Chris Cross

Honesdale, Pennsylvania John Kerry's military record may have done him little good in the 2004 election, but that hasn't stopped Democratic congressional candidates who have worn the uniform from becoming the political phenom of this election season. All told, there are over 50 Democratic veterans running for Congress in November. But, even for liberals who treat every one of the so-called Fighting Dems as a conquering hero, Chris Carney's candidacy is something of a coup. He's nowhere near as high-profile as such candidates as the now-flamed-out Paul Hackett of Ohio or the much-praised Tammy Duckworth of Illinois; in fact, he hasn't served in Iraq. But he has a much more provocative bullet point on his resume: From 2002 to 2004, Carney served as a counterterrorism analyst for the Bush administration.For some Democrats, it's as if Richard Clarke decided to run for Congress. Last month, Markos Moulitsas Z*uniga of the liberal uberblog Daily Kos expressed his excitement that "someone who was in the boardroom helping plan and execute the nation's counterterrorism efforts would decide to 1) run for office, and 2) run as a Democrat," and he treated Carney to a fawning interview on Air America. Enthusiasm for Carney has spread beyond the blogosphere. After visiting a Carney rally in this rural and heavily Republican Pennsylvania district--where the naval reservist is challenging four-term incumbent Don Sherwood--Time's Joe Klein wrote that he could be "Karl Rove's worst nightmare." Indeed, armed with his counterterrorism experience, Carney might have strong enough national security bona fides to safely navigate Pennsylvania's conservative 10th District, where the president took 60 percent of the vote in 2004--and where a sign just outside Honesdale warns either you support the troops and their mission or you support the terrorists. For the 50 or so seasoned Democrats who gathered at Ann Bursis's house here in Wayne County on Saturday afternoon, Carney is practically a godsend. Mostly middle-aged or retired, Bursis's friends and neighbors can barely remember the last time they had a promising candidate. And they're hungry for someone to take on President Bush. When Carney calls for bringing troops home from Iraq, his audience listens raptly. The president, Carney says to applause, has "been telling untruths about Iraq" while Republicans on Capitol Hill--especially Sherwood-- abet him. "That's why you need guys like me in Congress." But Carney's Democratic supporters, both in the 10th District and across the country, are apparently unaware of one very odd fact about his candidacy: Carney supported and helped propagate one of the war's most dubious premises-- that Saddam Hussein was working closely with Al Qaeda. And these supporters are probably unaware of an even odder fact: Despite seeking an end to the war, Carney still believes it. Carney is a middle-aged Susquehanna County resident with an inviting and easygoing demeanor. In 2001, he was a political science professor at Penn State's Scranton campus and an intelligence officer in the Navy Reserve. After the September 11 attacks, he was mobilized for the invasion of Afghanistan. But, in early February 2002, he was "called upstairs" to the Pentagon, where he and a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst named Christina Shelton were detailed to the office of then-Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith. Their assignment: to scrutinize the CIA's assessment of Iraq's connection to Al Qaeda. The CIA maintained that, while there had been furtive contacts between Al Qaeda terrorists and Iraqi intelligence for years, the relationship hardly constituted an alliance. Feith, a longtime supporter of ousting Saddam, wasn't so sure. Carney says he was never instructed to find evidence of a relationship. But, he adds, "Remember the time frame--9/11 was fresh in everyone's minds. I'm not trying to apologize for the administration, Feith, or anyone else, but there was a lot of concern that we weren't going to get caught out again" by another attack. So Carney and Shelton put together a briefing, based largely on data that the majority of the intelligence community considered dubious or trivial, asserting a significant link between Saddam and bin Laden. Carney's briefing made its way through the Pentagon and CIA, and, ultimately, it was shown to Stephen Hadley, then the deputy national security adviser. A key section was titled "Fundamental Problems with How Intelligence Community is Assessing Information." While Carney denies that his briefing suggested that policymakers ignore CIA skepticism, it clearly reinforced the feeling among senior administration officials that the CIA was hopelessly dovish. And, in the fall of 2002, they made numerous public statements that far outpaced the intelligence community's assessment of Iraq-Al Qaeda ties: Donald Rumsfeld called evidence of the connection "bulletproof," and Bush said, "You can't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror." Even Carney, who still maintains there was a connection, thinks the administration and its allies went too far. "Not `bulletproof,' certainly," he says of the evidence. "Look, the way the analysis was going was on a sliding scale--from absolutely no relationship on one extreme to cooperative operational relationship on the other. What we saw was in the middle." Later, he elaborates, "There was some relationship of opportunity there. We know there was some high-level contact. What we don't know is what, if anything, evolved from those contacts." His position, however, is no longer tenable: The 9/11 Commission concluded that "we have seen no evidence that these or the earlier contacts ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship." (Carney thinks the commissioners "underplayed" the connection--hopefully, he adds vaguely, not due to "political pressures.") But Carney remains unrepentant. "I don't think I have any more responsibility for the war than any other analyst," he says. But that's more detail than most Democrats want. What's important to them is that Carney now largely considers the war a mistake. "In the long run, I'm not sure we've benefited tremendously from it, and it may have created greater animosity than we otherwise would have, from things like Abu Ghraib and other missteps the military and the administration made," he admits. "Those things don't help alleviate the terrorist problem." As a result, a major aspect of Carney's platform is his call to withdraw a U.S. battalion for every Iraqi battalion that completes training and is certified as combat-ready. Besides, for hyperpartisan Democrats like Moulitsas, only one thing really matters: A Republican candidate is vulnerable. Indeed, Sherwood has suffered significant ethical lapses that have left a bad taste in the mouths of voters-- namely, a five-year affair with a woman half his age, who once called the police to claim Sherwood was abusing her. (Sherwood contends the incident in question was the result of an overly aggressive backrub.) By the time the case was settled out of court last fall, Sherwood's poll numbers had fallen, creating an opportunity for Carney. That may not be a solid enough foundation to win the race. But, compared with the Iraq-Al Qaeda connection, it's practically bulletproof.

By spencer ackerman