Burying the lead

[Tigermike 3,053]

The Wall Street Journal wonders why CBS "buried the lead" on the latest Saddam WMD story that was just in the news:

Buried WMD Scoop

February 1, 2008; Page A14

Journalists are taught never to "bury the lead." Yet it looks as if that's precisely what CBS's "60 Minutes" did in reporter Scott Pelley's fascinating interview Sunday with George Piro, the FBI agent who debriefed Saddam Hussein following his capture in December 2003.

The Lebanese-born Mr. Piro, one of only a handful of agents at the bureau who speaks Arabic, was able to wheedle information from Saddam over a matter of months through a combination of flattery and ego-deflation that worked wonders with the former despot. But as Bruce Chapman of the Discovery Institute first noticed, the most important news in the segment comes when Mr. Piro describes his conversations with Saddam about weapons of mass destruction. The FBI interrogator says that, while Saddam said he no longer had active WMD programs in 2003, the dictator admitted that he intended to resume those programs as soon as he possibly could.

Here's the relevant segment, which appears well down in the interview:

Mr. Piro: "The folks that he needed to reconstitute his program are still there."

Mr. Pelley: "And that was his intention?"

Mr. Piro: "Yes."

Mr. Pelley: "What weapons of mass destruction did he intend to pursue again once he had the opportunity?"

Mr. Piro: "He wanted to pursue all of WMD. So he wanted to reconstitute his entire WMD program."

Mr. Pelley: "Chemical, biological, even nuclear."

Mr. Piro: "Yes."

Iraq's active WMD program had been destroyed, mostly by U.N. weapons inspectors, sometime in the 1990s, but Saddam told Mr. Piro that he maintained a pretense of having those weapons mainly to keep Iran at bay. This isn't exactly news. The key point is Saddam's admission that an Iraqi WMD program remained a threat so long as Saddam remained in power.

Opponents of the war argue that none of this matters because Saddam and his ambitions were being "contained" by U.N. sanctions. Hardly. As the Los Angeles Times reported in December 2000, "sanctions are crumbling among U.S. allies, who have begun challenging them with dozens of unauthorized flights into [iraq]."

Bowing to this reality, the Bush Administration came to office the following month promising to ease the sanctions regime, even as it spent billions patrolling the so-called "No-Fly Zones." And as we learned after the invasion, Saddam was well on his way to breaking free of the sanctions by bribing everyone from a British member of parliament to a former French cabinet minister, all through a U.N. convenience known as Oil for Food.

In another telling moment in the "60 Minutes" interview, Mr. Piro relates that when he asked Saddam about his use of chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians, the dictator acknowledged that he had given the orders personally and explained himself in a word: "Necessary." The same still goes for getting rid of Saddam.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120182537976533691.html

By their refusal to acknowledge the reality of the threat posed not only by Saddam, but by Islamic fanatacism and the regimes that support it, the left has created a recipe for disaster. Just listening to the two Democratic Presidential nominees the other night try to outdo each other in their denunciation of the Iraq war and the unseemly desire to surrender to Al Qaeda, should be a wake-up call for every American.

Maybe, just maybe, no amount of evidence would ever convince some people that Saddam was a threat to the U.S. and the entire world and that he once had WMDs and used them; and fully intended to have them and use them again. Maybe, but I doubt it.

[mowegl 4]

BTW if any of you didnt see the interview, you should try. Very interesting. Unless he writes a book, we probably wont ever get any of this info except by interviews with Piro.

[AURaptor 1,126]

Frmer Sec. State Madeleine Albright was on the Laura Ingraham show, and mentioned this " Saddam was contained " nonsense. When Laura mentioned the failed Food for Oil fiasco, Madame Albright casually tried to dismiss that as if it was something totally unrelated. It wasn't It showed that the UN could not be trusted w/ the mission at hand, and was corruptable. IT HAD BEEN CORRUPTED, and it was only a matter of time before Saddam got what he wanted.

The doves of the world don't understand, or don't WANT to understand, because facing that reality means that W was right all along.

Which of course, he was.