The Wall Street Journal can’t believe that the MSM would bury a huge story:
Journalists are taught never to “bury the lead.” Yet it looks as if that’s precisely what CBS’s “60 Minutes” did in reporter Scott Pelley’s fascinating interview Sunday with George Piro, the FBI agent who debriefed Saddam Hussein following his capture in December 2003.
The Lebanese-born Mr. Piro, one of only a handful of agents at the bureau who speaks Arabic, was able to wheedle information from Saddam over a matter of months through a combination of flattery and ego-deflation that worked wonders with the former despot. But as Bruce Chapman of the Discovery Institute first noticed, the most important news in the segment comes when Mr. Piro describes his conversations with Saddam about weapons of mass destruction. The FBI interrogator says that, while Saddam said he no longer had active WMD programs in 2003, the dictator admitted that he intended to resume those programs as soon as he possibly could.
Iraq’s active WMD program had been destroyed, mostly by U.N. weapons inspectors, sometime in the 1990s, but Saddam told Mr. Piro that he maintained a pretense of having those weapons mainly to keep Iran at bay. This isn’t exactly news. The key point is Saddam’s admission that an Iraqi WMD program remained a threat so long as Saddam remained in power.
Opponents of the war argue that none of this matters because Saddam and his ambitions were being “contained” by U.N. sanctions. Hardly. As the Los Angeles Times reported in December 2000, “sanctions are crumbling among U.S. allies, who have begun challenging them with dozens of unauthorized flights into [Iraq].”
With Oil for Food working so well, well enough to make a few countries rich that is, France and Russia were at the forefront to reduce the sanctions, and over time we all know what would have happened. Those sanctions would have disappeared and Saddam would have survived again to ensure terror and tyranny reign supreme in Iraq and the region by restarting that WMD program.
This isn’t only are intelligence services telling us this, its in Saddam’s own words.
But why tell that story? It would only prove Bush was right and that is NOT the narrative our MSM and the left wish to convey.
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Hmm…it doesn’t seem to mention how 60 Minutes “buried the lead”. Did they leave out that point?
My guess is because the Pelley interview wasn’t the lead story last Sunday night. It was the 2nd segment lined up, which did surprise me. I thought the interview should have been the lead story, definitely.
If the opposite had come out during the interview, whereas Saddam said he had no intention of restarting his WMD program, you absolutely know that would of been big news for the MSM.
“Saddam Had No WMD Ambition” and other headlines would have been ever present.
Since the opposite happened CBS barely uttered a peep. I would call that burying the lead.
It’s easier for people to believe that the entire war in Iraq (and often 911) is just a big imperialist/corporate conspiracy that can be fought and solved by blogging/trolling, sometimes protesting, and ultimately by voting a certain way. It’s not that simple. The idea of an imperialist/corporate conspiracy is actually EASIER and safer and more comforting than the reality of both the quanity and quality of the US’ wars.
I do agree that MSM as a whole didn’t “widely” distribute the story; but I do distinctly remember the previous Sunday, when CBS pre-empted 60 Minutes for an hour-long global warming special, which was just a rehash of previous 60 Minutes segments on the topic, without updating how part of James Hansen’s research has since been shown to be flawed, that they advertised the following Sunday’s 60 Minutes by talking about the Piro interview. That’s how I knew to expect it. I wouldn’t say that qualifies as “burying the story”. But I do agree that they would have given it greater promotion, had it been a “smoking gun” against the Administration.
Certainly Saddam would have confessed to actually having WMD if he had been water-boarded.
I am not sure of what the “smoking gun” was ? Is it Saddam’s WISH that he had WMD ? My guess is that Saddam was a long long way from being able to build one. Contrary to popular belief it is just not that easy, let alone with any pretension of secrecy
From the WSJ
See, I don’t understand how the WSJ considers it “burying the story”, merely because it appears somewhere in the middle of the interview. That doesn’t make sense to me. But I do think it’s one story, like many, that does not get the wider airplay that it deserves.
I think if the GOP is to have a better chance of winning in ’08, it won’t be by distancing ourselves from the previous 8 years, but by embracing the efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not by being ashamed of it, and trying to bury it all under a rug. Public opinion could be swayed in light of the positive turns happening in Iraq. And by highlighting and underscoring that the “Bush lied, people died” meme is a media myth.
Word,
That requires courage and the RNC seems to have little, despite the volumes of mail they get from members.
John, a great amount of WMD stuff that Saddam once had remains unaccounted for (per the UN). The question remains, where did it go?
As to whether Saddam would have taken long to rebuild his programs, no. It would have taken hours in some case (again, per the UN). Months in most (per the CIA’s ISG “Duelfer Report”), and the 2003 NIE says it would have taken until 2007 for nukes. There was, however, a large amount of proscribed materials (often just lump-summed into the term WMD by the media and politicians) which were found in Iraq, and which were on order outside Iraq-including an ICBM ordered from North Korea (‘course that was years before even the North Koreans found out their long range missiles sucked).