Carter vs. Condi: Who's Telling the Truth? Former president said he alerted State Department of plans to meet with Hamas.

April 25, 2008  -- Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former President Jimmy Carter went to the Middle East in pursuit of peace, but instead he found himself in a war of words with the U.S. secretary of state.

The controversy has come down to a simple question: Who is telling the truth, Jimmy Carter or Condoleezza Rice?

Rice said that the State Department urged Carter not to travel to the region, but that if he did, he should not meet with the Palestinian group Hamas, which the United States considered a terrorist organization.

"We counseled President Carter against coming to -- against going to the region, and particularly against having contacts with Hamas," Rice told reporters earlier this week. "We wanted to make sure that there would be no confusion and that there would be no sense that Hamas was somehow a party to peace negotiations."

In response to that, Carter has essentially called Rice a liar.

"I saw all kinds of statements out of the State Department that said they begged me not to come, they urged me not to come," Carter said in an interview with Steve Inskeep on National Public Radio. "All of this is absolutely false. They never once asked me not to come."

So, what did happen?

Both sides agreed that Carter placed a call to Rice before his trip. She responded by putting him in touch with Assistant Secretary of State David Welch, the top State Department official on Middle East issues. Welch then spent a half hour on the phone with Carter talking about his upcoming trip. Welch also had pretrip conversations with Carter's staff.

Rice said the message given to Carter was crystal clear. "We certainly told President Carter that we did not think meeting with Hamas was going to help the Palestinians who actually are devoted to peace."

Carter insisted that Welch was actually "quite positive" about the trip and never asked him not to meet with Hamas or not to make the trip.

The one man who should know who is telling the truth is David Welch. But Welch didn't want to call a former president or a current secretary of state a liar. He is a lifelong foreign service officer who has served high-level diplomatic positions in both Democratic and Republican administrations. All he would say about his conversation with Carter is it was "a professional, pleasant conversation" and "I did counsel him about our concerns about Hamas."

But Welch wouldn't say whether he asked Carter not to meet with Hamas.

"I'd prefer just to leave it right there," he told National Public Radio.

In a written statement, the Carter Center claimed that "no one" in the State Department "even suggested" the former president not meet with Hamas.

That seemed to be contradicted by the public record. In fact, on April 10, more than a week before Carter left for the Middle East, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said publicly that the State Department did not want Carter meeting with Hamas "because U.S. government policy is that Hamas is a terrorist organization, and we believe it is not in the interests of our policy or in the interests of peace to have such a meeting."