Scandal!

July 11, 2003, 11:00 a.m. Scandal! Bush’s enemies aren't telling the truth about what he said.

The president's critics are lying. Mr. Bush never claimed that Saddam Hussein had purchased uranium from Niger. It is not true — as USA Today reported on page one Friday morning — that "tainted evidence made it into the President's State of the Union address." For the record, here's what President Bush actually said in his SOTU: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Precisely which part of that statement isn't true? The British government did say that it believed Saddam had sought African uranium. Is it possible that the British government was mistaken? Sure. Is it possible that Her Majesty's government came by that belief based on an erroneous American intelligence report about a transaction between Iraq and Niger? Yes — but British Prime Minister Tony Blair and members of his Cabinet say that's not what happened.

They say, according to Britain's liberal Guardian newspaper, that their claim was based on "extra material, separate and independent from that of the US."

I suppose you can make the case that a British-government claim should not have made its way into the president's SOTU without further verification. But why is that the top of the TV news day after day? Why would even the most dyspeptic Bush-basher see in those 16 accurate words of President's Bush's 5,492-word SOTU an opportunity to persuade Americans that there's a scandal in the White House, another Watergate, grounds for impeachment?

Surely, everyone does know by now that Saddam Hussein did have a nuclear-weapons-development program. That program was set back twice: Once by Israeli bombers in 1981, and then a decade later, at the end of the Gulf War when we learned that Saddam's nuclear program was much further along than our intelligence analysts had believed.

The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed in the 1990s that Saddam Hussein had an advanced nuclear weapons development program, had a design for a nuclear weapon and was working on five different methods of enriching uranium for a bomb.

Since Saddam never demonstrated — to the U.S., the U.N., or even to Jacques Chirac — that he had abandoned his nuclear ambitions, one has to conclude that he was still in the market for nuclear materials. And, indeed, many intelligence analysts long believed that he was trying to acquire such material from wherever he could — not just from Niger but also from Gabon, Namibia, Russia, Serbia, and other sources.

Maybe there was no reliable evidence to support the particular intelligence report saying that Saddam had acquired yellowcake (lightly processed uranium ore) from Niger. But the British claim was only that Saddam had sought yellowcake — not that he succeeded in getting a five-pound box Fedexed to his palace on the Tigris.

And is there even one member of the U.S. Congress who would say that it was on the basis of this claim alone that he voted to authorize the president to use military force against Saddam? Is there one such individual anywhere in America?

A big part of the reason this has grown into such a brouhaha is that Joseph C. Wilson IV wrote an op-ed about it in last Sunday's New York Times in which he said: "I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."

Actually, Wilson has plenty of choices — but no basis for his slanderous allegation. A little background: Mr. Wilson was sent to Niger by the CIA to verify a U.S. intelligence report about the sale of yellowcake — because Vice President Dick Cheney requested it, because Cheney had doubts about the validity of the intelligence report.

Wilson says he spent eight days in Niger "drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people" — hardly what a competent spy, detective, or even reporter would call an in-depth investigation. Nevertheless, let's give Wilson the benefit of the doubt and stipulate that he was correct when he reported back to the CIA that he believed it was "highly doubtful that any such transaction ever took place. "

But, again, because it was "doubtful" that Saddam actually acquired yellowcake from Niger, it does not follow that he never sought it there or elsewhere in Africa, which is all the president suggested based on what the British said — and still say.

And how does Wilson leap from there to the conclusion that Vice President Cheney and his boss "twisted" intelligence to "exaggerate the Iraqi threat"? Wilson hasn't the foggiest idea what other intelligence the president and vice president had access to.

It also would have been useful for the New York Times and others seeking Wilson's words of wisdom to have provided a little background on him. For example:

He's an "adjunct scholar" at the Middle East Institute — which advocates for Saudi interests. The March 1, 2002 issue of the Saudi government-weekly Ain-Al Yaqeen lists the MEI as an "Islamic research institutes supported by the Kingdom."

He's a vehement opponent of the Bush administration which, he wrote in the March 3, 2003 edition of the left-wing Nation magazine, has "imperial ambitions." Under President Bush, he added, the world worries that "America has entered one of it periods of historical madness."

He also wrote that "neoconservatives" have "a stranglehold on the foreign policy of the Republican Party." He said that "the new imperialists will not rest until governments that ape our world view are implanted throughout the region, a breathtakingly ambitious undertaking, smacking of hubris in the extreme."

He was recently the keynote speaker for the Education for Peace in Iraq Center, a far-left group that opposed not only the U.S. military intervention in Iraq but also the sanctions — and even the no-fly zones that protected hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Kurds and Shias from being slaughtered by Saddam.

And consider this: Prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Wilson did believe that Saddam had biological weapons of mass destruction. But he raised that possibility only to argue against toppling Saddam, warning ABC's Dave Marash that if American troops were sent into Iraq, Saddam might "use a biological weapon in a battle that we might have. For example, if we're taking Baghdad or we're trying to take, in ground-to-ground, hand-to-hand combat." He added that Saddam also might attempt to take revenge by unleashing "some sort of a biological assault on an American city, not unlike the anthrax, attacks that we had last year."

In other words, Wilson is no disinterested career diplomat — he's a pro-Saudi, leftist partisan with an ax to grind. And too many in the media are helping him and allies grind it.

— Clifford D. May, a former New York Times foreign correspondent, is president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on terrorism.

There is another fly in the ointment. A one Mr. Rand Beers. Rand Beers who served under Reagan, GHWB, Clinton, and GWB. Beers served as Senior Director for Combating Terrorism in the current Administration.

His previous service record is as follows:

Senior Director for Combating Terrorism
RAND BEERS

National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice announced August 15 the appointment of Mr. Rand Beers as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Combating Terrorism, effective August 19, 2002.

For the last four years, Mr. Beers served as Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. He has also held various positions in the State Department's Bureau of Political Military Affairs: Deputy Assistant Secretary for Regional Affairs and Export Control, Deputy for Strategy and the Operations Coordinator for Regional Affairs and Security Assistance, Director of the Office of Security Analysis and the Office of International Security Policy, and Deputy Director of the Office of Policy Analysis. Additionally, he has served three times on the National Security Council staff and was the Deputy Political Advisor to the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe.

A native of Washington, D.C., Mr. Beers holds two degrees in history: a B.A. from Dartmouth and a M.A. from the University of Michigan. He is married to Bonnie Beers; they have two children.

http://usinfo.state.gov/topical/pol/nsc.htm#beers

Are we to believe that Mr. Beers, after serving in a capacity that included vetting Central American drug running during the Iran Contra Days, who managed to swallow his extreme attacks of conscience at that time, who headed the investigation of the shooting down of a plane carrying missionaries over Peru

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/primetime/2020/primetime_010524_perutransmissions_feature.html

Mr. Beers, a Registered Democrat

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A62941-2003Jun15&notFound=true

suddenly had an attack of conscious so bad prior to the Iraq war that he resigned only five days before the war started and went to work for the campaign of John F. Kerry?

[snip]

Beers's resignation surprised Washington, but what he did next was even more astounding. Eight weeks after leaving the Bush White House, he volunteered as national security adviser for Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), a Democratic candidate for president, in a campaign to oust his former boss. All of which points to a question: What does this intelligence insider know?

[snip]

Mr. Beers who served as "Deputy Political Advisor to the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe."

R. RAND BEERS, deputy political adviser, Supreme Allied Commander Europe, 1973-75;
deputy director, Office of Policy Analysis, Bureau of Political Military Affairs, Department of
State, 1982-84; director, Office of International Security Policy, Department of State, 1984-86;
deputy director for military contingencies, Bureau of Political Military Affairs, Department of
State, 1986-88; director for counterterrorism and narcotics, National Security Council, 1988-92;
director for multilateral affairs, National Security Council, 1993-95; senior director for
intelligence, National Security Council, 1995-98; assistant secretary for international narcotics
and law enforcement affairs, Department of State, 1998-present.

http://www.puaf.umd.edu/CISSM/Projects/NSC/Clinton.pdf

Any other names sound familiar when you hear Supreme Allied Commander Europe? Maybe Wesley Clark? No, they didn't serve at the same time but this reeks to me!

Rand Beers who attempted to shut down the CIA's investigation of the links between Al Qaeda and Iran in 1996.

http://www.rense.com/general19/one.htm

[snip]

By then, I was a group chief and could instruct my stations to do essentially what I wanted, so I leaned on our offices in the Caspian and Central Asia to concentrate on the Iranian target. Early in 1996, one place came up with a plan to bug a clandestine Pasdaran facility. At that point, we had no idea what the Pasdaran was doing in the Caspian, but the possibility always existed that it intended to open a third front, in addition to Saudi Arabia. Any information would have been helpful.

I knew the routine and called Heslin for her permission to go ahead. I described what we intended to do, what we expected the take to be, and what the benefit would be to US interests in the region. I could feel a frigid Arctic air coming over the telephone line.

Less than 20 minutes later, my green phone rang - the super- encrypted communications line used for discussing sensitive information. Rand Beers was on the other end. "What's this about the Iranian Pasdaran and some audio operation?" he asked.

"Yeah, what's the problem?"

"Well, Heslin's worried about the blowback."

"The blowback?"

"She's afraid the Iranians will take revenge on Amoco's people in Azerbaijan."

I was furious. "Do you mean to tell me we have to stop an operation against a terrorist group - one perhaps responsible for killing five Americans in Saudi Arabia - to protect Amoco's balance sheets?"

"Well, I wouldn't put it that way," Beers said.

"Fine, I'll call Congress and tell them that Sheila Heslin, Amoco's ambassador to the NSC, no longer wants us to target the Iranian Pasdaran because we're worried about Amoco's profits."

Like a good bureaucrat, I fired off what is called a spot report to the deputy director of operations, Dave Cohen, about my conversation with Beers. I got no response, but Beers called back that same day to tell me the NSC had had a change of mind and decided not to object to South Group's targeting the Pasdaran. Congress and Iran had a certain resonance in the White House.

I remember thinking that it should have been a big moment. After all the bureaucratic infighting within the intelligence community, I had finally won one. For a moment, at least, the battle against terrorism had trumped the battle for oil money. But I was just so tired of it all. We were talking about lives, for God's sake. The fight shouldn't have been so difficult.

How do you call an end to a career that has taken you so far into the heart of darkness and shown you so many of the secrets that lie there? I didn't want to go out bitter, but I didn't want just to slink away, either. I'd spent a quarter-century building up a body of knowledge and a set of instincts about some of the worst people and most dangerous organisations on the planet. I decided to find out, really find out, to the best of my knowledge, the truth behind Iranian-sponsored terrorism.

Maybe, I thought, the search would lead me to what I considered the biggest secret of all, the one that had been gnawing at me for more than 13 years: who bombed the US embassy in Beirut, and why had they never been brought to justice? If we couldn't identify who had done it, if we couldn't even learn what kind of explosives had been used, chances are it would all happen again, maybe at a far greater magnitude. It had become obvious to me that the new, politically correct CIA was neither up to nor interested in the challenge.

I started out by running a computer search for intelligence we knew to be factual on the hostages in Lebanon. The phantom I kept running up against in my investigation was the IJO. It seemed to pop into existence whenever some new horror was inflicted in the Middle East and elsewhere, and then it seemed to slip completely back into the shadows again.

And then it occurred to me: the IJO had never existed. It was only a name the Pasdaran used for communiquÈs to claim terrorist operations. What's more, the CIA knew the IJO was merely a front for the Iranians. It was clear from the documents I dredged up that, by at least 1997, the CIA knew the Pasdaran's command structure inside and out, just as it knew that Ayatollah Ali Khameini and President Rafsanjani approved every terrorist operation to come out of Iran. As I looked at the evidence in front of me, the conclusion was unavoidable: the Islamic Republic of Iran had declared a secret war against the US, and the US had chosen to ignore it.

When the world as most of us knew it began to fall apart on the morning of September 11, 2001, I was at my home in Washington DC. If United Airlines Flight 93 had been allowed by its passengers to fly on to its intended destination, I would have heard it crash into the White House. If the target had been the Capitol, and it might have been, I would have felt the crash as well.

For me, the irony of the situation was hard to miss. After two decades in some of earth's true hellholes, I had returned to the heart of the most powerful nation on earth, protected by a military force such as the world has never known, watched over by domestic and foreign security services that number in the hundreds of thousands. And what had saved the city I was living in? Not the CIA. Not the FBI. Not the air force or navy or marines or army. But the raw courage and determination of a fistful of average Americans. The lapse made me furious to think about.

[snip]

Rand Beers who I repeat, resigned just prior to the start of the war in Iraq. Who was privy to all kinds of intelligence information who now works for the John F. Kerry campaign. John F. Kerry who made a "major education policy speech" yesterday to some 3000 teachers. That speech managed to touch the topic of education exactly twice. Once to make sure they all knew he was "vehemently opposed to vouchers", and the second to let them all know he was more than a little unhappy about GWB's No Child Left Behind policy.

The balance of his speech focused on GWB and intel and attempting to portray this Administration as, at best, untrustworthy.

I submit that there is a leak, a real leak. One that's going straight to the campaign of John F. Kerry and most likely the DNC. One Mr. Rand Beers.

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