OKAY, MAYBE I WILL LIE TO YOU:

Former aide criticizes Carter over Mideast book: In L.A., Kenneth Stein says 'falsehoods' in book on Mideast prompted his resignation. (Rebecca Trounson, January 13, 2007, LA Times)

A former executive director of the Carter Center whose resignation from the institution has been a focal point of the furor over former President Jimmy Carter's new Middle East book said his decision to step down was a matter of "intellectual honesty."

In his first detailed public comments since his resignation last month, Kenneth W. Stein, who was the center's first executive director, told a Los Angeles audience Thursday that his concerns grew out of what he called Carter's "gross inventions, intentional falsehoods and irresponsible remarks."

Stein, a professor of Middle Eastern history at Emory University in Atlanta, said that in two of the most serious errors, Carter misrepresented the wording of a key U.N. resolution and gave a false account of a 1990 meeting he held with former Syrian President Hafez Assad, which Stein attended. [...]

Carter wrote that Assad had said that he was willing to negotiate with Israel on the status of the Golan Heights, which Israel has occupied since the Six-Day War in 1967.

But Stein said his own notes of the Damascus meeting show that Assad, in response to a question from Carter, replied that Syria could not accept a demilitarized Golan without "sacrificing our sovereignty."

Stein also disputed Carter's statement in the book that Assad expressed willingness to move Syria's troops farther from the border than Israel should be required to do. "Why does Carter do that?" Stein asked his audience. "To make Israel appear intransigent." Carter also wrote of his attempts to report on his talks with Assad and other Middle Eastern leaders to White House staffers who were preoccupied with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. However, Stein said the White House briefings occurred in the spring of 1990 and the invasion was not until August.

MORE (via Tom Morin)
Carter's Arab financiers (Rachel Ehrenfeld, December 21, 2006, Washington Times)

To understand what feeds former president Jimmy Carter's anti-Israeli frenzy, look at his early links to Arab business.

Between 1976-1977, the Carter family peanut business received a bailout in the form of a $4.6 million, "poorly managed" and highly irregular loan from the National Bank of Georgia (NBG). According to a July 29, 1980 Jack Anderson expose in The Washington Post, the bank's biggest borrower was Mr. Carter, and its chairman at that time was Mr. Carter's confidant, and later his director of the Office of Management and Budget, Bert Lance.

At that time, Mr. Lance's mismanagement of the NBG got him and the bank into trouble. Agha Hasan Abedi, the Pakistani founder of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), known as the bank "which would bribe God," came to Mr. Lance's rescue making him a $100,000-a-year consultant. Abedi then declared: "we would never talk about exploiting his relationship with the president." Next, he introduced Mr. Lance to Saudi billionaire Gaith Pharaon, who fronted for BCCI and the Saudi royal family. In January 1978, Abedi paid off Mr. Lance's $3.5 million debt to the NBG, and Pharaon secretly gained control over the bank.

Mr. Anderson wrote: "Of course, the Saudis remained discretely silent... kept quiet about Carter's irregularities... [and] renegotiated the loan to Carter's advantage."