What happened to investigative journalism?

Ron Erskine: 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 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?

Latest Theilmann: Administration officials now suggest that the Kay report, based on three months of work in Iraq, shows Saddam Hussein's WMD "intentions" and justifies the decision to invade. They are attempting to morph the original WMD rationale for the war into a campaign for human rights, Middle East democratization and anti-terrorism.

But the official justification for war that was presented to Congress was to enforce the U.N. Security Council requirement that Iraq's WMD be eliminated. The key question was never whether Mr. Hussein's Iraq sought WMD or had chemical or biological weapons and a nuclear weapons program before the 1991 gulf war. It clearly did.

Rather, the question was whether Iraq continued to have active, illicit programs or weapons that posed such an urgent threat that it could be addressed only by military action instead of continued robust weapons inspections backed by the U.N. Security Council. The accumulating evidence from the field suggests more strongly than ever that the answer is no.