After the war started, in March, Wilson, shocked that the discredited Niger story had appeared in Bush's State of the Union address, wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times about the lack of evidence he found in Niger. In retaliation and in an attempt to intimidate him and any other future critic, "two administration sources gave conservative columnist Robert Novak the name of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, a covert CIA agent, which he published in his column, published in the Washington Post. The act of revealing the identity of an undercover CIA operative is a federal felony against national security. The episode led to appointment of a special prosecutor. That probe continues. Lately, the prosecutor has hauled a number of journalists who may or may not have information in for questioning."

Bradley interviews Wilson, who says that he found nothing in Niger to indicate that any purchase agreement had been signed or executed. Bradley then speaks with the former director of the Department of State's intelligence bureau (intelligence and research), Greg Thielmann, who explains why he concluded that Iraq was not attempting to reconstitute its nuclear program. In March 2002, Bradley reported, the White House received Thielmann's report, titled "Niger: Sale of Uranium Is Unlikely."

"But the story didn't die there," Bradley says in a voice-over. On-screen appears an image of the White House lit at night, suggesting intrigue, and a shot of the Washington Monument in the moonlight. The camera pulls in on the spooking red lights flashing in the monument. "Then suddenly the documents materialize ... in Rome."

Burba, the Italian journalist, for the first time tells how anxious she felt when she received the Niger documents, knowing they could change the course of history, and her dismay that after she personally had investigated and debunked them, Bush could mention them again in his State of the Union address.

The former foreign minister of Niger, Allele Habibou, whose signature was on one of the forged documents, is shown next in footage from a German documentary. Wearing traditional African dress, he gesticulates dismissively. "I only found out about this when my grandchildren found this on the Internet. I was shocked," he says. The document was dated 2000, but by then Habibou had been out of the government for 11 years.

Bradley then interviews an expert from the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency, who tells him laughingly that it took only about two hours of Google searches for his staff to figure out the documents were fraudulent.

Then-CIA Director George Tenet warns the White House not to let Bush use the discredited Niger information in his speeches. "That might have been the end of it, but it wasn't," Bradley says. Cut to Bush delivering the fateful 16 words in the 2003 State of the Union address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., a senior Intelligence Committee member, tells Bradley that the claim was a deliberate attempt to mislead the public. "The people who wrote that address knew that the CIA doubted the very story that they were putting into the State of the Union," Levin says. "So instead they put the words in the mouth of the British. That seems to me so fundamentally wrong."

"Two weeks later, the U.S. and its allies invaded Iraq," Bradley intones. Yet no weapons of mass destruction were found, he points out, as newspaper headlines about Bush's disputed statement in the State of the Union flash on-screen. Rice is shown in file footage bounding from a car into a television studio -- one of many appearances in which she blamed the statement on the CIA. "Had there been even a peep that the agency did not want that sentence in," she said on CBS's "Face the Nation," "it would have been gone."

But this claim is implicitly contradicted by headlines stating "Officials Were Warned on Claim" (that is, warned by the CIA) that appear on the screen. Rice, on NBC's "Meet the Press," shrugs apologetically. "This was a mistake," she says. But Bradley observes that the claim was still made in speeches by Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Bradley returns to Jafar, the former head of Iraq's nuclear program. After the invasion, Jafar slipped out of Iraq, and a CIA agent immediately showed up on his doorstep. "They ask me questions. 'Do you have nuclear weapons?'" Jafar said. "I laughed him off. I said, if we had nuclear weapons, I wouldn't be here."

In his closing, Bradley explains how fiercely the White House fought his report. Administration officials and Republicans in Congress turned down "60 Minutes'" requests for interview. So did former Rep. Porter Goss, the Florida Republican whom Bush has appointed as the new director of the CIA.

"60 Minutes" defied the White House to produce this report. But it could not survive the network's cowardice -- cowardice born of self-inflicted wounds.

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