The report's authors – Gerald Stone, the founder of 60 Minutes in Australia in 1979; senior Nine executive David Hurley; and Nine Entertainment's in-house counsel Rachel Launders – found that a number of "critically relevant questions" relating to the decision to film the attempted rescue-cum-abduction of the children were never raised "by the executive producer who approved it, the senior producer who proposed it, or the reporting team that volunteered to participate in it". Tara Brown and Stephen Rice arrive at Sydney International Airport after the Beirut saga. Credit:Getty Images Stone said in a statement issued via Nine that "this has been the gravest misadventure in the program's history", and said "inexcusable errors were made". Nine chief executive Hugh Marks added: "We got too close to the story and suffered damaging consequences." Among the questions the report says were never asked are:

Would payment to the child recovery agency encourage an unlawful act?

Could such a payment backfire on Nine?

Would Nine's staff be participating in an unlawful act?

What were the potential consequences if the act failed?

What would be the impact on the reputation of Nine and 60 Minutes if the operation failed or resulted in injury?

Did the public interest in telling the story outweigh the risks involved? The report's authors found there were legitimate reasons to report on international custody battles such as Ms Faulkner's, but said "that story could have been told in a number of ways that did not expose Nine to formidable risks". Tara Brown, left, and Australian mother Sally Faulkner, right, leave a women's prison in the Beirut southeastern suburb of Baabda in April. Credit:Diego Ibarra Sanchez/Getty Images The report suggested that "in a perfect world" payment for stories such as Ms Faulkner's "would not occur", but accepted that in practical terms it was sometimes necessary. On the much-debated point of whether Nine was more culpable for having paid the child-recovery agency, Child Abduction Recovery International, directly, the authors found "there was little practical difference in paying that company directly [or] paying Ms Faulkner, when Nine well knew what all of the funds would be used for".

The 60 Minutes team who were detained in Lebanon: Tara Brown, David "Tangles" Ballment, Stephen Rice and Ben Williamson. The report found that the reporting team "had formed a genuine emotional attachment to Ms Faulkner" and to what they saw as "the justice of her cause". However, that commitment had "obvious pitfalls" that led to the program and its staff "grossly underestimating a number of factors, not least being the power or willingness of a foreign government to enforce its laws". Further exacerbating the situation was the fact that 60 Minutes had come to operate with a degree of autonomy so great "that the executive producer saw no need to consult with the director of news & current affairs on the wisdom of commissioning this story". The degree of autonomy granted to 60 Minutes was so great that the Executive Producer saw no need to consult with the Director of News & Current Affairs on the wisdom of commissioning this story. Independent review of the 60 Minutes/Sally Faulkner story

Further, when a query was raised about the payment being made directly to CARI by one of Nine's internal lawyers, "the issue was not escalated to senior management for a review of the producer's proposal". The report concluded that the commissioning and oversight of the story revealed "poor judgment" and a "failure to adhere to Nine's usual procedures" relating to risk assessment, failings that were attributable to the autonomy 60 Minutes enjoyed and the lack of oversight exercised by management, as well as a culture of loyalty within the 60 Minutes reporting team that "did not encourage team members to press concerns". The key recommendations of the report are: The executive producer of 60 Minutes should approve all stories.

The director of news & current affairs should approve any story requiring overseas travel or any stories which are rated as "high risk".

The executive producer should be kept abreast of any material changes to a story and be given the authority to cancel a story at any time on the basis of a risk assessment. The authors added that Nine needed to foster an atmosphere in which "all staff at 60 Minutes feel empowered to express their concerns (eg to safety or reputation) about participating in a story or about 60 Minutes producing a story".

The report suggested management "censure in the strongest possible terms those most directly involved in the events". That presumably includes not just the four who were arrested in Beirut – reporter Tara Brown, story producer Rice, cameraman Ben Williamson and sound recordist David Ballment – but also Kirsty Thomson, executive producer of 60 Minutes when the story was in production but chief of staff on the show when it was approved, and Tom Malone, now director of sport but executive producer of 60 Minutes at the time the story was commissioned. The authors explicitly stated their review "does not recommend that any staff member should be singled out for dismissal". In spite of that, Nine announced on Friday that Rice "will be leaving the company, effective immediately". Friends of Stephen Rice, who had been at Nine for 25 years, say he is "angry and disappointed at the way he has been treated".

Rice has not responded to Fairfax Media's request for comment. The questions no one asked How the 60 Minutes saga unfolded The "independent review into 60 Minutes' Lebanon assignment" is the result of an internal investigation into the program's widely condemned child snatching operation in Beirut in April. Reporter Tara Brown, cameraman Ben Williamson, producer Stephen Rice and sound recordist David Ballment were arrested in the Lebanese capital in early April over their involvement in a botched child recovery mission.

The 60 Minutes crew was arrested alongside agents of Child Abduction Recovery International (CARI), a private company led by former Australian soldier Adam Whittington. The program had reportedly paid $69,000 to Mr Whittington on behalf of Brisbane mother Sally Faulkner in an attempt to retrieve her children, aged 4 and 6, as part of an international custody battle with her estranged husband, Ali Elamine. The bungled abduction took place on a Beirut street, where the children were forcibly taken from their paternal grandmother. The operation was recorded on CCTV, and that grainy footage was broadcast widely by other media outlets. A Lebanese court is still considering criminal charges against the 60 Minutes staffers, who were released and returned to Australia in late April after the Nine network reportedly paid Mr Elamine around $1 million to drop charges against them. Channel Nine issued a mea culpa after Ms Faulkner was tearfully reunited with her three-month-old son in Brisbane, admitting the program had failed.

"There's one thing we want to state very clearly from the outset, we made a mistake," 60 Minutes host Michael Usher said in a segment that aired after the crew returned to Australia. "Our role in reporting Sally's desperate efforts to be reunited with Lahela and Noah are now the subject of a lot of soul searching here at Channel Nine." Despite Tara Brown's protestations that she thought "reason would prevail" with the Lebanese judicial system, Nine announced an internal inquiry into the story. "I really thought we're journalists, we're doing our job, they will see reason, they'll understand that," Brown said in an interview following her release. "That we are here just to do a story on a very, very desperate mother." Mr Elamine is still pursuing charges against Mr Whittington. He and other CARI employees remain in a Lebanese prison. The network has refused to help members of the child recovery group, saying it feels no obligation toward their fixers.

"They are not part of our team, they have their own legal advice and process to go through, we were journalists covering a story of an Australian mother trying to be reunited with her children," a Nine spokesperson told News Corp. The men's lawyer, Joe Karam, slammed the network, accusing Nine of leaving the men "out to dry". Ebony Bowden