posted April 11, 2005 07:57 PM              

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The Bolton Nomination: An Effort to Derail?NewsweekApril 18 issue - Are efforts to derail John Bolton's nomination as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations progressing? NEWSWEEK has learned that in a closed-door interview with Senate intelligence-committee staffers last week, Stuart Cohen, former acting chief of the National Intelligence Council, a panel of senior intel analysts, said Bolton had visited his CIA office to demand that the council's top Latin America expert be removed from his post. Sources say the expert, who can't be identified because he serves undercover overseas, tangled with Bolton about the draft of a speech Bolton made in 2002 claiming that Cuba was pursuing a germ-warfare program. A Senate intel-committee report last year quoted another WMD analyst from the State Department as saying that Bolton had also tried to have him transferred because he raised questions about the same speech. (Neither analyst was reassigned.)

Senate Democrats expect a witness will appear at Bolton's delayed confirmation hearing this week to testify about Bolton's alleged attempts to intimidate intel professionals. Intel sources say a review last fall of Cuban WMD programs by the entire U.S. intel community vindicated the analysts who questioned the draft of Bolton's speech. The review concluded that U.S. agencies had reason to doubt the accuracy of a 1999 intel estimate which Bolton used to justify his claim that Cuba had "at least a limited offensive biological warfare research and development effort." Senate Republicans don't believe that Bolton's criticism of analysts was out of bounds. Bolton declined to comment.

—Mark Hosenball

posted April 11, 2005 08:54 PM            

"Yesterday, Dodd claimed that there is "credible information" that Bolton tried to have two intelligence analysts fired for raising objections in advance of his Heritage speech. Dodd seems to have forgotten that the Senate has already investigated these allegations. In a report issued by the Intelligence Committee last July, Bolton and other government officials were exonerated of the charges of trying to manipulate intelligence for political purposes. According to the Journal, the report concluded that none of the intelligence analysts it interviewed "provided any information to the Committee which showed that policymakers had attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their analysis or that any intelligence analysts had changed their intelligence judgments as a result of political pressure." Moreover, reported the Journal, "the Senate report specifically clears Mr. Bolton of charges relating to the Heritage speech. It quotes an unnamed analyst who said that Mr. Bolton "berated" him when he made changes to a draft of the speech. But he also said "he was not removed from his portfolio and that he did not suffer any negative effects professionally." The analyst, Christian Westermann, is expected to testify against Mr. Bolton. Similar charges have been levied by a Latin America analyst at the CIA, who, like Mr. Westermann, also remains in his job." The Journal piece concluded: "All of this, in short, is political smoke designed to disguise what is really a policy dispute. Mr. Bolton's opponents don't want to promote a blunt-spoken supporter of Mr. Bush's foreign policy to help reform an obviously dysfunctional United Nations. They prefer someone who'll subjugate U.S. interests to the 'multilateralism' that is their, and the U.N.'s, dominant ethic. Democrats who vote against Mr. Bolton will be saying they want an Ambassador to the U.N. who represents Kofi Annan, not America."
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2005/4/11/121852.shtml

posted April 11, 2005 09:16 PM              

this is about a "witness" who is supposed to testify tommorrow who will probably say something not in that old Senate Intelligence Committee report....

posted April 11, 2005 09:18 PM              

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=34930

posted April 11, 2005 10:03 PM            

Perfectly true Petron and what is perfectly true is not a lie.

Less than a week after the NIE was published, he warned that "on any given day" – provoked by attack or not, sufficiently desperate or not – Saddam could team up with Osama and conduct a joint terrorist operation against America using weapons of mass destruction.

"Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists," Bush said Oct. 7 in his nationally televised Cincinnati speech. "Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving fingerprints." The terrorists he was referring to were "al-Qaida members."

Let me round it all out for you Petron. The President went on to say he couldn't take the chance that Saddam and al-Queda would....