According to a knowledgeable source, the lead producer of the report, David Gelber, had toyed with using Martino to delve into another intriguing angle: why has the Federal Bureau of Investigation apparently done little to fulfill a request by Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, for an investigation into the origins of the forged Niger documents? Martino, a central figure in the affair, should be of keen interest to the FBI. But, as of late last week, investigators had still failed to interview him. A U.S. law enforcement source told Newsweek the bureau was waiting for the Italian government to grant permission.

That strange explanation raises the question of whether the right-wing government of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi had helped manufacture evidence that his ally, Bush, could use to persuade Americans to support an invasion. Burba passed on the documents to the U.S. Embassy in Rome at the instruction of her editor at Panorama, a news magazine owned by Berlusconi. An alternative theory, floated in corners of the conspiracy-minded European press, is that Martino was working for the antiwar French, who hoped to discredit the Bush administration by getting American officials to swallow obviously forged documents.

Whatever the case, the CBS producers apparently decided to concentrate on what could be nailed down: the Bush administration had, either intentionally or with breathtaking credulity, relied on patently false intelligence to make the case for invading Iraq.

"Two years ago, Americans heard some frightening words from President Bush and his closest advisors," Bradley said in his introduction of the now-shelved report. "Saddam Hussein, they said, could soon have a nuclear bomb. Of course, we now know that wasn't true." Not only did Saddam not have a nuclear program, Bradley said, but "he hadn't for more than 10 years. How could the Bush administration be so wrong about something so important?"

The answer, Bradley was to have told viewers, "has a lot to do with a single piece of evidence: A set of documents that appear to prove Saddam was secretly buying uranium ore." The mysterious surfacing of the forged Niger documents, Bradley said, helped "explain why President Bush and his cabinet delivered the frightening message we all heard in the early autumn two years ago." The broadcast then cut to video clips of Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice making public statements with eerily similar wording:

"We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons," Cheney said in an address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Cut to Rumsfeld: "We do now know that Saddam Hussein has been actively and persistently" pursuing nukes. Then, Rice, on a television talk show, insisted: "We do know that he is actively pursuing a nuclear weapon."

By showing the video clips in rapid succession, the television piece conveyed, in a manner beyond the printed word, how deliberate and practiced was the administration's sense of urgency.

Bradley then interviewed Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. (No one from the Bush administration or any Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee would cooperate, Bradley told viewers.) Biden said in the run-up to the war, he had been perplexed by the remarks of Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice, because nothing he knew about Iraq's nuclear threat squared with their claims. Asked why he thought they were making such dire pronouncements, Biden said: "What's the one way to energize the American public to go to war? The threat of nuclear weapons."

Cut to Bush: "We cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." The expression on Bush's face as he speaks portentously was a look of concern. Yet, had the segment aired, the viewer would have understood that the president was not telling the truth.

The next scene: Bradley walks down a crowded sidewalk in Milan with Dr. Jafar Dhia Jafar, who had been Saddam's chief nuclear scientist. Jafar explains that Iraq dismantled its nuclear program after the Gulf War in the face of United Nations inspections. "So what was going on?" Bradley asks. "Nothing was going on," Jafar replies. He tells Bradley that the Bush administration was either "being fed with the wrong information" or "they were doing this deliberately."

In a voice-over, Bradley asks: "So what information did the Bush administration have to support its argument that Saddam was rebuilding his nuclear weapons? They began hearing reports about one piece of evidence that, if true, would have been the smoking gun."

Cut to a man leading a camel down a crowded city street and a boy playing with a tire in the dirt. We are in Niger, the world's fourth-leading supplier of uranium yellowcake, Bradley explains, as he moves into an interview with former ambassador Joseph Wilson. The CIA dispatched Wilson to Niger in 2002 to investigate reports that Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium from the African nation. Wilson reported that he found no evidence to support the claim. But the Bush administration ignored him and the CIA. In his State of the Union address in January 2003, President Bush cited the supposed Iraqi nuclear threat, slyly attributing its sourcing to British intelligence, since discredited by the Senate Select Intelligence Committee report.

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