The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060508/scheer0426Truthdig | posted April 26, 2006 (web only)
One More Insider Denounces Bush
Robert Scheer
Robert Scheer is editor of TruthDig, where this essay originally was published.
Confession time: In fall 2004, during a crucial presidential election campaign, I made the mistake of playing by corporate media rules that amount to self-censorship.
Specifically, I joined other journalists in denying the public the right to learn of a definitive investigative report by CBS' 60 Minutes on President Bush's disregard for the truth concerning the weapons of mass destruction threat allegedly posed to the United States by Iraq. Having received an advance copy of the devastating segment, I honored CBS' proprietary request not to write about the news it carried until after it aired.
Only, it never aired. CBS got cold feet, probably because of Dan Rather's troubles over an unrelated story critical of the President. The suppressed story was solidly reported and, by exposing the Bush Administration's utter disregard for the truth concerning Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, should have been made available to the public before the November election. Now, no one seems to care.
The segment finally aired this past Sunday, in a more robust form. Unfortunately, the response has been tepid; it seems the media, at least, have become jaded with all the endless examples of the President's perfidy. But the CBS story remains very important as further evidence of the depths of the Bush Administration's deception.
Perhaps most damning is an interview, added for the broadcast version, with Tyler Drumheller, a CIA veteran of twenty-six years' service who was the agency's top spy in Europe until his retirement a year ago. According to him, before the war Hussein's foreign minister had been "turned" and was talking secretly to US intelligence. At first excited by this rare inside look at Hussein's regime, the top dogs at the White House dropped the issue like a hot rock as soon as his information contradicted their overheated rationale for "pre-emptive" war. "The policy was set," Drumheller told CBS correspondent Ed Bradley. "The war in Iraq was coming. And they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy."
That's how now, more than three years later, after at least two major governmental investigations into pre-war intelligence on Iraq and countless journalistic post-mortems, we are only just finding out that a highly-placed double-agent in Iraq was poking a huge hole in the Hussein-as-WMD-bogeyman story.
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