Replies

Guess which story on Iraq 60 minutes bumped so they could run the infamous Bush National Guard story?

"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."

http://www.ccmep.org/2004_articles/iraq/092304_story_that_didnt_run.htm

Also in that article:

"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."

Me: Those Niger docs were obvious forgeries. The docs were not planted by someone who wanted to support the war, they were planted by someone who wanted to undermine the basis for war. These are the same forged docs that Wilson claimed to have knowledge of...before they were even in CIA possession...a claim he later retracted and said he must have "misspoke".

Also, as far as Rocco's credibility:

"Meanwhile, she [Elisabetta Burba, the Italian journalist who first obtained the phony documents] said she is fed up with Martino who has “lied” to her and provided contradictory accounts to other journalists."

Fedora,
Here is a link to another article about Rocco that came out about a month after the Libero article:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/09/19/wniger19.xml

Yes, I knew that.

Thanks for posting for others' info.

And your analysis:

The docs were not planted by someone who wanted to support the war, they were planted by someone who wanted to undermine the basis for war. These are the same forged docs that Wilson claimed to have knowledge of...before they were even in CIA possession...a claim he later retracted and said he must have "misspoke".

Is spot on.

It's not a coincidence CBS had this in its "bring down Bush" packet of stories in the weeks before the election. Their angle was going to be how the WH had been duped by forgeries. The truth was as soon as CIA headquarters (stateside) got them here in February 2003---after the SOTU---they quickly raised questions about their authenticity and turned over to the IAEA. In the wake of CBS themselves being taken in by forgeries they realized that angle wasn't going to play as well as originally planned so it was scrapped.

Guess which story on Iraq 60 minutes bumped so they could run the infamous Bush National Guard story?

I was thinking about that last night as well. I've read there are some who still want to run the story that got killed.

Thanks for the link to the Telegraph article; I hadn't seen that one.