Posted on 09/24/2004 7:10:28 AM PDT by bikepacker67
The CBS scandal gets worse every day. Now, in an amazing twist, Michael Isikoff of Newsweek was on Chris Matthews' MSNBC "Hardball" show on Wednesday night claiming that CBS had been planning to air a story about the White House using forged documents to make the case for war against Iraq. CBS postponed the story so it could go on the air attacking President Bush on the National Guard issue. It backfired when 60 Minutes itself got caught using forged documents. Still, Isikoff indicates that 60 Minutes is planning to air the anti-Bush piece, perhaps as early as Sunday night, September 26.
There is only one big problemthe anti-Bush story, as described by Isikoff and eagerly embraced by Democrat partisan Matthews, is completely false. It's as phony as those National Guard documents.
The Iraq-uranium link, the subject of much media misinformation, has been documented and confirmed by authoritative reports from Britain's Lord Butler, who had been a cabinet secretary under five different Prime Ministers, and the Senate Intelligence Committee.
In an article on the Newsweek website, Isikoff claims that 60 Minutes had originally planed to run a story about "how the U.S. government was snookered by forged documents purporting to show Iraqi efforts to purchase uranium from Niger." Isikoff says the story, narrated by CBS 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." Isikoff says 60 Minutes has been working on the story for more than six months.
(Excerpt) Read more at aim.org ...
yes very out of line...... i think the china will make a move on Tiawan when the terrorist hit us again... this is big deal..... and we are watching it spin out of control.....
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/world/9758001.htm?1c
CBS delays critical report on Bush's Iraq war decision
By Kate Zernike
The Mercury News
CBS News said Friday that it had postponed a ``60 Minutes'' segment that questioned Bush administration rationales for going to war in Iraq.
The announcement, in a statement by a representative, was issued four days after the network acknowledged that it could not prove the authenticity of documents it used to raise new questions about President Bush's Vietnam-era military service.
The Iraq segment had been ready for broadcast Sept. 8, CBS said, but was bumped at the last minute for the segment on Bush's National Guard service. The Guard segment was considered a highly competitive report, one that other journalists were pursuing.
CBS said Friday night that the report on the war would not run before Nov. 2.
``We now believe it would be inappropriate to air the report so close to the presidential election,'' CBS representative Kelli Edwards, said in a statement.
Edwards said the report had been scheduled for June but was postponed because of additional news on the subject.
The CBS statement followed a report in the online edition of Newsweek that described the frustration of CBS News reporters and producers, who said the network had concluded that it could not legitimately criticize the president because of the questions about the National Guard report.
According to the Newsweek report, the ``60 minutes'' segment was to have detailed how the administration relied on false documents when it said Iraq had tried to buy a lightly processed form of uranium, known as yellowcake, from Niger. The administration later acknowledged that the information was incorrect and that the documents were most likely fake.
The Newsweek article said the segment was to have included the first on-camera interview with Elisabetta Burba, the Italian journalist who was given the fake documents and who provided them to a U.S. Embassy for verification. The documents were sent to Washington, where some officials embraced them as firm evidence that Iraq was aggressively trying to make nuclear weapons.
The lead producer on the Niger segment, David Gelber, declined to comment.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post reported Friday night that former Texas National Guard officer Bill Burkett is looking for an attorney to pursue a possible defamation case against CBS after anchor Dan Rather disclosed Monday that Burkett was the network's confidential and ``unimpeachable'' source for the possible fraudulent documents about Bush's service.
Also Friday, the Pentagon released 10 pages of records from Bush's service, but the files shed no new light on his military career, the Associated Press reported. The records included several that had been released before and others that were administrative files or cover letters to other documents that had been previously released.
May a pox be on their house for a hundred years.
This time they used the Boston Globe
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