[Mb-civic] Intel: Did Bolton Try to Intimidate Spies? By Mark Hosenball Newsweek

[Michael Butler]

Also see below:    
David Corn | John Bolton: Ally of Drugrunners    €

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    Intel: Did Bolton Try to Intimidate Spies?
    By Mark Hosenball
    Newsweek

    11 April 2005 Issue

    
Bolton: Influencing intelligence?
(Photo: Koji Sasahara / AP)
    
    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.

 

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    John 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.

    You can read David Corn's blog complete with recent postings on Bush's
screwed-up budget for homeland defense, an unrequited offer from
radical-turned-rightist David Horowitz, and how the fringe-right is right
about the Schiavo judges.