GOP targets Democrat over war

[Ron Burgundy]

AP - Chris Carney wasn't in Congress in 2002, never voted for the resolution authorizing President Bush to go to war in Iraq and yet the Pennsylvania Republican Party accuses the Democrat of helping to start the war.

"Chris Carney failed our nation once ... now Chris Carney attacks the same war he helped start," reads the mailing sent to voters. "Don't give Chris Carney the chance to fail us again."

Carney, a former intelligence analyst at the Pentagon, is challenging Republican Rep. Don Sherwood (news, bio, voting record). A lieutenant commander in the Navy reserves, Carney dismissed the mailing as a sign of desperation and argued that Bush — with Congress' blessing — took the country to war.

Sherwood voted to give the president the authority to use military force to oust Saddam Hussein.

"How can they dare attack my service? The accusation is that I'm responsible for the war. That is ridiculous," Carney said. "The intelligence community consists of 16 different agencies. I was but one voice in one agency."

Last week, Bush campaigned for Sherwood in the district once considered safe until it became public that Sherwood, 65, had had a five-year extramarital affair, which he admitted.

The flier cites material from a January/February 2004 Mother Jones Magazine article that discusses the work of the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group and says exaggerations were made in intelligence in the lead up to the Iraq war. The article does not specifically mention Carney, who worked for the group.

Carney, a professor, was activated to work in intelligence at the Pentagon from January 2002 until January 2003. He later worked as a civilian adviser at the Pentagon from February 2003 to August 2004, and part-time there for another year after that.

He said he analyzed intelligence that examined al-Qaida's relationship with Saddam Hussein, but he said on a scale of one to 10, the link he saw was about a 2.5. He said he also saw striking evidence that there could be a strong insurgency after the ground war. When he realized that had been ignored, his view of the decision to invade Iraq changed from support to opposition.

"That's what made me angry," Carney said. "That's how my support of the war was lost."

Carney has said that he favors withdrawing one battalion of U.S. troops in Iraq for every Iraqi battalion fully trained.

Matt Burns, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania Republican party, said Carney was "trying to deflect any responsibly from his own record and his own involvement in this area" by passing blame for the decision to invade Iraq.