CBS revises history about Iraq's WMD

On February 26, 2003, CBS aired an interview with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in which he told Dan Rather "There are no missiles that are contrary to the prescription of the United Nations in Iraq. They are no longer there." (Saddam Hussein Interview transcript, 60 Minutes II, February 26, 2003)

On January 27, 2008, CBS aired an interview of FBI agent George Piro, the lead interrogator of President Hussein for the FBI and CIA, by correspondent Scott Pelley. The following exchange is from the interview:

PELLEY: And what did he tell you about how his weapons of mass destruction had been destroyed?

PIRO: He told me that most of the WMD had been destroyed by the U.N. inspectors in the '90s, and those that hadn't been destroyed by the inspectors unilaterally destroyed by Iraq.

PELLEY: He had ordered them destroyed?

PIRO: Yes.

PELLEY: So why keep the secret? Why put your nation at risk? Why put your own life at risk to maintain this charade?

(Interrogator Shares Saddam's Confessions, 60 Minutes, Jan. 27, 2008)

It is a perverse reversal of narrative to suggest, as Pelley does, that Hussein was the one lying by keeping the fact that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction a secret, and to suggest that Hussein wanted his country to be invaded when it was President Bush that pulled the U.N. inspectors from Iraq and made the decision to go to war. It was the U.S. government that mislead the public about Iraq having WMDs.

Related Link:

• The "Great Mystery" of Iraq's (FAIR, 2/1/2008)