One evening last week I was reclined on the sofa watching the
baseball playoffs, brain happily in neutral (my favorite gear),
when Ren
ée yelled from upstairs about a segment she was watching on 60
Minutes II. I flipped over.
One evening last week I was reclined on the sofa watching the baseball playoffs, brain happily in neutral (my favorite gear), when Renée yelled from upstairs about a segment she was watching on 60 Minutes II. I flipped over.
Fifteen minutes later, I was picking my jaw up off the floor, my emotions evenly divided between anger and disappointment. In this limited space, I cannot recreate the full impact of the piece, but let me highlight the key points.
Greg Thielmann, a 25-year foreign-service officer, was most recently the director of Strategic Proliferation and Military Affairs at the State Department. All Iraqi weapons information, whether from the CIA or the Defense Department came through his office. He said:
• Colin Powell’s speech to the United Nations and President Bush’s State of the Union speech illustrated Saddam Hussein’s determination to obtain a nuclear weapon by showing us aluminum tubes he was trying to obtain in order to enrich uranium. The world’s leading experts on enriching uranium at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory inspected these tubes and determined that they could not be used for that purpose. This information was told to the White House in 2001.
• Powell showed satellite photos of a chemical bunker identified by the decontamination vehicles that were a “unique signature” of such sites. It turns out these were fire trucks, hardly a unique signature.
• Powell claimed that Saddam still had Scud missiles. “I wondered what he was talking about,” said Thielmann. “We did not have any evidence that the Iraqis has those missiles, pure and simple.”
According to 60 Minutes II, “Thielmann says that Iraq didn’t pose an imminent threat to anyone: ‘I think it didn’t even constitute an imminent threat to its neighbors at the time we went to war.'”
You can read the full story at cbsnews.com (click 60 Minutes II and look in the Archives for “The Man Who Knew”).
The most disturbing part of this story is not that our leaders lied to us. Watergate, Iran-Contra, Monica Lewinsky and many other examples of lying presidents have conditioned us to take the blows with passive cynicism rather than screaming out our indignation. Sad, but true.
The real issue is: Where was CBS News, or any news organization, last February when we needed them? This piece did not belong on a news show; it belonged on the History Channel. We needed to know this information before the war. Why didn’t we get it then?
The truth was surely available to an investigative reporter back in February when Colin Powell made his speech to the United Nations. Why didn’t some editor at the Washington Post or the New York Times say, “Jones, I want you and Smith to get out there and turn over every rock in Washington and find out if this stuff is true?”
The answer is that last February there was an American Flag on every porch and President Bush’s approval rating was astronomical. We wanted this war then and the press feared the response from its audience and probable sanctions from the White House. Now that things are getting messy in Iraq and we are tiring of it, it takes little courage to investigate and tell the story.
The role of the press in maintaining our freedom is critical to the success of our democracy. It given special protection by our constitution to insure that we hear the truth even when our leaders lie to us. But it is an empty protection without the courage to find the truth when it is most difficult to report it. Thank goodness Woodward and Bernstein pursued Watergate when they did, despite threats and immense difficulties, rather than track down the information in 1976. By then it would have been interesting but useless historical information, just like CBS’s post-war story of pre-war lies.
Step up to the plate, press. Give us the truth when we can shape the world with it, not when we’re writing our history books.
