Janette Sent Me These

Former Aide Takes Aim at War on Terror

Five days before the war began in Iraq, as President Bush prepared to raise the terrorism threat level to orange, a top White House counterterrorism adviser unlocked the steel door to his office, an intelligence vault secured by an electronic keypad, a combination lock and an alarm. He sat down and turned to his inbox.

"Things were dicey," said Rand Beers, recalling the stack of classified reports about plots to shoot, bomb, burn and poison Americans. He stared at the color-coded threats for five minutes. Then he called his wife: I'm quitting.
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?

"The administration wasn't matching its deeds to its words in the war on terrorism. They're making us less secure, not more secure," said Beers, who until now has remained largely silent about leaving his National Security Council job as special assistant to the president for combating terrorism. "As an insider, I saw the things that weren't being done. And the longer I sat and watched, the more concerned I became, until I got up and walked out."

"The first day, I came in fresh and eager," he said. "On the last day, I came home tired and burned out. And it only took seven months."

Part of that stemmed from his frustration with the culture of the White House. He was loath to discuss it. His wife, Bonnie, a school administrator, was not: "It's a very closed, small, controlled group. This is an administration that determines what it thinks and then sets about to prove it. There's almost a religious kind of certainty. There's no curiosity about opposing points of view. It's very scary. There's kind of a ghost agenda."

Mrs. Bush Defends Her Son

You have to understand that Junior has not had an easy life. In a family where none of the boys were too bright, George was called "slow" by all of us. Not stupid, just slow. Well, maybe stupid as well, but very slow. At an early age he built up all of these resentments and a lot of anger. We were reluctant to leave him home alone for fear that he'd burn down the damn house. He always wanted to be destroying things. He was funny that way. I mean, we were all kind of scared of him. His favorite movie was Star Wars, and that's when he got it in his head that there were evil empires. He thought it was a documentary. That seemed kind of funny at the time, because he used to take turns deciding which of us in the family was part of the axis of evil.

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