One of the reasons for the questionable course of American policy towards Sudan for much of the 1990s - especially during the Clinton Administration - was the poor standard of what passed for research and analysis within the United States regarding Sudanese affairs. This misrepresentation has been within both the private and government sectors. While one would expect a wide range of personal bias, prejudice and competence amongst individuals and organizations with their own private agendas, it is disappointing to note that a similar prejudice and unprofessionalism has characterized American government institutions. At the heart of this governmental ineptitude has been the Congressional Research Service (CRS).

The service describes itself as "the public policy research arm of the United States Congress" created to provide Congress with "its own source of nonpartisan, objective analysis and research on all legislative issues."(1) CRS also specifically states that it seeks to "provide products and services that can be relied upon to be free of partisan or other bias" and that are "reliable, current and comprehensive". It is clear that this has not been the case with regard to its work on Sudan. Its principal "expert" on Sudan has for some years been Ted Dagne. He has authored most of Congressional Research Service's documents on Sudan. They have been noticeably partisan, stale and selective. 

Sudan has been wracked by civil war for decades. Since 1983 the war in the south has been fought against the Government of Sudan by the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA). Congressional Research Service documents undoubtedly served to underpin the Clinton Administration's skewed Sudan policy within Congress. (2) No less a commentator than former President Jimmy Carter was very candid about both the lack of objectivity in this policy: "If the United States would be reasonably objective in Sudan, I think that we at the Carter Center and the Africans who live in the area could bring peace to Sudan. But the United States government has a policy of trying to overthrow the government in Sudan." (3) Carter bluntly described Clinton's Sudan policy as the "biggest obstacle" to peace in Sudan.

It is a conflict that has cost the country dearly in lost lives and millions of displaced civilians. Dagne's bias towards the SPLA position is clear. In November 1997, for example, Dagne spoke in a seminar on Sudan at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Former Congressman Mervyn Dymally, a past chairman of the House of Representatives Africa Sub-Committee, said of Dagne's presentation that instead of an "objective presentation, one would think that Ted represents the SPLA here." It comes as little surprise that former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Herman Cohen confirmed that Dagne was a "good friend" of SPLA leader John Garang, and that Dagne would host meetings for Garang in his Washington home. (4)

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Quite what CRS's analyst is doing singing the praises of the SPLA is unclear. It is an organisation described by The New York Times as "brutal and predatory" which has "behaved like an occupying army, killing, raping and pillaging." (5) Human Rights Watch stated that: "The SPLA has a history of gross abuses of human rights and has not made any effort to establish accountability. Its abuses today remain serious". (6) The New York Times described John Garang as one of Sudan's "pre- eminent war criminals". (7) 

The Congressional Research Service's poor track record on Sudan spans the 1990s, and has, apart from misanalysis, included the repetition of undiluted disinformation. An early example were claims that thousands of Iranian revolutionary guards were present in Sudan. The Congressional Research Service served as a conduit for this sort of propaganda in the early 1990s. (8) By 1994, however, 'The Independent' newspaper in London was reporting that "intelligence assessments...say that reports of Iranian revolutionary guards [in Sudan]...are without foundation". (9) This is supported by the memoirs of the former United States ambassador to Sudan, Donald Petterson, in which he commented on this particular instance of disinformation:

"Reports appeared in the media that hundreds, even thousands of Iranians, many of them Revolutionary Guard military and security police advisers, had come to Sudan. Reports also persisted that the Iranians were training Palestinian, Egyptian, Algerian, and other radical Islamist terrorists at sites in Sudan, some of them quite large. The reports were based in part on information provided by Egyptian intelligence sources, which were conducting an assiduous disinformation campaign against Sudan. The truth was something far less alarming. There were Iranian advisers and technicians in Sudan, and Shiite propagandists and clerics as well, yet their numbers were relatively small, certainly nothing like the numbers being reported by the Western press." (10)

The reality is that the number of Iranians of all sorts in Sudan at the time could be numbered in tens rather than hundreds or thousands. The "Iranian revolutionary guards" affair was only one of many examples of questionable claims made about Sudan by the Congressional Research Service.

Dagne's selectivity, and that of the CRS, regarding Sudan is equally clear. While reviewing Sudan, "terrorism" and the Clinton years, for example, Dagne cites Osama bin Laden's stay within Sudan, but does not mention any of the well-documented offers made by Khartoum to extradite him to the United States, nor Khartoum's attempts to co-operate in counter-terrorism, including repeated offers from 1996 onwards to share information on the bin Laden network. (11) Indeed, he keeps to the revisionist line, denying that any such offers were made. (12)