MSNBC : : Did Bolton Try to Intimidate Spies?
There's no end to this man's bad habits:
Accusations that Bolton pressured intel specialists on Cuba have circulated since at least 2003, when congressional intelligence committees looked into allegations that intel analysts were urged to issue alarming reports about Saddam Hussein's unconventional weapons.
See also: John Bolton: Ally of Drugrunners
...years later, the CIA's own inspector general released two reports that acknowledged the CIA had knowingly worked with contra supporters suspected of drugrunning. Kerry and the others had been right. But the sly spinners of the Reagan-Bush administrations had succeeded in preventing the contra drug connection from becoming a full-blown scandal.
And who was one of the Reagan/Bush officials who strove to thwart Kerry and other pursuers of this politically inconvenient truth? By now you have guessed it: John Bolton.
So he helped fabricate intelligence for the administration, -and- he's implicit in Iran-Contra? That sounds like the perfect Bush II nominee!
Accusations that Bolton pressured intel specialists on Cuba have circulated since at least 2003, when congressional intelligence committees looked into allegations that intel analysts were urged to issue alarming reports about Saddam Hussein's unconventional weapons.
See also: John Bolton: Ally of Drugrunners
...years later, the CIA's own inspector general released two reports that acknowledged the CIA had knowingly worked with contra supporters suspected of drugrunning. Kerry and the others had been right. But the sly spinners of the Reagan-Bush administrations had succeeded in preventing the contra drug connection from becoming a full-blown scandal.
And who was one of the Reagan/Bush officials who strove to thwart Kerry and other pursuers of this politically inconvenient truth? By now you have guessed it: John Bolton.
So he helped fabricate intelligence for the administration, -and- he's implicit in Iran-Contra? That sounds like the perfect Bush II nominee!
posted by Management at 9:13 PM
3 Comments:
Intel: Did Bolton Try to Intimidate Spies?
By Mark Hosenball
Newsweek
11 April 2005 Issue
Bush critics in the Senate are hunting for evidence to derail or delay confirmation of State Department official John Bolton as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Foreign Relations Committee staffers are looking into charges that Bolton attempted to intimidate or victimize two career intelligence officials for what he viewed as their insufficiently alarmist analyses of intel on purported Cuban biological weapons. Committee investigators have contacted both the State Department and the intel community seeking records and witnesses. But Bolton's opponents are unsure if they will be able to make their case in time for Bolton's confirmation hearing Thursday.
Accusations that Bolton pressured intel specialists on Cuba have circulated since at least 2003, when congressional intelligence committees looked into allegations that intel analysts were urged to issue alarming reports about Saddam Hussein's unconventional weapons. The hearings produced little evidence of that. But State Department WMD analyst Christian Westermann testified that he tangled with Bolton about a speech on Cuban germ warfare. According to a Senate intel committee report, Westermann says he sent the CIA an e-mail proposing changes in Bolton's speech. Bolton later got a copy of the e-mail, "berated" Westermann and tried to have the analyst transferred. Westermann wasn't reassigned.
The second case Bolton's congressional critics are examining involves a senior intelligence-community Latin America analyst. Congressional and administration sources say Bush foreign-policy aides - including Bolton and Otto Reich, a top policymaker on Latin America - tried to have the analyst, who today serves undercover, fired. They then tried to block him from being promoted because they believed he was too soft on Cuba, and because he was once assigned to President Bill Clinton's National Security Council. Reich tells NEWSWEEK that he believed the analyst's work was "unreliable." Reich says he discussed his views with Bolton and "other colleagues" and that he wrote a secret letter to the analyst's bosses critiquing the expert's work. But a former official says George Tenet, who was then CIA director, resisted pressure from Bolton and Reich, and the analyst was ultimately promoted. Some Senate Democrats hope to persuade at least one Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee to vote against Bolton's confirmation, which could deadlock the panel and delay - or even block - his U.N. nomination from reaching the Senate floor. Bolton declined to comment.
ohn Bolton: Ally of Drugrunners
By David Corn
The Nation
Wednesday 30 March 2005
John Bolton is a bad penny. He keeps coming back. As I've written before, there are plenty of reasons why he's a horrible pick to be US ambassador to the United Nations. Even if you believe the UN needs reform, you don't send a pyromaniac to fix a house of sticks. Beyond his UN-bashing, Bolton has not just been extreme in his foreign policy views, he has been wrong and reckless: accusing Cuba of developing biological weapons and Syria of posing a serious WMD threat without proof. (The CIA felt obliged to block him from testifying before Congress on Syria and WMDs.) He also has had his brushes with scandal, receiving money from a political slush fund in Taiwan and advocating for Taiwan in congressional testimony (when he was not in government) without revealing he was paid by a Taiwanese entity to write policy papers for it. (He might have even broken the law by failing to register as a foreign agent.) Recently 59 former US ambassadors signed a letter opposing Bolton's nomination as ambassador to the UN; forty-six of these ambassadors served in Republican administrations. (For a full text of the letter, click here.) Now, an alert reader has uncovered more information critical of Bolton. It just happens to be something I wrote with Jefferson Morley for The Nation sixteen years ago - a column which had totally escaped my aging mind.
Readers over the age of 40 might recall that in the late 1980s, there was a fierce fight pitting the Reagan and Bush I administrations against a few gutsy Democrats in Congress - Senator John Kerry among them - who were trying to investigate allegations that supporters of the Reagan-backed contra rebels in Central America were involved in drugrunning. Rather than cooperate in the search for truth, Reagan and Bush I officials withheld documents from the Democrats. They also badmouthed the investigations and did all they could to marginalize these inquiries as nothing but partisan-driven efforts of conspiracy-minded wingnuts. And, to a degree, the GOP obstructionists succeeded. The Iran-contra committees stayed away from the matter. The report produced by Kerry's subcommittee - which concluded there was evidence that supporters of the CIA-assisted contras were drug smugglers - received little media attention. Yet years later, the CIA's own inspector general released two reports that acknowledged the CIA had knowingly worked with contra supporters suspected of drugrunning. Kerry and the others had been right. But the sly spinners of the Reagan-Bush administrations had succeeded in preventing the contra drug connection from becoming a full-blown scandal.
And who was one of the Reagan/Bush officials who strove to thwart Kerry and other pursuers of this politically inconvenient truth? By now you have guessed it: John Bolton. Read on:
From Meese to the UN; John Bolton,
Nominee for Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs
By David Corn and Jefferson Morley
The Nation
Monday 17 April 1989
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee should take a good look at John Bolton, the nominee for Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs, a position in which he would, among other things, act as a liaison between the US government and the UN. Currently Assistant AG in the Justice Department's civil division, Bolton was known to be one of Edwin Meese 3rd's most loyal lieutenants. At Justice, Bolton developed a reputation for combativeness. When he attacked the independent counsel law, even a White House spokesman accused him of being intemperate.
Bolton's record as Assistant AG for the Office of Legislative Affairs in 1986 and 1987 merits special scrutiny. He "tried to torpedo" Sen. John Kerry's inquiry into allegations of contra drug smuggling and gunrunning, a committee aide says. When Kerry requested information from the Justice Department, Bolton's office gave it the long stall, a Kerry aide notes. In fact, says another Congressional aide, Bolton's staff worked actively with the Republican senators who opposed Kerry's efforts.
In 1986 this chum of Meese also refused to give Peter Rodino, then chair of he House Judiciary Committee, documents concerning the Iran/contra scandal and Meese's involvement in it, Later, when Congressional investigators were probing charges that the Justice Department had delayed an inquiry into gunrunning to the contras, Bolton was again the spoiler. According to Hayden Gregory, chief counsel of a House Judiciary subcommittee on crime, Bolton blocked an arrangement by which his staff had agreed to let House investigators interview officials of the US Attorney's office in Miami. Bolton refused to speak to us on the subject.
Last year Legal Times reported that Bolton, who earned $330,000 in 1984 as a partner at a blue-blood DC law firm, had contacted several private firms hoping to parlay his government experience into a lucrative lobbying job. None were interested in a tainted Meese disciple. Fortunately for him, George Bush and James Baker are less discriminating.
That article is a blast from the past. But Bolton's truth-smothering endeavors back then are consistent with his subsequent career. He has been an ideological hatchet man, saying whatever he needs to say (whether it's true or not) to press forward his hawkish agenda. Back in the 1980s, he blocked inquiries into the CIA's involvement with drug runners. Now he complains about corruption at the UN and claims to be a force for truth and reform. As a cynical and partisan situationalist who poses as a frank and blunt idealist, he does indeed represent the Bush administration. But the nation deserves better representation at the UN.
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