Wednesday, September 7, 2016

"Saddam's Confessions"


Scott Pelley [source: my San Antonio dot com]
In January of 2008, on the weekly news show, "60 Minutes," CBS ran an illuminating segment called "Saddam's Confessions."

In the segment, reporter Scott Pelley interviewed FBI interrogator George Piro, who had interrogated Saddam Hussein himself.

Pelley asked, "And what did he tell you about how his weapons of mass destruction had been destroyed?" and there followed the most intriguing exchange:
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 were 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?"

PIRO: "It was very important for him to project that because that was what kept him, in his mind, in power. That capability kept the Iranians away. It kept them from reinvading Iraq."

PELLEY: "He believed that he couldn't survive without the perception that he had weapons of mass destruction?"

PIRO: "Absolutely."

To me, at the time, this sequence bore the hallmarks of a scripted event. I thought Pelley's line of questioning was Double Bogus, because he was trying to get Piro to explain something that didn't happen rather than talking about what did happen.

Piro could have said, and truthfully, "Saddam Hussein said his weapons of mass destruction had been destroyed, he provided the UN with documentation of their destruction, and he gave the UN weapons inspectors carte blanche in his country. What else could he have done? He made no secret of the fact that he didn't have any WMD. Who told you otherwise?"

But he didn't, of course. And after failing to challenge Pelley's Double Bogus line of questioning, Piro made his own contribution to the creation of an entirely false impression.

I couldn't help wondering whether this exchange had been as carefully crafted as it looked, because it looked like a textbook example of deception masquerading as journalism.

And I figured this might explain the disagreement I had with my friend about whether Hans Blix had ever been in Iraq. I thought my friend must have been absorbing heavy doses of propaganda, from not only from "60 Minutes" or CBS in particular, but from American journalism in general -- propaganda which, thanks to my radio and all these foreign news services, I had managed to avoid.

But this implied an enormous conspiracy. It suggested that all the journalists, including Scott Pelley and many others, plus their supervisors, their employers, and all the political leadership, right to the top of the Bush administration, were working together to create a false justification for an unjustified act of mass murder.

It was a very unsettling suggestion, but there seemed no other way to explain what was happening. Of course, this was before I knew about The Mandela Effect.

File under: , ,