françois yves le gal

"The Story That Didn’t Run
Here’s the piece that ‘60 Minutes’ killed for its report on the Bush Guard
documents

By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Newsweek

Updated: 3:46 p.m. ET Sept. 22, 2004

Sept. 22 - In its rush to air its now discredited story about President
George W. Bush’s National Guard service, CBS bumped another sensitive piece
slated for the same “60 Minutes” broadcast: a half-hour segment about how
the U.S. government was snookered by forged documents purporting to show
Iraqi efforts to purchase uranium from Niger.

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.

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.”

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 laughing stock,” said one source intimately familiar
with the story.

Although acknowledging that it was “frustrating” to have his story bounced,
David Gelber, the lead CBS producer on the Niger piece, said he has been
told the segment will still air some time soon, perhaps as early as next
week. “Obviously, everybody at CBS is holding their breath these days. I’m
assuming the story is going to run until I’m told differently.”

The delay of the CBS report comes at a time when there have been significant
new developments in the case—although virtually none of them have been
reported in the United States. According to Italian and British press
reports, Martino-the Rome middleman at the center of the case—was questioned
last week by an Italian investigating magistrate for two hours about the
circumstances surrounding his acquisition of the documents. Martino could
not be reached for comment, but his lawyer is reportedly planning a press
conference in the next few days.

Burba, the Italian journalist, confirmed to NEWSWEEK this week that Martino
is the previously mysterious “Mr. X” who contacted her with the potentially
explosive documents in early October, 2002—just as Congress was debating
whether to authorize President Bush to wage war against Iraq. The documents,
consisting of telexes, letters and contracts, purported to show that Iraq
had negotiated an agreement to purchase 500 tons of “yellow cake uranium
from Niger, material that could be used to make a nuclear bomb. (A U.S.
intelligence official told NEWSWEEK that Martino is in fact believed to have
been the distributor of the documents.)

Burba—under instructions from her editor at Panarama, a newsmagazine owned
by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi—then provided the documents to
the U.S. Embassy in Rome in an effort to authenticate them. The embassy soon
passed the material on to Washington where some Bush administration
officials viewed it as hard evidence to support its case that Saddam
Hussein’s regime was actively engaged in a program to assemble nuclear
weapons.

But the Niger component of the White House case for war quickly imploded.
Asked for evidence to support President Bush’s contention in his State of
the Union speech that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa, the
administration turned over the Niger documents to the International Atomic
Energy Agency. Within two hours, using the Google search engine, IAEA
officials in Vienna determined the documents to be a crude forgery. At the
urging of Sen. Jay Rockefeller, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence
Committee, the FBI launched an investigation into the Niger documents in an
effort to determine if the United States government had been duped by a
deliberate “disinformation” campaign organized by a foreign intelligence
agency or others with a political agenda relating to Iraq.

So far, the bureau appears to have made little progress in unraveling the
case. “The senator is frustrated by the slow pace of the investigation,”
said Wendy Morigi, the press secretary for Sen. Rockefeller, who was
recently briefed on the status of the FBI probe.

One striking aspect of the FBI’s investigation is that, at least as of this
week, Martino has told associates he has never even been interviewed by the
bureau-despite the fact that he was publicly identified by the Financial
Times of London as the source of the documents more than six weeks ago and
was subsequently flown to New York City by CBS to be interviewed for the
“60 Minutes” show.

A U.S. law-enforcement official said the FBI is seeking to interview
Martino, but has not yet received permission to do so from the Italian
government. The official declined to comment on other aspects of the
investigation.

The case has taken on additional intrigue because of mounting indications
that Martino has longstanding relationships with European intelligence
agencies. Martino recently told the Sunday Times of London that he had
previously worked for SISMI, the Italian military intelligence agency, a
potentially noteworthy part of his resume given that the conservative
Italian government of Berlasconi was a strong supporter of the Bush
administration’s invasion of Iraq. A French government official told
NEWSWEEK that Martino also had a relationship with French intelligence
agencies. But the French official rejected suggestions from U.S. and British
officials that French intelligence may have played a role in creating the
documents in order to embarrass Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
The French never disseminated the documents because they could not establish
their authenticity, the French official said.

Martino has told Burba and others that he obtained the phony documents from
an Italian woman who worked in the Niger Embassy in Rome. He was in turn put
in touch with the woman by yet another middleman who, according to Burba’s
account, had directed Martino to provide the documents to “the Eygptians.”
Some press reports have suggested the still unidentified middleman who put
Martino in touch with his Niger Embassy source was in fact a SISMI officer
himself.

Burba, who has twice been interviewed by the FBI but never gave up Martino’s
name, said she had been cooperating with the CBS team on the story in hopes
of getting to the bottom of the matter. But now, with the “60 Minutes”
broadcast postponed, she is no longer confident that can ever happen.
Meanwhile, she said she is fed up with Martino who has “lied” to her and
provided contradictory accounts to other journalists.

“I’m disappointed,” she told NEWSWEEK. “In this story, you don’t know who’s
lying and who’s telling the truth. The sources have been both discredited
and discredited themselves.”

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6073449/site/newsweek/