60 Minutes 6 Months Investigating Niger Fraud- Story Scrapped For NG Story

[seemslikeadream]

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=2405636

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0923-02.htm

Published on Thursday, September 23, 2004 by MSNBC
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

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.

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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

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