It's a dem full court press and repeated all day on TV.
From a National Review article on the subject; see the following: On Thursday the Democratic National Committee released a television ad, entitled "Read His Lips: President Bush Deceives the American People," accusing Bush of lying when he mentioned the uranium issue in his State of the Union address. The ad calls for a bipartisan investigation of the issue. It was produced by a group of veterans of the Clinton/Gore administration and several Democratic campaigns.
The ad begins with the words, "In his State of the Union address, George W. Bush told us of an imminent threat — " It then cuts to a video clip of the president saying, "Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
The ad omits the first words of Bush's statement, which read, in full, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
The government of British Prime Minister Tony Blair has said it stands behind its intelligence assessment of the African uranium issue.
The DNC ad continues, "But now we find out that it wasn't true. Far worse, the administration knew it wasn't true. A year earlier, that claim was already proven to be false. The CIA knew it. The State Department knew it. The White House knew it. But he [the president] told us anyway."
National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice has said that she, and other top officials in the White House, did not know that the Iraqi/African uranium allegation was based on forged documents. In Africa Friday morning, Rice said the Central Intelligence Agency has approved Bush's State of the Union address, including the portion that dealt with Africa and uranium.
"The CIA cleared the speech in its entirety," Rice said. "If the CIA — the director of Central Intelligence — had said, 'Take this out of the speech,' it would have been gone...We wouldn't put anything knowingly in the speech that was false."
The Democratic ad concludes, "It's time to tell the truth. Help hold George W. Bush accountable by calling for an independent, bipartisan investigation. Go to www.democrats.org/truth to sign the petition to make your voice heard. Because America deserves the truth."
In a DNC press release accompanying the ad, party chairman Terry McAuliffe said, "To date, President Bush has only evaded questions on the topic, so we're going to try something new by appealing directly to the people to demand his accountability, and I think the people are going to respond."
The ad was produced by a company called QRS Newmedia, a Washington-based advertising and public affairs firm.
One of the firm's managing partners is Laura Quinn, a former deputy chief of staff to Vice President Al Gore. Quinn has also served in positions with the Democratic National Committee and the Senate Democratic leadership. The president of QRS Newmedia, Steve Rabinowitz, also worked in the Clinton White House. And the third partner, Mark Steitz, is a former director of communications at the DNC and top adviser to Jesse Jackson's 1988 presidential campaign.
Link
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¬Found=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.