at least not any time soon, on the grounds that the network can now not credibly air a report questioning how the Bush administration could have gotten taken in by phony documents. The network would “be a laughingstock,” said one source intimately familiar with the story.
I think Marshall’s “Kafka novel” quote just about sums it up.