REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Nuts and Bolton
Intelligence "pressure" and other phony charges.
It's too bad double jeopardy doesn't obtain for Presidential nominees. If it did, Democrats wouldn't be reviving long-discredited accusations against John Bolton, whose nomination as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations comes before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee today.
There are two principal charges. First is that Mr. Bolton distorted intelligence information in a public speech in which he warned of a possible biological weapons effort in Cuba. Second, he is said to have intimidated intelligence officials, two or three of whom Democrats may call tomorrow to testify in opposition to Mr. Bolton's confirmation. Among his accusers is Carl Ford, a former Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research, who clashed with Mr. Bolton.
Let's take the allegations about the Cuba speech first. In May 2002, Mr. Bolton told an audience at the Heritage Foundation that he believed Havana had "a limited offensive biological warfare research and development effort" and has "provided dual-use technology to other rogue states." As is usual, the speech was cleared by intelligence authorities prior to delivery.
If they had done their homework, the critics would know that Mr. Bolton wasn't the first U.S. government official to use such language. As our Mary Anastasia O'Grady reported at the time, Mr. Ford used nearly identical words when he testified before Congress two months earlier. On March 19, 2002, he said, Cuba has "a limited developmental offensive biological warfare research and development effort." And, "Cuba has provided dual use biotechnology through rogue states." Mr. Ford repeated himself on June 5, 2002, when he testified again before Congress. If Mr. Bolton skewed the government's position on Cuba's germ-warfare effort, then Mr. Ford did too.
The occasion of Mr. Ford's second testimony was a hearing of the Senate Western Hemisphere subcommittee called for the purpose of investigating Mr. Bolton's Heritage comments. Connecticut Democrat Christopher Dodd--one of Mr. Bolton's fiercest critics--asked Mr. Ford: "Did you have any disagreements with the draft [Heritage] speech?" Mr. Ford replied, "On the intelligence side, we did not. We approved it. It was the language we had provided." We trust Mr. Dodd will recall this exchange when he questions Mr. Bolton today.
Mr. Dodd said yesterday that there is "credible information" that Mr. Bolton tried to have two intelligence analysts fired for raising objections in advance of his Heritage speech. As it happens, the Senate has also investigated these allegations. The Intelligence Committee issued a report last July exonerating Mr. Bolton and other government officials of trying to manipulate intelligence for political purposes. None of the intelligence analysts it interviewed, the report says, "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, 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.
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.
