Senate Intelligence committee staff send word that tomorrow's Bolton hearings by their fellow Foreign Relations committee should be interesting. Senate Intel committee leadership were briefed yesterday on the NSA intercepts from which Bolton requested he be provided with the US persons identities on ten occasions. Senators Rockefeller and Roberts were apparently not told the names from the NSA intercepts; but go read the last two graphs of this wire report. An awful lot of fuss from Bolton's crew involving intelligence community resistance to their hype of a Cuba bioweapons threat, it seems.

Update: One legitimate justification for requesting the US identities from NSA intercepts involves counterintelligence concerns. Did Bolton's crew try to investigate Fulton Armstrong and/or Christian Westermann as spies for Cuba? There seems to be a bizarre degree of reluctance of Fleitz and Freedman now to explain the particular subject at issue or their reason for their heated communications about it or their current reluctance to discuss it. Such tactics would seem to constitute an unusually vicious way to attempt to retaliate against intel analysts with whom one disagrees...

Posted by Laura at May 11, 2005 10:14 PM