The story CBS should have run

Incredible irony.

Sept. 22 - In its rush to air its now discredited story about President George W. Bush’s National Guard service, CBS bumped another sensitive piece slated for the same “60 Minutes” broadcast: a half-hour segment about how the U.S. government was snookered by forged documents purporting to show Iraqi efforts to purchase uranium from Niger.

[...]

A team of “60 Minutes” correspondents and consulting reporters spent more than six months investigating the Niger uranium documents fraud, CBS sources tell NEWSWEEK. The group landed the first ever on-camera interview with Elisabetta Burba, the Italian journalist who first obtained the phony documents, as well as her elusive source, Rocco Martino, a mysterious Roman businessman with longstanding ties to European intelligence agencies.

CBS's priorities: go with a rehash a 30-year old story that everyone already knows about and use documents of which they didn't know the provenance, instead of a story based on six months of investigation that centers on an issue relevant to today. Hmmm. As Yglesias says, "stupid CBS."

Meanwhile, CBS was able to track down Rocco Martino. The FBI? Not so lucky.