Press Release/Commentary by ESPAC posted on March 18, 2006 at 11:25:33: EST (-5 GMT)
SELF-SERVING DISHONESTY: JOHN PRENDERGAST ON SUDAN AND COUNTER-TERRORISM
The European-Sudanese Public Affairs Council
Date of Publication: 17 March 2006
In a February 2006 ‘Los Angeles Times’ article, former Clinton
Administration Africa analyst John Prendergast and the Hollywood actor
Don Cheadle criticized counter-terrorism cooperation between the United
States and Sudan in the international war on terrorism, focusing in
particular on General Salah Abdallah Gosh, the head of Sudanese
intelligence, and the fact that General Gosh was flown to the United
States in 2005 in the course of this cooperation.(1) Given that
Prendergast’s previous record in relation to counter-terrorism issues
would be farcical if it had not had such tragic consequences, for him to
pontificate on current counter-terrorism issues is nothing short of
astounding.
It is also surprising that Prendergast continues to tout himself as an
Africa expert let alone someone qualified to comment on Sudan and
counter-terrorism. His track record on all these issues is abysmal.
Prendergast served as director of African affairs at the National
Security Council during the Clinton Administration and then as special
advisor to the American assistant secretary of state for African
affairs, Susan Rice. Prendergast’s current comments relating to Sudan
should be assessed in the light of his record on Sudan and Africa during
his time within the Clinton Administration. Prendergast was intimately
associated with all of the Clinton Administration’s disastrous Africa
policies – policies which caused and built upon deadly conflict almost
wherever they touched the continent.(2) It was an African-American
Democratic Congresswoman, Cynthia McKinney, a member of the House of
Representatives Committee on International Relations and Committee on
National Security, who summed up the Clinton Administration’s Africa
policy during Prendergast’s watch in a 1999 letter to President Clinton:
“I feel compelled to report to you that crimes against humanity are
being committed … throughout Africa, seemingly with the help and
support of your administration. I would suggest to you that U.S. policy
in the Democratic Republic of Congo has failed and it is another example
of our policy failures across the continent. One only has to point to
diplomatic duality in Ethiopia and Eritrea, indecisiveness and
ambivalence in Angola, indifference in Democratic Republic of Congo, the
destruction of democracy in Sierra Leone, and inflexibility elsewhere on
the continent. The result is an Africa policy in disarray, a continent
on fire, and U.S. complicity in crimes against humanity … your Africa
policy has not only NOT helped to usher in the so-called ‘African
Renaissance,’ but has contributed to the continued pain and suffering
of the African peoples.” (3)
Congresswoman McKinney was one amongst many such critics. The American
periodical, ‘The New Republic’, also observed: “The Clinton
administration’s Africa policy will probably go down as the strangest
of the postcolonial age; it may also go down as the most grotesque …
Indeed, confronted with several stark moral challenges, the Clinton
administration has abandoned Africa every time: it fled from Somalia, it
watched American stepchild Liberia descend into chaos, it blocked
intervention in Rwanda … Clinton’s soaring rhetoric has posed a
problem that his predecessors did not face – the problem of rank
hypocrisy … the Clintonites have developed a policy of coercive
dishonesty.” The New Republic pointed out that Capitol Hill Africa
specialists described the Clinton Administration’s dishonesty on
Africa as “positively Orwellian”. (4) John Prendergast was at the
heart of this flawed analysis, policy failure and dishonesty.
There is no clearer example of flawed analysis, policy failure and
dishonesty than the Clinton Administration’s Sudan policy, policy
drafted by Prendergast. (5) More specifically, with regard to Sudan and
counter-terrorism issues, it was on his watch that almost unbelievable
mistakes were made. Unsurprisingly, Prendergast’s ‘Los Angeles
Times’ article glosses over these failures during his years in the
Clinton Administration. A brief review of this period would be useful.
The degree of American intelligence and counter-terrorism failure
regarding Sudan during Prendergast’s watch was staggering. It was
revealed in part in 1998, with the admission that at least one hundred
CIA reports on Sudan and terrorism were scrapped as unreliable or having
been fabricated. (6) The withdrawal of over one hundred such reports can
only be described as massive systemic intelligence failure. The CIA had
realised that the reports in question had been fabricated, probably by
political opponents of the government or other anti-Sudanese forces or
simply for financial gain. It is clear that the American intelligence
agencies were either unable or disinclined to check the accuracy of
their sources, and were all too eager to rely on information of dubious
quality because it supported the sorts of preconceived ideas with regard
to Sudan peddled by Prendergast.
In what could pass for a snapshot of the accuracy of Clinton
Administration claims about Sudan and terrorism in general during
Prendergast’s time as the Sudan expert, the ‘New York Times’
stated that: “the Central Intelligence Agency … concluded that
reports that had appeared to document a clear link between the Sudanese
Government and terrorist activities were fabricated and unreliable …
In the case of the Sudan, Washington has conspicuously failed to prove
its case.” (7)
This did not dent the wishful thinking and continuing policy failure
regarding Sudan by “analysts” such as Prendergast – failure which
subsequently resulted in the disastrously inept American cruise missile
attack on the al-Shifa medicine factory in Khartoum in 1998. The Clinton
Administration claimed, amongst other things, that the factory was
involved in the production of weapons of mass destruction and that it
was linked to Osama bin-Laden. Every single American claim about the
al-Shifa factory was proven – largely by the American media itself –
to have been false. (8) The observations of U.S. Senator Pat Roberts
regarding the al-Shifa fiasco bear repeating: “[T]he strike in
regards to the Khartoum chemical plant cannot be justified”. (9)
The Clinton Administration’s woeful record on Sudan and
counter-terrorism during Prendergast’s watch was further exposed by
articles published in the wake of the September 2001 terrorist attacks
in the United States. The American magazine ‘Vanity Fair’, and
‘The Financial Times’ and ‘The Observer’ newspapers in Britain
reported that Sudan had attempted to actively cooperate with the Clinton
Administration with regard to al-Qaeda and Osama bin-Laden for several
years and had been repeatedly rebuffed by people such as Prendergast
before being acted upon in part by Washington in May 2000. (10)
Moreover, in a November 2001 article, ‘The Washington Post’ also
publicly revealed that Sudan offered to hand Osama bin-Laden over to the
Clinton Administration, just as Khartoum had extradited Ilich Ramirez
Sanchez, “Carlos the Jackal”, to France in 1994. Amazingly, the
offer was declined. (11) It was also revealed that in the wake of the
1998 bombings of American embassies in east Africa, Sudanese security
authorities arrested two key al-Qaeda organisers implicated in those
attacks soon after they entered Sudan on false passports from Nairobi,
and offered to hand them over to the FBI, the lead agency investigating
the attacks. The FBI jumped at the offer but Clinton Administration
officials blocked the extradition: the terrorists were subsequently
deported to Pakistan, and vanished. Perhaps Prendergast can explain what
role he may have played in how these offers were handled – and whether
thousands of lives might have been saved had any of these offers been
accepted. The former US ambassador to Sudan at the time, Tim Carney,
described the bungling of all these offers as “worse than a crime”. (12)
Prendergast’s self-serving dishonesty on Sudan and counter-terrorism
is clear. In his ‘Los Angeles Times’ article he claims, for example,
that the Sudanese government intensified its cooperation on
counter-terrorism only when there was a credible threat of U.S. military
action against the Khartoum regime following the attacks on 9/11. This
is a self-evident lie. In May 2000, Sudan’s repeated requests for
counter-terrorist cooperation and intelligence sharing were finally
accepted and joint CIA, FBI and State Department counter-terrorism and
intelligence teams established a permanent office in Sudan – almost
eighteen months before the attacks on 11 September 2001. (13) (They
have been there continuously, at Khartoum’s request, ever since.)
‘The Observer’ confirmed that in May 2001 these teams had given
Sudan “a clean bill of health” with regard to allegations of
terrorism. In August 2001 Bush Administration officials further
confirmed that the Sudanese-American cooperation on counter-terrorism
had been positive. (14) This American-Sudanese intelligence cooperation
was said to have “covered everything”. (15) All this was well
before the 9/11 attacks. The then U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for
African Affairs Walter Kansteiner confirmed that Sudan had been
cooperating with the United States for some time before the World Trade
Center attacks, and that this cooperation had reached new levels since
11 September: “We appreciate Khartoum’s relationship with us.” (16)
At the heart of the Clinton Administration’s systemic intelligence
failure was a tendency to play Capitol Hill politics with regard to
Sudan, pandering to anti-Islamic constituencies. In his article, which
seeks to downplay the importance and value of Sudanese involvement in
the war on terrorism, Prendergast continues to play the role of a
dilettante clearly out of his depth. He refers to the current
cooperation as “snippets of … information” – just as ten years
ago the administration he advised downplayed Sudanese offers to share
intelligence on what was to emerge as, and subsequently metasize into,
al-Qaeda and turned down Khartoum’s offer to extradite Osama bin-Laden
to Washington – passing up on pivotal and strategic counter-terrorism
opportunities.
In his address to the joint session of Congress and the American people
in the week following the murderous terrorist attacks of 11 September
2001, President George Bush declared that the war on terrorism would be
the single most important struggle facing the United States and its
allies. (17) Intelligence is at the heart of any counter-terrorism
policy. That Sudan has played and continues to play a pivotal role in
the war on terrorism is largely unrecognised and unreported. Glimpses of
Sudan’s importance in this war have emerged from time-to-time. (18) In
April 2005, for example, ‘The Los Angeles’ Times reported that the
Bush Administration has “forged a close intelligence partnership”
with Sudan, a partnership which included sharing intelligence and
providing access to terrorism suspects. The Administration noted that
Sudan’s assistance is “important, functional and current” and that
the Sudanese intelligence service could become a “top tier” partner
of the CIA. (19) One month prior to Prendergast’s article, the
‘Daily Telegraph’ newspaper in London reported that a US
intelligence official stated that he rated Sudan’s cooperation in the
war on terrorism as “ten out of ten”. (20)
It is a matter of record that the powerful anti-Sudan lobbies within the
United States have significantly impeded the effective prosecution of
the war on terrorism, both before and after the horrific events of 9/11.
Indeed, the horrific events of 11 September 2001 may well never have
happened had the Clinton Administration accepted Sudanese offers to
extradite Osama bin-Laden (or repeated subsequent offers to share
intelligence and cooperate in counter-terrorism measures). The
administration’s reluctance to do so was clearly heavily influenced
not only by flawed policy but also by these lobbies within Washington –
lobbies which continue to find spokesmen in the shape of dilettantes
such as John Prendergast.
The dangers of taking Prendergast seriously in any of his views, whether
they are on Sudan, counter-terrorism or Africa, are self-evident.
Footnotes:
1 John Prendergast and Don Cheadle, “Our Friend, An Architect Of
The Genocide In Darfur”, ‘The Los Angeles Times’, 14 February 2006.
2 For an examination of Prendergast’s shortcomings as a Sudan
analyst, see, for example, “No Lesson Learned: A Review of John
Prendergast’s ‘God, Oil and Country: Changing the Logic of War in
Sudan”, The European-Sudanese Public Affairs Council, London, 20
February 2002 available at
http://www.espac.org/oil_pages/no_lesson_learned.html.
3 Letter from Hon. Cynthia McKinney to U.S. President William
Jefferson Clinton, 31 August 1999, available at
http:www.africa2000.com/UGANDA/mckinney.html
4 “Sierra Leone, the last Clinton betrayal: Where Angels Fear to
Tread”, ‘The New Republic’, 24 July 2000.
5 See David Hoile, ‘Farce Majeure: The Clinton
Administration’s Sudan Policy 1993-2000’, The European-Sudanese
Public Affairs Council, London, 2000, available at
http://www.espac.org/usa_sudan_pages/farce_majeure.html. See also
articles such as “Sierra Leone, the Last Clinton Betrayal: Where
Angels Fear to Tread”, ‘The New Republic’, 24 July 2000; Michael
Kelly, “U.S. Handiwork in Sierra Leone”, ‘The Washington Post’,
19 July 2000.
6 See, “Decision to Strike Factory in Sudan Based Partly on
Surmise”, ‘The Washington Post’, 21 September 1998; and “Sudan
Attack Blamed on US Blunders”, ‘The Times’ (London), 22 September 1998.
7 “Dubious Decisions on the Sudan”, Editorial, ‘The New York
Times’, 23 September 1998.
8 See, “More Doubts Rise Over Claims for U.S. Attack”, ‘The
Wall Street Journal’ (New York), August 28, 1998; “Sudan to Allow
U.N. to Investigate Any Alleged Chemical-Arm Site”, ‘The Wall Street
Journal’ (New York), October 16, 1998; “U.S. Should Admit Its
Mistake in Sudan Bombing”, ‘The Wall Street Journal’ (New York),
May 20, 1999.
9 “Roberts Calls US Missile Attack on Sudan Unjustified”,
‘The Wichita Eagle’, 28 October 1998. Senator Roberts is a member of
both the Senate Intelligence and Armed Forces Committees.
10 David Rose, “The Secret Bin Laden Files: The Al-Qaeda
Intelligence the U.S. Ignored”, ‘Vanity Fair’, New York, January
2002, p.50; and “Resentful West Spurned Sudan’s Key Terror Files”,
‘The Observer’ (London), 30 September 2001.
11 “Sudan Offered Up bin Laden in ‘96”, ‘The Washington
Post’, 3 October 2001.
12 David Rose, “The Secret Bin Laden Files: The Al-Qaeda
Intelligence the U.S. Ignored”, ‘Vanity Fair’, New York, January 2002.
13 See, for example, “US Sees Good Progress in Terrorism Talks
with Sudan”, News Article by Reuters on 25 September 2001.
14 “Powell Mulls U.N. Action on Sudan After Report African
Government is Moving in right Direction on Terrorism”, News Article by
Associated Press on 22 August 2001 and “Sudan Provides Intelligence to
U.S.”, News Article by Reuters, 29 September 2001.
15 “Foreign Minister says Sudan has been Cooperating with the
United States in the Fight against Terrorism for More Than a Year”,
New Article by Associated Press on 25 September 2001.
16 “U.S. Official Accuses Somalia of Harboring Terrorists”,
News Article by Xinhua, 12 December 2001.
17 “Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American
People”, United States Capitol, Office of the Press Secretary,
Washington-DC, 20 September 2001.
18 See, for example, “Official Pariah Sudan Valuable to
America’s War on Terrorism. Despite Once Harboring Bin Laden, Khartoum
Regime Has Supplied Key Intelligence, Officials Say”, ‘The Los
Angeles Times’, 29 April 2005.
19 “Official Pariah Sudan Valuable to America’s War on
Terrorism. Despite Once Harboring Bin Laden, Khartoum Regime Has
Supplied Key Intelligence, Officials Say”, ‘The Los Angeles
Times’, 29 April 2005.
20 “Friends like these...”, ‘The Daily Telegraph’, London,
24 January 2006.