This Bob Simon interview a favorite. "but Bush didn't give a sh** and invaded Iraq." Video

About 29 minutes in.

There's a strange comment above the video.

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SO if it doesn't play that's why.

The show he refers to from 2002 I think, can't be found anywhere online apparently.

“60 Minutes” reporter Bob Simon just died. This was his most important story

Taking stock of a career that spanned five decades, Simon told an interviewer for the Archive of American Television in 2013 that his most important reports were about the flawed intelligence that led up to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. His favorite one involved an Iraqi defector code-named “Curveball,” who, as Simon said in his 60 Minutes broadcast, “spun a web of lies which convinced America’s top spies” and made the case for waging war in Iraq.

Another story about the Iraq war, broadcast before the invasion, was also high on his list of favorites. He explained, “Look, I knew from my sources, particularly Israeli sources, ’cause whatever you say about the Israelis, they’ve got great intelligence, they told me, they said there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.”

So, Simon said, he and his producer did a blistering segment on CBS called “Selling the Iraq War to the US.” The broadcast is no longer available from CBS (and does not seem to exist on Youtube), but you can read a summary here.

“That piece got a lot of attention,” Simon told the interviewer, “but of course Bush didn’t give a shit and invaded Iraq, as they had decided to do.”

Here is a summary of that show in a few paragraphs, but it really says very little.

Politicians have had to sell the public on going to war since Colonial times, but they never had the arsenal of advertising and communications techniques the Bush administration is using to sell a possible war on Iraq. Bob Simon reports on those techniques and those employed by the elder Bush prior to the 1991 Gulf War.

Simon reminds viewers that a horrible story spread widely by the first Bush administration prior to the Gulf War about Kuwaiti babies pulled from incubators by invading Iraqis turned out not to be true. The current Bush administration may be also misinforming the public in its efforts to justify a possible second war with Saddam Hussein.

I would love to see that show online.

Seems to me that Simon tried to say more about the Iraq lies than most other journalists.

RIP Bob Simon.