Bob Woodward recently urged reporters to take more time investigating stories. For example, reporters should have taken more time to investigate and debunk Bush’s claim that Iraq had secret weapons.
“We should have been much more aggressive,” Woodward told a conference in Tokyo.
“I’ve thought what I could have done,” he said. “The only way to find out if (weapons of mass destruction) really existed is to get on the ground.”
But he said the round-the-clock deadlines of the modern media were hampering investigative journalism. (Source)
Yeah, that and Saddam, who continued to refuse U.N. weapons inspectors free access to suspected weapons sites. But a well-placed cadre of journalist spies sneaking through Iraq’s “presidential palaces” and military sites might have alerted the world that Iraq didn’t have WMDs, contrary to conventional intelligence opinion at that time.
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I’m not sure that was the thrust of him comment. I’ve read his book, and from that I gather that he was saying that we should have probed what the Administration a whole lot deeper instead of merely being Bush’s stenographer, taking what he said as gospel without digging into it to find out if there were dissenting voices out there who were saying the opposite, and weighing their background to see if there was reason to give their position at least equal weight to that of the president.
And, you are forgetting that just a day or two before the bombing started Saddam gave the insp0ectors free access to wherever they wanted to go in the country, but Bush ordered the inspectors out of the country instead, forbidding them to continue their search.
I don’t know. I’m just taking Woodward at his word when he says, “I’ve thought what I could have done. The only way to find out if (weapons of mass destruction) really existed is to get on the ground.”
Well, even that doesn’t work if they’re not there. Had the press taken a more adversarial role in the beginning of this mess and dug a little deeper, they would have found out that the ‘intellilgence’ they parroted came from an ad hoc group, located in the Pentagon, that answered directly to Cheney. It had neither the legal authority nor the expertise to do what it was doing.
They also could have gone to Niger and done a bit of snooping. Had they done that, they would have found out that all the uranium in the ground in Niger existed in a mine that was owned by a consortium of four countries, including Japan and France (Niger used to be a French colongy, if you’ll recall). It is aa third world country with only one or two cities that contain mud houses because what little wood that exists there is used for cooking. It is land-locked, fully 800 miles from the nearest port.
The rour countries file an estimate every year of how much ore they will take out of the ground. That ore goes directly to those founr countries and is used in their nuclear plants to provide electricity. If they deviate substantially from the estimates, they must provide an updated estimate with the government explaining how much additional ore will be taken, and why.
Only about 10 percent of the people in Niger have what we could call steady, paying jobs, and nearly all of them work for the embassies or the local government, such as it is. Getting 500 tons of yellowcake out of that country without being detected would be an impossibility. There are only two commercial flights into the country each week, and they are a mere 12 hours apart, leaving only cargo planes entering the country otherwise, aside from a very few private flights. The army goes through the cargo entering the country piece-by-piece, recording every item for tax purposes.
My understanding is that even 50 tons of yellowcake would yield a financial windfall around $100,000,000 U.S. That kind of sudden wealth in a country like that would be instantly noticed by one and all.
Now, you tell me how that much yellowcake could possibly be gotten out of that country. Just a few questions by a reporter would have made the whole idea look as preposterous as it is. The press didn’t do their job.
I’ve heard it said that there are two sides to every story. My guess is that most stories have even more sides than that. But, in this case, even checking out one more side would have saved many lives and billions of our dollars.
Did Bush ever claim that Iraq had bought nuclear material from Niger? I don’t think so. Here for your reading pleasure, the infamous sixteen words in his 2003 State of the Union speech:
I never realized that Cheney had so much power and influence. You’re claiming that he convinced the rest of the world and the Clinton administration that Iraq had WMD, even before W took office. Wow!
If you will recall, Powell went to the U.N. with the ‘news’ that yellowcake had been obtained from Niger, as per a document that was later determined to be a very poor forgery. That is the reason Joe Wilson was sent to Niger to verify that claim. He came back to the U.S. and delivered the message to the proper authorities that not only had none been obtained for anybody outside of the four members of the consortium that owned the mine, but that doing so was a virtual impossibility.
Yes, Cheney was the one who set up the ad hoc group in the Pentagon. That group included nothing but Iraq hawks, including Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, among others, to deliberately dig up the intelligence chatter that had been discounted by those in the intelligence community that had been discounted for valid reasons.