To us civilians, Bolton's repeated efforts to meet with foreign officials without first clearing his foreign travel with the relevant State Department offices may seem like a technical infraction, but not too much more. Doug Jehl first reported the story earlier this week, and the AP's Barry Schweid has a story tonight built around an interview with outgoing assistant secretary of state for European Affairs Elizabeth Jones, who had to intervene with Bolton several times over the matter. But in the ways of the US government, this is actually a pretty big deal. Another story I co-reported recently involved a not dissimilar effort by US government officials to hold a secret meeting in a foreign country with a third country's defectors and representatives of that foreign country's intelligence service, that was also not first cleared with the US ambassador there, the State Department or the CIA. It left a lot of confusion in its wake in that country, problems for the US officials involved back home, and major consternation at CIA and State. The US officials' passports start getting checked at that point, and State and CIA complained to the National Security advisor at the highest levels. In other words, a fine -- and completely avoidable -- mess.

It all goes to something one sees again and again with Bolton, and his supporters. Their sense that he and they are representing the real Bush administration foreign policy to places like Iran and North Korea, while everyone else at State was working against the President's policies. But that's not how it works in an administration that has a strong sense of what the President's policies are to places like Iran and North Korea. Bolton's supporters, some of them anyhow, want Bolton to represent the real Bush foreign policy to Iran and North Korea, one that is uncompromising, that refuses to negotiate with dictators, that sees the real solution to those countries' nuclear programs as being changing those countries' leaders. Advocating that inside and outside the bureaucracy is one thing; simply conducting one's own foreign policy as if it were the President's policy is another -- as Bolton apparently was in the habit of doing.

The problem for Bolton and his supporters is that, at least up until this point, regime change in Iran and North Korea has not been the declared or explicit or clear policy President Bush has chosen. And if and until he does so, you can't have US officials running around on their own trying to make it so, by throwing a wrench in six party talks, or convincing European negotiators the Bush administration gives no credence to their negotiations with Tehran, and therefore making those delicate negotiations' failure basically a kind of fait accompli. The accounts coming out about Bolton every day do nothing so much as suggest the Bush administration is a ship that is basically unmoored and directionless on the most pressing foreign policy challenge this country faces, the threat of rogue state nuclear proliferation.

The American Prospect's Mark Leon Goldberg reports the depressing news that the Bush administration is rapidly backtracking from action to stop the genocide in Darfur, and is recently making nice with the Sudanese government. Goldberg writes that on a trip last week to Darfur, Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick vastly lowballed the death count there and refused to call what is occurring in Darfur genocide, as former Secretary of State Colin Powell had already declared it. Africa watchers and human rights activists say Zoellick's equivocating was a very deliberate signal:

"Zoellick is not some State Department official acting on his own,” [the International Crisis Group's John] Prendergast told me, “but was deliberately signaling a shift in administration policy." Eric Reeves, the Smith College professor whose analysis of the conflict continues to prove prescient, agrees. Shortly after the press conference, Reeves surmised on his Web site that Zoellick’s comments heralded a new administration strategy meant to forestall the need for a U.S. commitment to humanitarian intervention by downplaying the urgency of the situation.

If so, this post-Powell policy is placing the administration on a collision course with Congress. Last week, the Senate unanimously passed the Darfur Accountability Act as part of the Iraq-Afghanistan emergency supplemental appropriations bill. Led by Republican Sam Brownback of Kansas and Democrat John Corzine of New Jersey, the act appropriates $90 million in U.S. aid for Darfur and establishes targeted U.S. sanctions against the Sudanese regime, accelerates assistance to expand the size and mandate of the African Union mission in Darfur, expands the United Nations Mission in Sudan to include the protection of civilians in Darfur, establishes a no-fly zone over Darfur, and calls for a presidential envoy to Sudan...

Yet in an April 25 letter from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget to House Appropriations Chairman Jerry Lewis obtained by the Prospect, the administration signaled its desire to strike the Darfur Accountability Act from the supplemental.

This is quite depressing news. Perhaps the Bush administration's increasing posture of a relationship of political expedience with the Sudan regime is best explained by Ken Silverstein's blockbuster piece from Khartoum today in the Los Angeles Times. The two pieces read together are quite illuminating that while the Bush administration talks a good game about Sharansky and human rights, their recent actions with the Saudis and Khartoum speak volumes about their preference for political expedience most every time. As Atrios often says, "LIARS!"

Rice is a far more disappointing Secretary of State than some of us could have imagined, and Bolton's appeasing of genocide has been well established. The Bush administration is being ill served by the team Bush has chosen to advise him on humanitarian matters.

Update: More on the revelations in the Silverstein piece about the Bush-Khartoum intelligence relationship from Tapped's Goldberg.

Sunday Update: Nadezhda of Liberals Against Terrorism has a different take: the African Union has agreed to double their force strength in Darfur, one sign of what she says more generally is evidence the Africans are "getting their act together."

More on John Wolf's and Alan Foley's interviews with Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff yesterday, from the Washington Post's Dafna Linzer. Up shot? Bolton tried to get fired or disciplined at least four people at State, and at least one at CIA, because he disagreed with their views, contrary to what he said at his testimony a couple weeks back. Three of the cases we've heard about (Fulton Armstrong, Christian Westermann, Rexon Ryu), but two are still under wraps, and the targets of Bolton's wrath are still working at State. Linzer writes:

In an interview yesterday with Republican and Democratic staff members, Wolf elaborated on that incident [involving Ryu] in 2003 and told the committee for the first time that Bolton demanded disciplinary actions against other career officials who offered views that differed from his own. To protect the officials' privacy, Wolf did not name them to the committee staff or describe the nature of the views they offered...

Committee sources said [former CIA WINPAC director Alan Foley] confirmed testimony provided by Stuart Cohen, the former acting director of the National Intelligence Council, that Bolton had tried to fire the national intelligence officer for Latin America who disagreed with Bolton's assertions about an alleged bioweapons programs in Cuba.

"Foley told us that Bolton's chief of staff, Fred Fleitz, called him up and said that Bolton wanted the analyst fired," one committee investigator said. Bolton has denied that he sought to fire the officer.

The committee also interviewed Thomas Hubbard, the former ambassador to South Korea, who reiterated earlier statements that he did not approve a controversial speech Bolton gave on North Korea, as Bolton had testified in his confirmation hearing.

Bolton tried to get multiple people fired because he disagreed with their professional analysis and judgment. They were right and he was wrong. And he lied in his testimony to the Senate about whether he tried to get people fired. And Bolton allegedly used NSA intercepts to snoop on his American bureaucratic enemies, in violation of the spirit and letter of all US civil liberties laws and protections.

Go read Suzanne Nossel on what all the players mean when they talk about UN reform. Perhaps not surprisingly, there's little sunlight between the Annan reform proposal and the ideas discussed by Condoleezza Rice's UN advisor:

What do President Bush and Condi Rice mean when they talk about the need for UN reform (as they do unfailingly when stressing how vital it is that Bolton be confirmed)? To find out I went to the USUN website and read a speech given on April 7 by Shirin Tahir-Kheli, whom Rice appointed her Senior Adviser on UN Reform within days of Bolton's nomination.

The speech supports most of the important ideas contained in Annan's reform report, including the terrorism treaty, the revamped Human Rights Council, the creation of a new Peacebuilding Commission and the strengthening of UN non-proliferation instruments. Tahir-Kheli sidesteps a series of other issues, like demands for more development aid and a call for reform of the UN Security Council (she says the U.S. supports such reform, but offers no view on a formula).

In short, while the brouhaha over Bolton unfolds, Condi has her woman quietly advocating a reasoned reform agenda. But what's virtually missing from Tahir-Kehli's speech is any concept of a reform agenda that goes beyond what Annan advocates. The one exception is a reference to a UN Democracy Fund, an idea Bush first floated last fall.

For all their criticism of Annan and their outraged calls for wide reform, the Administration's vision for change dovetails very closely with the Secretary-General's. It's also worth noting that despite the White House's sense of urgency to get Bolton to NYC to start reforming, Tahir-Kheli made clear that Bush rejects Annan's proposal to try to agree on a package this September, and thinks the reform process should not be subject to "artificial deadlines." If reform can wait, why the pressure last week to ram through Bolton?

Not surprisingly, when John Bolton has talked about UN reform, he has talked about it mainly in the context of withholding US dues from the organization:

When John Bolton served as Assistant Secretary of the State Department's International Organization's bureau, reform mostly meant withholding U.S. dues to the UN in an effort to force through various bureaucratic reforms, like zero-based budgeting and getting the UN staff to make good on their commitment to serve abroad. Some of the specific reform measures advocated made senses, but the steps were for the most part seen as made-in-the-USA demands being foisted on an unwilling membership. The result was scorched-earth -- a reflexive hostility among the membership to even the word reform. By the time I got to the UN the U.S. delegation couldn't chime in at a meeting without being told that before opining we ought to pay our dues "on time, in full, and without conditions."

Nossel has some ideas of her own that go beyond the Bush administration's, including ways to reduce Israel's isolation at the UN and reducing overlap and duplication, go read. I've written about some of these issues too.

The LA Times' Ken Silverstein reports on the Bush administration's secret close relationship with Sudan, an intelligence partner in the war on Al Qaeda:

Last week, the CIA sent an executive jet here to ferry the chief of Sudan's intelligence agency to Washington for secret meetings sealing Khartoum's sensitive and previously veiled partnership with the administration, U.S. government officials confirmed.

A decade ago Bin Laden and his fledgling Al Qaeda network were based in Khartoum. After they left for Afghanistan, the regime of Sudanese strongman Lt. Gen. Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir retained ties with other groups the U.S. accuses of terrorism.

As recently as September, then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell accused Sudan of committing genocide in putting down an armed rebellion in the western province of Darfur. And the administration warned that the African country's conduct posed "an extraordinary threat to the national security" of the United States.

Behind the scenes, however, Sudan was emerging as a surprisingly valuable ally of the CIA...

Meantime, the Boston Globe's Farah Stockman reports that John Bolton hyped....the Sudan biological weapons threat in the wake of 9/11. (Thx to RMS and Eric Umansky).

F is for Failure. While Senators consider the merits and drawbacks of Bolton as UN ambassador, they might consider this. This is the result of John Bolton's four years as the top nonproliferation official in the United States. You don't get a bigger failure than this until North Korea tests one, which could be any time. Bolton's supporters might have felt good when Bolton tried to derail six party talks, but they have nothing but increased insecurity for Americans and allies abroad to show for it.

Former Bolton protege John Wolf tells Senate Foreign Relations committee staff of Bolton's bizarrely extreme efforts over months to retaliate against junior State Department rising star Rexon Ryu, and two other still unnamed State Department officials. Steve Clemons as usual has the latest details. Here's some background from a reader on Bolton and Wolf. More from Doug Jehl.

"MORE SIGNS ECONOMY is weakening: Economy grows at slowest pace in two years," the AP reports. Scary. That was not a very robust recovery, was it. Can these guys get absolutely anything right?

Charles Taylor's Al Qaeda connections. My friend, working for the Special Court in Sierra Leone, writes to say, "NBC News has just confirmed that it will be airing a piece on Charles Taylor's connections with Al Qaeda this evening on NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw....If for some reason the piece gets bumped at the last minute, it will run tomorrow night instead." Further, he alerts me that Senators Judd Gregg (R-NH) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt) have released a bipartisan letter today to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. The letter urges stepped up US pressure to get Taylor extradited from Nigeria to face war crimes charges at the Special Court in Sierra Leone, before the court's mandate expires. (The blog to visit if you are interested in following these issues is Doug Farah's).

Bolton Reader Response. Lots of emails, some of which it finally occurred to me to post. Here are three. Reader CA writes in recommendation of a post today by Suzanne Nossel at Democracy Arsenal:

Hi Laura,

Suzanne Nossel has an excellent post at Democracy Arsenal about the skills it takes to achieve reform at the UN. Her comments are based on a longish (11 page) article she published three years ago in The National Interest that discusses the diplomacy waged by Richard Holbrooke to get the UN members to agree to reduce US dues. I really recommend it as a basis for better explaining why Bolton doesn't have the skills or temperament to accomplish change in a multinational organization.

I am going to try to make a short analysis of Suzanne's paper for my own research, but I don't know when I will get to it. Still, I think the paper is worth a look in the context of John Bolton's nomination and it deserves to be more widely read. If you are interested, here is the URL (editor's note, .pdf document linked).

Recommendation noted.

Among several interesting Bolton-related emails from a well-informed reader and Hill veteran, is this from yesterday:

Laura,

I agree that the dynamics of this battle have moved back in Bolton's favor only because the White House has made very clear that it is determined to go to the mat for this nomination. The emerging strategy of Bush, Cheney, Rove, and Rice all expressing their strong support, with considerable White House arm-twisting behind-the-scenes, have scuttled my hopes that this nomination would have collapsed of its own weight by now. The Administration has done a very good job of portraying this battle as one over Bolton's temper and brusque personal manner (implicitly saying that Dems are opposed because people's feelings were hurt), and obscuring the fact that the nominee's behavior was a direct function of his efforts to intimidate/punish career employees for their intelligence analysis. Moreover, there have not been any major allegations constituting "new news" since last week's business meeting. (I don't really count the Syria stuff, since that was publicly available knowledge for quite some time.)

What matters now is (1) whether the 20 staff interviews produce anything new and (2) the fate of the NSA transcripts.

Remember -- I had predicted a while back that the pro-Bolton forces would seek to move this nomination to the floor by fiat if the SFRC did not prove cooperative. If that happens, I would predict that Reid would seek a filibuster of the nomination, as it would prove the Administration has no respect for the perogatives of the Senate and the minority party, especially when every Dem on the Committee voted against the nomination and every Senate Democrat, except for maybe Ben Nelson, would vote against the nomination. As the press notes, a filibuster would not be Reid's first choice, but I think this nomination has proven so alienating that he would be under intense pressure from the Democratic base to do so. And, when you toss in the possible nuclear option on judicial filibusters, this is where things get interesting. Does Frist threaten to exercise such an option on the Bolton nomination, providing credence to the Democratic argument that destroying judicial filibusters is only a first step?

But if the Committee votes 10-8 to support Bolton, then any battle on the Senate floor becomes a partisan issue. And I suspect Reid will be hard-pressed to mount a filibuster if he wants to avoid the dreaded "obstructionist" message.

And my friend AR alerted me yesterday to something interesting I hadn't been aware of. That writer Christopher Hitchens, pro-Iraq war supporter and frequent ally of the neoconservatives who have rallied behind Bolton, fiercely opposes Bolton's nomination for UN ambassador. Why? The same reason that I have become so exercised against Bolton: Bolton is indifferent to genocide, opposed US intervention to stop genocide at every point in the 1990s, and doesn't generally think the US has a moral responsibility to intervene to stop it. This from Hitchens' appearance on MSNBC's Chris Matthews the other day:

This is HARDBALL, only on MSNBC...

MATTHEWS: More revelations today from "The New York Times" about John Bolton, President Bush`s nominee for U.N. ambassador. Will it make --
will he make it?

Christopher Hitchens and Deborah Orin are back with us again.

Let me ask you, will Bolton be confirmed, Christopher?

HITCHENS: Well, I think it is increasingly unlikely. And it is not because
of his politics. And it is not because he isn`t that tightly wrapped, I think. And it is not because he isn`t all that tightly wrapped, I think.

MATTHEWS: I love that phrase.

HITCHENS: And it`s not because he doesn`t mind kicking the old bureaucrat, because everybody should be in favor of that, especially intelligence
bureaucrats.

It`s because he seems to have overstated a lot of things, in that -- because his -- particularly about Cuba, but I think also about Syria.

MATTHEWS: And also about -- what about North Korea, when he said that the ambassador there had approved of his lingo in a speech he had given,
when, in fact, the ambassador had simply said, well, one part of it was OK?
And then, afterwards, he made it sound like he had got complete agreement
from the guy.

HITCHENS: But the nice about Bolton, you have to say, is that he`s
been described by the North Koreans as a beast in human shape. That`s all right. It`s just that his...

MATTHEWS: Scum. They called him scum.

HITCHENS: His anger seems to be a sign of insecurity, rather than of overconfidence.

MATTHEWS: Do they know you up in North Korea? You snuck through there once. Do they know you? Are you on their list of fame up there?

HITCHENS: I`ve now been in Iraq, Iran and North Korea since 2000. I think I`m the only person who has done the whole axis...

HITCHENS: And, by the way, that`s a real solid axis. The one that is proposed by Mr. Bolton, the...

MATTHEWS: It was Cuba, Syria and Libya.

HITCHENS: Cuba, Syria and someone else...

MATTHEWS: He had a second trio.

HITCHENS: And I have to bring it up because it is important. He was
pro-Serb. He was against the intervention in Kosovo.

MATTHEWS: And you were. You were for it.

(CROSSTALK)

HITCHENS: Absolutely not. Milosevic absolutely had to go to where he is now, to the dock. And Bolton was against that. So, he seems to me to be a very odd duck politically. And how can the president come and say, this is the best I can do? I never forgave his father -- did you? -- for saying with Dan Quayle and Clarence Thomas both, 'I can`t do any better than this. I`ve looked everywhere else. These are the best.' [...]

MATTHEWS: So, where are you on Bolton? Do you want him?

HITCHENS: No, not a bit.

In other words, not the right guy for the US at the UN.

Thanks all for the letters...

A few days ago, Steve Clemons hinted that a bigger dispute between Bolton and a higher level State Department official was set to emerge in the Senate investigation of the Bolton nomination. Could Jehl's story in the IHT today (blogged below) be it? In his piece today, Jehl reveals that Bolton did not only harass and try to get fired lower level intelligence analysts who refused to clear his intel manipulations, but that Bolton's regular refusal to clear his foreign trips with US ambassadors abroad created diplomatic crises for fairly senior US officials, including US assistant secretary for European Affairs, Elizabeth Jones and officials from the bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. Writes Jehl:

As under secretary of state, John Bolton routinely arranged meetings with Israeli, Russian, British and French officials without first notifying the State Department offices responsible for relations with those countries, according to three former department officials.

The officials described the practice by Bolton, who has been nominated to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, as unusual and a violation of department procedures...

On at least one occasion, the officials said, Elizabeth Jones, then assistant secretary of state for European affairs, confronted Bolton to complain about meetings in Moscow that Bolton had sought with Russian officials without clearance from the European bureau.

Some meetings that Bolton held in Israel, including those with officials of Mossad, the foreign intelligence service, also prompted complaints in the State Department from the bureau of Near Eastern affairs, the officials said.

Bolton traveled overseas widely during his tenure but often ignored a requirement that he seek "country clearance" from the U.S. Embassy involved, the officials said.

The episodes were described by former State Department officials with direct knowledge of the events. They said they regarded the episodes as notable because they reflected Bolton's practice of acting unilaterally, even in sensitive diplomatic areas in which it was important that U.S. policy be coordinated. But it had not previously been known that the clashes included concerns about Bolton's meetings abroad, which some of the former State Department officials described as exercises in freelance diplomacy.

You can see why Bolton's freelance foreign policy running might have lead to some misunderstandings for the US ambassadors to France, Britain, Russia and Israel to clear up later. But more seriously, you can see why it is truly very dangerous for foreign officials to get the sense that the Bush administration has more than one foreign policy to nuclear hotspots like North Korea and Iran, and for there to be any confusion in their minds what it is. That Bush allowed and allows this to continue speaks to a central flaw in his leadership, a failure to reconcile the conflicting signals of his foreign policy to places like North Korea and Iran. There's certain to be more on this to emerge in coming days.

Bolton repeatedly failed to clear foreign trips with US ambassadors, Doug Jehl reports:

As under secretary of state, John Bolton routinely arranged meetings abroad with Israeli, Russian, British and French officials without first notifying the State Department offices responsible for relations with those countries, according to three former department officials.

The officials described the practice by Bolton, who has been nominated to be ambassador to the United Nations, as unusual and a violation of department procedures.

On at least one occasion, the officials said, Elizabeth Jones, then assistant secretary of state for European affairs, confronted Bolton to complain about meetings in Moscow that Bolton had sought with Russian officials without advance clearance from the European bureau.

Some meetings that Bolton held in Israel, including those with officials of Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence service, also prompted complaints in the State Department from the bureau of Near Eastern affairs, the officials said.

Bolton traveled overseas widely during his tenure, but often ignored a requirement that he seek "country clearance" from the American Embassy involved, the officials said.

The episodes were described by former State Department officials with direct knowledge of the events. They said they regarded the episodes as notable because they reflected Bolton's practice of acting unilaterally, even in sensitive diplomatic areas in which it was important that American policy be coordinated.

Bolton's apparent attitude that he was running his own foreign policy came out in the account given by Amb. Tom Hubbard, of Bolton demanding a meeting with the incoming South Korean premier who had met the week before with State's Jim Kelly carrying a message directly from President Bush. Well, just maybe Bolton had something to say to the South Koreans that Bush hadn't thought of, right? Bolton had something he really wanted to get off his chest, and why let the President's message get in the way?

Update: And, if you haven't had too much caffeine, go read General Clemons.

Via Atrios, Chalabi acting oil minister. More from Reuters. And, now that his old friend and former INC intel chief Aras Habib Karim is back from Tehran, what's his role?

"Bush administration switches gears, releases terror report," Knight Ridder's Frank Davies reports:

Under pressure from Congress, the Bush administration reversed gears Wednesday and released a report showing an upsurge in terrorist attacks worldwide in 2004 after first withholding the statistics from the public.

The number of "significant attacks" grew to about 651 last year, from 208 in 2003, according to statistics released by the National Counterterrorism Center. The 2004 total includes 201 attacks in Iraq.

Good move, and good for Jon Landay, Larry Johnson, Praktike and others for bringing attention to the misguided effort to bury the numbers.

What Sen. Lugar doesn't say here is that he's pushing for his Foreign Relations committee members to get access to the actual ten NSA intercepts that Bolton requested and received along with the identities of the US persons whose conversations were monitored. As Sen. Lugar's spokesman told me today, "We’re working to get information relevant to the investigation here, but within the parameters of US law and national intelligence. So that is not something that is easily done. We are confident that will be worked out so members will have the information they need to make a decision on Secretary Bolton and not violate the intelligence." The spokesman wouldn't translate exactly what that means, but I hear it as code for not pushing for the intercepts per se, but some sort of highly redacted and sanitized summary. Even when New Mexico's Democratic governor Bill Richardson himself is quoted by the Associated Press wondering if he was one of the people whose conversations Bolton became privy to.* Wouldn't the Senators need to know whose conversations Bolton was interested in, and why, and what he did with the information? And how possibly can the Congressional oversight committees not have the intelligence clearances required to review everything they need to vet the candidates they are mandated to? Especially when allegations of a pattern of manipulating and politicizing intelligence and retaliating against career professionals whose judgment conflicted with Bolton's ideology has become the central focus of the nominee investigation?

*Update: Chris Nelson tonight adds, " The potentially explosive part of this is that Richardson is known to have had several conversations with then-Secretary of State Powell about his meetings with North Koreans since the Bush Administration came to power. If intercepts of these chats are on Bolton’s list, some observers argue that this means that Bolton, in effect, was spying on his own boss."

Update II: The inside skinny here.

Reform Resistant. Matt Yglesias is absolutely right. It's hard to be persuaded that these guys are so exercised about corruption -- at the UN or anywhere else. Reform starts at home, in the GOP, with Tom DeLay. But this White House quite literally embraces the most verifiably corrupt and reform-resistant the party has to offer.

What were Bolton's meetings on the Hill with GOP Senators notably not on the Senate Foreign Relations committee about yesterday? The Washington Post's Jim VandeHei and Charles Babington report that the White House and GOP leaders are maneuvering to bring a vote on Bolton to the whole Senate floor even if he does not get an up vote in the SFRC committee:

With Bolton's confirmation jeopardized by allegations that he bullied colleagues who crossed him, Bush is planning a three-pronged strategy to win Senate approval next month of his nominee, aides said.

The White House is providing detailed rebuttals to any allegations Republican senators find troubling. Bush is also looking to make the debate over Bolton about reforming the United Nations, not Bolton's temperament, and working with Senate Republicans to produce a vote count this week showing there are enough votes to approve the nominee on the floor.

If they can't win playing by the rules, then their next move is ... to change the rules. Still a fairly astonishing loss of face with a ruling party majority in both committee and the floor, one that will be noted at the UN and around the world and erode Bolton's legitimacy should he get there, as well as the Bush administration's. And, as Steve Clemons is quite right to point out, the battle's by no means over. After all, it's worth remembering where we were just a week ago on the eve of the SFRC vote -- and how quickly dynamics shift. But people do need to be aware that the situation has moved in favor of Bolton getting to the UN by hook or by crook in the past couple days. Let's see what the Foreign Relations committee investigation turns up.

Gov. Bill Richardson is wondering if Bolton snooped on his negotiations with the North Koreans, the AP reports (towards end of article). And Bolton was on the Hill today meeting with Senators notably not on the Senate Foreign Relations committee, including Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev). This NYT piece reports that Voinovich's staff won't say whether Bolton met with Voinovich or not today. Senate Foreign Relations commitee staff are in the midst of interviewing as many as 20 people on Bolton, it reports. In a second NYT piece, Elizabeth Bumiller reports that the White House has "intensified its campaign to rescue" the Bolton nomination, and you can feel a shift today in pro-Bolton advocacy moving from the public realm to the back rooms. Note that the ultra-right wing MoveAmericaForward's anti-Voinovich ads have been halted -- presumably because they have been assured Voinovich will vote as the White House wishes. It seems in the past 24 hours the threshold needed to suay GOP SFRC Senators to vote no on Bolton has been raised.

Business as usual between Bush and the Saudis, it seems. So much for global freedom, huh? Fred Kaplan has the story.

Major terrorist attacks tripled worldwide in 2004, according to a new US government count. That is one reason why Condoleezza Rice has suppressed further publication of Patterns of Global Terrorism, as reported originally by Knight Ridder's Jonathan Landay. It's such increasingly frequent displays by Rice of suppressing the truth that makes one lose respect for her rather quickly all over again. Wednesday Update: The same tactics are being resorted to by Rumsfeld's Pentagon as Iraq violence spikes. Again. Update II: Praktike gets this right. How very disappointing. More Here from Larry Johnson at the so-good-it-should-be-classified Counterterrorism Blog. (Hat Tip, Praktike).

A brief break from our regularly scheduled programming to alert our readers that James Wolcott's send up of the blog-spy-cocktail party circuit is quite a hoot.

Presumably, Bill Richardson might have concluded his discussions on North Korea were being taped by the North Koreans, but he now has the added comfort of knowing Bolton was getting the transcript as well. Is this about understanding foreign intelligence better -- or the domestic opposition? Steve Clemons has the details.

Yesterday I wondered aloud on this site, why the pro-Bolton pushback had been so curiously silent on the substantive issues and concerns raised about Bolton, in particular his well documented manipulation and exaggeration of intelligence, and retaliation against those intelligence analysts and negotiators whose professional judgment conflicted with Bolton's ideological views. While Bolton's supporters accuse his critics of engaging in character assassination, they studiously avoid answering some of the chief substantive policy-process concerns raised about Bolton, and they themselves keep the focus squarely on Bolton's style ("blunt, but effective") (and the character of his many critics).

So, why won't Bolton's conservative supporters just stand up and say they wholeheartedly endorse Bolton's record of grossly exaggerating rogue state proliferation threats far beyond the best professional judgment of the intelligence community? The Boston Globe's Peter Canellos explains:

After the well-documented intelligence failures surrounding the Iraq War, numerous committees have called for revamping the way intelligence is gathered, analyzed, and presented to the world. But all have tiptoed around the issue of when and whether it is appropriate for political appointees to put pressure on intelligence analysts. It is a crucial question, given that many conservatives strongly believe that career intelligence analysts in many goverment agencies, especially the CIA, wait too long to identify threats that, in the terrorism era, can blow up quickly.

But conservatives are reluctant to discuss this issue -- which was once a staple of their think tanks and policy boards -- because of the Bush administration's insistence that it did not go beyond the assessment of the CIA in depicting the dangers of Iraq. By denying that his team did anything but parrot the CIA, Bush may inadvertently be strengthening the view that no official should ever put his own gloss on the agency's findings.

Bolton, however, is a favorite of those who have long believed political leaders should look beyond the CIA for analysis of threats to the United States.

Bolton's conservative supporters in and out of the administration are therefore in the absurd position of blaming the entire pre-war hype and misjudgment on Iraq's non-existent WMD stockpiles on the US intel community, hype of which they were the cheerleaders in chief, but which they would now like us to think was all a chimera, a figment of our imagination. Now, in the current Bolton nomination debate, out comes - surprise, surprise! -- a well-documented pattern of John Bolton's exaggeration and politicization of the WMD threat posed by nations like Cuba and Syria to the consternation of the US intelligence community. But wait! That's precisely what Bolton's supporters like about Bolton. He exaggerates and politicizes the threat for ideological reasons, running up time and again against the judgment and patience of the professional US intelligence community. But -- shhhh -- after the Iraq WMD intel fiasco, the Bush line is, that such hype was (c'mon, you know the chorus) all the US intelligence community's fault. Black is white, folks. Canellos' piece goes a long way to explaining this small dilemma faced by Bolton's supporters in trying to address the intel manipulation issue.

More from Kevin, Matt, Stygius, and Lindsay G.

Bolton's neoconservative supporters relentlessly portray former deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage as Bolton's -- and their -- arch enemy, the epitome of all that was equivocating in Bush's first term foreign policy towards places like Iran and North Korea. So I thought it was interesting that in this Post piece today, Armitage wades into the Bolton matter offering the gentlest defense of his old colleague. (The matter in question is whether or not Bolton delayed NATO funds to former East Bloc states until they exempted the US from the ICC). Bolton, who are your real friends? But in all seriousness, some suggest Armitage's public neutrality on Bolton is informed by the fact that he is among those being considered to succeed Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary. We'll see.

There is much Bolton news this morning. Stygius picks up this (UK) Times account of British defense secretary Jack Straw's extreme difficulty working with Bolton on Iran policy:

As a series of new allegations against Mr Bolton put his chances of confirmation further into doubt, details emerged of how a furious Mr Straw told Colin Powell, the former US Secretary of State, that Mr Bolton was trying to destroy a European initiative on Iran’s nuclear programme.

Mr Straw made the complaint after he became convinced that Mr Bolton was the source of an article on the front page of The Times last July quoting an unnamed senior US official who dismissed the initiative as “spring training” and advocated “regime change” in Tehran. The Times has never revealed its source.

A Foreign Office spokesman said last night that Mr Straw had “no recollection” of clashing with Mr Bolton. Privately, however, a senior British official recalled that Mr Straw had been very angry with Mr Bolton, whom he described as “extremely disobliging”.

Other sources at the time told of the Brits' horror that in October 2004, Bolton had basically told the European troika trying to negotiate Iran's abandonment of uranium enrichment, something along the lines of, So, when are you ready to stop this nonsense and prepare to bomb? (That prompted Straw to make this comment to the BBC at the time).

One can't help but believe that a lot of the tension between Bolton and Powell/Armitage would have been resolved had President Bush himself been less equivocating about what his policies toward North Korea and Iran really were and are -- regime change, confrontation, or negotiation to end their nuclear programs? As it was, Bush left a bureaucratic stalemate that is surfacing in the Bolton nomination debate about who really was carrying out President Bush's intended foreign policies toward those countries, Bolton or people like Jack Pritchard.

On the matter of Straw's memory, am told by British friends/colleagues that "no recollection whatsoever" is "standard code" for the Foreign Office for what we in the American press undestand as the non-denial denial. And we can all imagine what a less masterfully British equivocating denial (..."storm in a teacup"...) might sound like. It's pretty clear that Blair's government can't be seen to be weighing in on such a decision as to who their preference for Bush's UN choice would be. But it's no secret that the Blair government is terrified of what Bolton would mean for the UN and their desire for the US to work more strategic issues through that body.

Bolton "stretched" Syria threat, according to a new piece out tonight in the NYT. Tuesday Update: Today's NYT piece reminded Spencer Ackerman that he had written about Bolton's exaggeration of the Syria nuclear threat in the New Republic a couple years back:

Moving Syria into the category of potential nuclear threats has been championed for months by Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security (and über-hawk) John Bolton. Intelligence analysts, by and large, had not seen indications of either Syrian intentions of becoming a nuclear power or the capabilities to do so and had until recently been able to ward Bolton off. After Bolton told the House International Relations Committee in June that American officials are "looking at Syria's nuclear program with growing concern," an outraged CIA delivered nearly 40 pages of written objections to the Bush administration and succeeded in delaying further testimony from Bolton on the issue. Now the CIA's own report matches Bolton's analysis practically word for word. When one incredulous former intelligence official contacted a CIA analyst who worked on the assessment to find out why the Agency was blessing Bolton's position, he was told, "Well, it's just [a report] to the Congress, and it's the administration position." Another dubious ex-analyst learned from an active-duty colleague that the intelligence community has not collected any new reporting that changes the equation on Syrian nukes in at least a year. "This is really discouraging," he says. "The administration, having been burned [on Iraq], now seems to be doing the same thing [on Syria]."

Just so we don't level all the fault of exaggerated WMD threat estimates on the US "intelligence community" if this ever becomes a subject of dispute (if you could ever imagine that happening).

The law seems pretty clear: there are legitimate reasons for the relevant US authorities to seek the names of the US persons on communications between foreign and US persons intercepted by the NSA. Those reasons come down to three:

1) the US person has consented to the dissemination of his/her name by the NSA;

2) the information is publicly available, e.g. in an unclassified news report;

3) but the main reason is if there's reason to believe the US person is engaged in criminal activity such as terrorism, narcotics trafficking, is serving as a foreign intelligence agent, or is the target of a foreign country intelligence operation.

Here's US Signals Intelligence Directive 18, declassified version, section 7.2, on "dissemination" of US person identities:

7.2 ...Dissemination of U.S. PERSON Identities. SIGINT reports may include the identification of a U.S. PERSON only if one of the following conditions is met and a determination is made by the appropriate approval authority that the recipient has a need for the identity for the performance of official duties:

a. The U.S. PERSON has CONSENTED to the dissemination of communications of, or about, him or her and has executed the CONSENT form found in Annex H of this USSID, or

b. The information is PUBLICLY AVAILABLE (i.e., the information is derived from unclassified information available to the general public), or

c. The identity of the U.S. PERSON is necessary to understand FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE information or assess its importance. The following nonexclusive list contains examples of the type of information that meet meet this standard:

(1) FOREIGN POWER or AGENT OF A FOREIGN POWER. The information indicates that the U.S. PERSON is a FOREIGN POWER or an AGENT OF A FOREIGN POWER.

(2) Unauthorized Disclosure of Classified Information. The information indicates that the U.S. PERSON may be engaged in the unauthorized disclosure of classified information.

(3) International Narcotics Activity. The information indicates that the individual may be engaged in international narcotics trafficking activities. (See Annex J of this USSID for further information concerning individuals involved in international narcotics trafficking).

(4) Criminal Activity. The information is evidence that the individual may be involved in a crime that has been, is being, or is about to be committed, provided that the dissemination is for law enforcement purposes.

(5) Intelligence TARGET. The information indicates that the U.S. PERSON may be the TARGET of hostile intelligence activities of a FOREIGN POWER.

(6) Threat to Safety. The information indicates that the identity of the U.S. PERSON is pertinent to a possible threat to the safety of any person or organization, including those who are TARGETS. victims or hostages of INTERNATIONAL TERRORIST organizations. Reporting units shall identify to P05 P02 any report containing the identity of a U.S. PERSON reported under this subsection (6). Field reporting to P05 P02 should be in the form of a CRITICOMM message (DDIxx) and include the report date-time-group (DTG), product serial number and the reason for inclusion of the U.S. PERSON's identity.

(7) Senior Executive Branch Officials. The identity is that of a senior official of the Executive Branch of the U.S. Government. In this case only the official's title will be disseminated. Domestic political or personal information on such individuals will be neither disseminated nor retained.

In other words, if Osama bin Laden calls Mr. John Smith American, we can hope that the relevant authorities are going to figure out who Mr. Smith is. Same with several dozen other designated terrorist groups and rogue states one could imagine the US might have a legitimate interest in tracking US persons communicating with (and 3,000 such requests a year from the entire US national security establishment strikes me as none too high, given the groups being tracked during the "war on terror," and the fact that "US persons" includes even foreign citizens residing in the US). So, how did John Bolton use the US person identities he was provided with at his request, and for what purpose?

(Thanks to Steve Aftergood for help with this.)

Anyone else notice that the pro-Bolton pushback has been curiously tepid on the issues raised by numerous press reports? That Bolton was pulled off the Libya team at the request of the highest officials in the UK. That he retaliated against and tried to have removed intelligence analysts and US negotiators whose professional judgment didn't comport with his ideology. Etc. What you see in the pushback is three things -- 1) efforts to tear down the person levelling a complaint about his behavior or expressing concern about his behavior -- Carl Ford, Melody Townsel, Colin Powell, Amb. Tom Hubbard, Jack Pritchard, Sen. Voinovich, etc. 2) Accounts that Bolton is actually a "nice guy" (at least if you are a member of his same ideological club). And most of all, 3) accusations that Democrats are engaged in character assassination. Except -- there are so many grave issues of concern that have come up that are not about Bolton's character, but about his disturbing actions and the way he conducted himself particularly as undersecretary of state for nonproliferation that the other side doesn't seem interested to address. Why's that? In a way, they seem to want to keep the issue focused on Bolton's character, and not on the substance of the concerns about Bolton, in particular about his efforts to politicize and manipulate intelligence, his meagre record as nonproliferation czar, and the absurd lengths to which he went to try to retaliate against those at State and CIA who got in the way of his intelligence manipulations. Why not debate the issues?

This is a great travesty. So the guy uncovering the evidence of more US Abu Ghraibs is forced out of his UN job under US pressure. Is this what the Bush administration has come to, snuffing out those on our side trying to stop more US war crimes? Bassiouni was a great hero on Bosnia as many of us remember. More soon.

Greg Djerejian is increasingly troubled by the Bolton nomination. It's a long post with the pros and cons as he sees it laid out, that reflects perhaps the mind of a moderate GOP Bush supporter -- one who knows better than most the UN's need for reform. But the emerging pattern of evidence of Bolton's abusiveness to professionals - from intelligence analysts to ambassadors -- whose professional judgment doesn't comport with Bolton's ideology seems to trouble Greg, as it should.

The White House has tried to equate in the American public mind John Bolton with "UN reform." Those of us who actually care about real UN reform need to make clear, our opposition to Bolton is because Bolton would actually hinder UN reform, just as he has obstructed the US policy objective of ridding rogue states of their weapons of mass destruction programs. Indeed, in his ideological zeal, Bolton has actually sought rogue states escalating their WMD programs, rather than be part of efforts to negotiate their abandonment. Two cases in point, Libya and North Korea.

Bolton Pulled by White House from Libya Team. Bolton had to be taken out of the Libya negotiating chain of command at Tony Blair's insistence, Newsweek reports, for it to succeed. Bolton's supporters cite two meagre successes of his on the job he was supposed to be performing when he wasn't running his own ideologically-driven counterintelligence ops against US negotiators and intelligence underlings at State and CIA. That job was supposed to be nonproliferation, and the two successes cited are Libya's decision to abandon its WMD program and Bolton's pet Proliferation Security Initiative. Well, scratch Libya:

On several occasions, America's closest ally in the war on terror, Britain, was irked by what U.S. and British sources say were efforts by Bolton to undermine promising diplomatic openings. Perhaps the most dramatic instance took place early in the U.S.-British talks in 2003 to force Libya to surrender its nuclear program, NEWSWEEK has learned. The Libya deal succeeded only after British officials "at the highest level" persuaded the White House to keep Bolton off the negotiating team. A crucial issue, according to sources involved in the affair, was Muammar Kaddafi's demand that if Libya abandoned its WMD program, the U.S. in turn would drop its goal of regime change. But Bolton was unwilling to support this compromise. The White House agreed to keep Bolton "out of the loop," as one source puts it. A deal was struck only after Kaddafi was reassured that Bush would settle for "policy change"—surrendering his WMD.

Read the Newsweek piece which is testimony to the fact that the US's most significant ally, Britain, refuses to work with Bolton because of the destructive role he has played in sensitive negotiations to persuade countries like Libya and Iran to abandon their nuclear programs. We already have the principal US negotiators on North Korea coming forward to say Bolton was a dangerous disaster on North Korea -- and the proof is in the pudding. These are substantive policy failures, where the combination of Bolton's inability to work with others who don't share his ideological worldview, and gross misuse of intelligence made him a danger and a hindrance for US policy goals.

Why is the Bush administration's Bob Zoellick lowballing the death count in Darfur, the WaPo asks.

"Facing down a bully," is how one of Sen. Voinovich's home state papers, the Cincinnati Post, headlined David Ignatius' latest column:

The problem with Bolton, in fact, is that he epitomizes the politicization of intelligence that helped produce the fiasco over Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The Bush administration has so far evaded any real accounting for its role in the Iraqi WMD blunder, letting the intelligence community take the hit. The Bolton saga is a microcosm of that larger failure: It's the story of a policy-maker who tried to pressure intelligence analysts into supporting WMD views that turned out to be wrong.

On its oped page today, the Cincinnati Post also praises Voinovich for "making a good call." The Cincy Enquirer's Sunday house editorial also lauds Voinovich's "maverick move on the Senate." Voinovich is receiving kudos as well from his home town paper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

We would expect Voinovich to follow his long-standing management insights and vote against Bolton. That is, if the White House has not by then seen the futility of its misplaced Bolton campaign and withdrawn his nomination...

The United States needs a U.N. ambassador versed in suasion, not stridency. The post should be a bully pulpit for America's aspirations, not a platform for America's bully.

The Plain Dealer's Elizabeth Sullivan -- no liberal -- also has written to oppose Bolton's nomination, even before Voinovich stepped in. It's pretty much unanimous kudos all around for Voinovich in Ohio. As you might recall, Ohioans didn't take very well the last time outsiders tried to wade into their politics, and I doubt they are going to be convinced by the California carpetbaggers trying to portray Voinovich as a "traitor" now. Indeed, given that Voinovich's numbers keep going up, especially when he has opposed unpopular White House proposals such as Bush's tax cut package, it seems likely to backfire.

Newly declassified Bolton emails reveal that it was not just Christian Westermann who objected to Bolton's Cuba hysteria, but the NSA, DIA, and other US intelligence agencies. The emails make clear that Bolton's staff, in particular his acting chief of staff Frederick Fleitz on loan from CIA's WINPAC (the WINPAC which bought Curveball's Iraq bioweapons lies hook, line, and sinker), openly admitted that Bolton's office wasn't interested in the professional judgment of the intelligence community, and that it was all about politicizing the raw intel for their purposes:

"I explained to Christian that it was a political judgment as to how to interpret this data, and the I.C. should do as we asked and sanitize my language as long as sources and methods are not compromised," Mr. Fleitz wrote to Mr. Bolton, referring to the intelligence community. Mr. Fleitz said of Mr. Westermann, "He strongly disagrees with us."

The e-mail messages also make clear that Mr. Westermann and others within the State Department's bureau of intelligence and research, known as I.N.R., were not the only intelligence officials to resist Mr. Bolton's request, and that objections also came from the National Security Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency and others.

Blatant efforts to defy bureaucratic obstacles to politicize intelligence would seem to be a relevant concern to the Senators examining Bolton's fitness for the UN job. And the NSA intercepts they are seeking should put this whole matter in even starker relief.

Here's the NYT piece which got a look at some of the emails. (Thanks to reader JM.)

A Bush volunteer who threw three people out of a Denver rally is being investigated by the US Secret Service for impersonating a federal agent, the WaPo reports:

The Secret Service this week sent agents to Denver to probe allegations by three area Democrats that they were ousted from Bush's March 21 event. The three did not stage any protest at the rally and were later told by the Secret Service they were removed because their vehicle displayed an anti-Bush bumper sticker...

The Secret Service knows the man's name, one of the people familiar with the probe said, and has interviewed him. Secret Service spokesman Jim Mackin refused to comment for this article.

This is not the first time the White House has faced scrutiny for ousting critics from Bush appearances or trying to stack audiences with friendly Republicans.

In Fargo, N.D., earlier this year, a local newspaper reported more than 40 residents were put on a list of people who should not be let in the door; the White House blamed the incident on an overzealous volunteer.

Several people reported similar treatment at other Social Security rallies, as well as during the 2004 presidential campaign, when the Bush team reportedly required some people to sign forms endorsing Bush to get into the events, and removed dissenters.

The Justice Department recently moved to dismiss a case filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of two West Virginia residents, who were arrested last year after refusing to remove anti-Bush shirts at a Bush campaign event at the state capitol. The lawsuit was filed against a White House advance staffer and Secret Service Director W. Ralph Basham. The ACLU is investigating other incidents to determine whether it can show a pattern of unlawfully silencing critics. "The incidents occurred in so many locations, it's hard to believe individuals in each local area are coincidentally making the same decision," said Christopher Hansen of the ACLU Foundation in New York...

The incident and the identity of the man have become news in parts of Denver. The three Democrats have started a Web site-- denverthree.org -- to press their case, and a local columnist has been hounding the White House for the identity of the "mystery man." "It's day 31. The White House stonewalling continues," Denver Post columnist Diane Carman wrote Thursday.

I suppose justice is too much to wish for, but let's hope that this Bush volunteer/secret service imposter ends up like the woman who claimed she found a finger in her Wendy's chili -- locked up.

Steve Clemons offers a very shrewd analysis of the state of play on Bolton as it stands, and the issues that are bubbling to the surface, as the clock ticks to the May 12 Bolton nomination vote:

...TWN believes that a 9-9 tie is no longer likely in the battle over Bolton. Either Senator Chafee or some other Senator will indicate a steadfastness to oppose Bolton and vote against him in Committee and bring with that vote several others, or alternatively, the Republicans will maintain a block.

That means we will either see something that looks like a 12-6 or even 13-5 vote against Bolton, or we will see a 10-8 vote in favor of Bolton. One Senator can make the difference, but once one Senator unambiguously moves and indicates a decision to oppose, then several other Senators will quickly move as well.

The White House is the driver here -- and Lugar is feeling excruciating pressure not to have his committee collapse on this nomination, and it is nearly "abusive" of the White House to be doing this to Lugar and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee because the battle will soon not be cast as one between Democrats and the White House -- but rather between the White House and the Senate on whether the President will respect the role and function of the Senate confirmation process.

While the Cheney-Bolton Opponents and the Undecided and Wavering now have more than two weeks to investigate -- the clock is ticking. There is new material on the way.

There is a story brewing regarding John Bolton's role as a disruptive force in the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom that involves a well-respected scholar, Jeremy Gunn. Dr. Gunn resigned his positions as Director of Research and Deputy General Counsel of the Commission because of matters that "related to Mr. Bolton."

TWN does not know more, but knows that Mr. Gunn has decided to share his experiences with Mr. Bolton with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee so as to have a more complete record of John Bolton's profile.

There is also a case of another still-closely-held, serious abuse incident that occurred at the State Department. TWN has no idea who the individual is -- but just that the incident is as offensive as the one involving Christian Westermann. For reasons I don't understand, this incident is still blacked out and serious political players in D.C. are trying to bring the incident and matter into the public record on Bolton -- while still protecting otherwise innocent people who might be harmed when matters are disclosed. This sort of issue is complicated -- as there seem to be many victims of Bolton abuse in Washington, but coaxing them to come forward and speak requires time and investigation. To be fair, John Bolton should also be given opportunity to respond.

TWN also believes that the most serious challenges regarding John Bolton are not his pattern of "serial abuse" but rather his pattern of delinquency and recklessness regarding national security objectives and delicate diplomatic initiatives. TWN is also alarmed at the seeming indifference that Senators Lugar and others have attached to the fact that John Bolton seems to have lied to the Committee on a broad number of questions -- and seems to have lied in a robust, emphatic manner...

There is a lot going on, and the momentum is clearly on the side of the Cheney-Bolton Opponents. But that doesn't mean for a moment that the other side can't rebound.

The National Security Agency intercepts will be a fundamental factor in what lies ahead. There is nothing more important than this evidence coming before the Senators.

I will have a bit more to report on that last issue soon.

Meantime, a reader has sent me a link to the Move America Forward Anti-Voinovich ad running in Ohio. The ads call Voinovich a traitor. But even Ohio newspapers that endorsed Bush are standing by Voinovich and opposing Bolton's nomination -- and the lack of judgment shown by the Bush administration in continuing to pursue it.

White House worried on Bolton, the Washington Post reports:

The fear, Bolton's backers said privately, is twofold. The new date will give opponents nearly three weeks to fan public reaction against him and to raise new questions about his conservative policy views and alleged bullying management style.

In addition, reports this week that former secretary of state Colin L. Powell told Republican senators his reservations about his former State Department subordinate's suitability for the post could alter the political dynamics of the Bolton battle. What had been a largely partisan quarrel could turn into a broader debate about whether Bolton's detractors have a reasonable case, a Bush administration official said.

Meantime, the WaPo reports what I heard today too. That the Republican staff on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee refused to let the Democratic staff sit in on an interview Friday morning with Amb. Thomas Hubbard:

In a sign of partisan tensions on the committee, Republican staff members yesterday interviewed Thomas Hubbard, a former U.S. ambassador to South Korea, without Democratic staff members present. Hubbard has said he clashed angrily with Bolton.

A senior Democratic committee aide said the interview was unfortunate, because Democrats thought they had an agreement between committee Chairman Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.) and Vice Chairman Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) for proceeding with interviews that would allow both sides to be present, along with a court reporter.

"When we asked to participate, we were refused," the aide said.

No great tragedy, Hubbard is clearly quite willing to speak with Democratic staff at a time of their convenience. But the SFRC majority staff do seem to be feeling a bit sore, don't they? Perhaps because they failed to help out their boss the other day with that Voinovich move. Anyhow.

Meantime, the LA Times reports another allegation of Bolton retaliation against an underling over policy differences, received by Sen. Barbara Boxer:

In a letter to Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), Lynne D. Finney said Bolton had bullied her and tried to have her fired when they clashed over U.S. policy on the distribution of infant formula in developing countries — an issue that was then highly visible and politically charged.

Finney said she was working as a USAID attorney and had developed relationships with foreign officials at the United Nations. She said that in late 1982 or early 1983, Bolton called her into his office and told her to use her influence to persuade the United Nations to ease a policy that restricted the marketing and promotion of infant formula in developing countries.

Finney objected, saying that she could not, in good conscience, push for such changes, because she believed that the improper use of formula in poor countries was jeopardizing the health of babies.

"He shouted that Nestle was an important company and that he was giving me a direct order from President Reagan," she wrote in the letter. "He yelled that if I didn't obey him he would fire me."

When she persisted, Finney said, "he yelled that I was fired."

Later Bolton learned that under a federal rule, he could not fire an employee for refusing an order that violated his or her conscience, she said.

Furious, he moved her desk from the General Counsel's office on the top floor of the State Department building in Washington "to a shabby windowless office in the basement, in order to force me to leave," she wrote.

The LA Times also reports that Chafee's concerns about Bolton "weren't allayed" by his several recent conversations with Sec. Powell and Amb. Hubbard. But maybe this love note will change his mind:

Meanwhile, Bolton's former colleagues at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington released a letter to Sen. Richard G. Lugar...disputing charges that he was a bully.

Those allegations were "radically at odds with our experiences," the letter said. It said Bolton was "unfailingly courteous and respectful to us."

I don't doubt a word of it. If they're lucky, they can get him back again soon.

The WSJ reports that the US believes North Korea could be preparing a nuclear test. It has asked China to pressure North Korea to prevent it.

Murkowski wavering? A palace coup? And with Bolton's chief patron Dick Cheney urging members of the Republican National Lawyers Association to lobby for Bolton, one thing the Republican lawyers might want to explore is why partner Bolton was asked not to return to law firm Covington & Burling.

Bolton vote hearing now scheduled for May 12. According to majority staff from the Senate Foreign Relations committee, the final Bolton hearing and vote is now scheduled for Thursday May 12, 10 am. Bolton won't appear, according to the AP. Senators are now scheduled to vote at 3pm that day.

Did John Bolton commit perjury in his testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations committee? Amb. Thomas Hubbard is coming forward to say Bolton "grossly exaggerated" the truth in regards to a speech Bolton claimed to the Senators Hubbard approved. On the contrary, Hubbard made clear to Bolton the North Korea speech was unhelpful. More allegations of Bolton perjury are being examined by the Senate Foreign Relations committee regarding Bolton's claims he did not try to get Westermann and a CIA analyst removed from their jobs. As many as five witnesses interviewed by the Senate committee contradict that. Bolton also claimed he just dropped by the CIA on his way home from work to discuss his concerns over the CIA Latin America analyst. Sen. Biden says the day logs indicate Bolton made a special morning trip to the CIA. Senators are interviewing former deputy CIA director John McLaughlin and two other officials to get clarification on the matter.

My question: why would Bolton lie over something so easy to check? Why would he give false or misleading testimony about these episodes where there are so many witnesses who directly contradict his testimony? Did he think they'd keep their mouths shut? Or is he himself a bit shaky with the truth? Indeed, there may be a common theme between's Bolton outrage at and attempts to retaliate against intelligence analysts whose analysis he disagrees with, to his alleged perjury before the Senate committee. Does Bolton have a serious problem recognizing the truth? Is he so used to manipulating and cherry picking the facts -- and damn the ambassadors and analysts who disagree with him -- to suit his world view that he cannot even truthfully testify before the Senate about the most basic facts? And in all seriousness, beyond Bolton's troubling mistreatment of subordinates, his gross misuse of intelligence, and his ideological agenda pushing, is someone who has such an evidently shaky hold on the truth a reliable relay between Turtle Bay and the White House?

Joe Conason has a piece on the inter-ruling party tensions on display in the Republican defections from Bolton:

What must be clear to anyone observing this process is that Democrats alone could scarcely have stalled Bolton, let alone inflicted what may be fatal damage to his nomination.

Indeed, despite unanimous Democratic misgivings about Bolton's rigid ideology and undistinguished record, he would be on his way to Turtle Bay by now -- except for the serious doubt and strong dissent expressed by Republican legislators and diplomats about his conduct, competence, honesty and temperament...

If Bolton's prospects have been dimmed by "politics," however, the troubles appear to reflect a growing division within the president's own party...

From the beginning, the president's advisors have pretended not to see or hear dissident Republicans. That insulting arrogance, which mirrors Bolton's own behavior, may well be the ultimate mistake in this misbegotten episode.

More here.

Colin Powell. George Voinovich. Chuck Hagel. Lincoln Chafee. Amb. Thomas Hubbard. Richard Lugar. And others. Much to the White House's surprise, significant unease with the Bolton nomination has become a beachhead for GOP moderates. How much being rammed down their throats by this White House is too much?

Colin Powell is returning calls on Bolton to Republican Senators on the Foreign Relations committee (via Stygius). More from the WaPo.

The WSJ takes a swipe at...Senator Lugar. For not doing a better job of covering up his own personal distate for Bolton:

We should add that Mr. Bolton would nonetheless be sailing toward confirmation if Republicans on the Foreign Relations Committee were doing their job. Senators Dodd and Biden are running rings around Chairman Dick Lugar, who should know on the day of a vote whether he has enough support to prevail. His defense of Mr. Bolton has been so weak that we almost wonder if he doesn't privately wish for the nominee's defeat.

Mr. Lugar's tepid opening statement on the nominee set the stage for the embarrassments that have followed, chief among them losing control of his own committee. Just as embarrassing has been Nebraska's Charles Hagel, whose waffling on the nomination should be understood as an attempt to curry favor with the liberal media and strike a blow for the permanent State Department bureaucracy that he has long allied himself with.

You know what this is really all about? Far more than a partisan fight between Republicans and Democrats as the White House would have us believe, this is really all about a fight within the Republican party about whether all Republicans have to robotically be in lockstep with the White House on every issue, every nomination, or not. Are they allowed a smidgen of independence, ever? Now the WSJ is serving happily as the "fashion police" for the White House on how forcefully Republican Senators need to speak about a nominee Sen. Lugar has every substantive reason and right to consider unfit for that job. And for that matter, that he did almost all in his power to push through committee. He just didn't look happy enough about it for the White House. Is this a trial balloon, a threat, that Lugar could lose his committee chair, a la Arlen Specter, as Chris Nelson suggested earlier this week, if he doesn't manage somehow to push Bolton through? How truly incredibly stifling.

"Bolton was running his own counterintelligence operation." So who is withholding the NSA intercepts from the SFRC committee to date? State or NSA or some other entity? More on this soon. Meantime, someone close to the investigation suggested that the 10 NSA intercepts Bolton demanded he be given with the identity of the redacted US persons revealed is an enormously interesting subject. "Bolton was running his own counterintelligence operation, was using the intelligence to figure out how he can get back at people." That would be against US officials. In the tradition of J. Edgar Hoover. I doubt this is behavior even Republican Senators are going to consider legitimate or tolerable, when they learn the details. Is this not an illegitimate, illegal and highly improper use of US signals intelligence, for a US official to spy on other US officials he doesn't trust? Talk about going behind someone's back! And was Jack Pritchard the only subject of Bolton's counterintelligence operations, or was Bolton's boss, Richard Armitage himself, and the staff who worked for him, also targets?

Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist subpoenaed, by Senate Indian Affairs committee (via Atrios). Details here.

A fourth case of Bolton berating an intelligence analyst, whose skepticism about a report on Chinese WMD outraged Bolton. From Newsweek:

Congressional sources say the Democrats are already examining at least one new case in which Bolton became angry after a State Department analyst raised questions about an alarming CIA report about Chinese WMD. The report had so interested Bolton's aides that they quickly sent a copy of it to Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. Before the report reached Armitage, however, sources tell NEWSWEEK, an intelligence analyst attached a note to both Armitage and the CIA questioning its accuracy.

Capitol Hill investigators now are trying to verify allegations that either Bolton or people in his office inappropriately berated the analyst for his action.

Read the rest of the piece too, in which former US ambassador to South Korea Thomas Hubbard describes Bolton as an unmoored, unstable presence on Korean peninsula issues. More from CBS's Gloria Borger. (Thx to DB).

Will the Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee end up deciding to recommend to the White House that the Bolton nomination be withdrawn? It's being hinted at in several pieces tonight that show Chafee again wavering. The SFRC has also asked former CIA deputy director John McLaughlin to weigh in on whether, contrary to his testimony last week, Bolton sought to have a CIA Latin America analyst fired. Separately, the AP reports, Senator Jay Rockefeller is seeking information on the 10 NSA intercepts that Bolton requested along with the identity of the US persons redacted in the intercepts. This is key.

Are Bush's hands tied on Bolton, from the right? So suggests Larry Sabato in the latest from the NYT/IHT:

"The nomination is very troubled, very troubled," said Larry Sabato, a political science professor at the University of Virginia. But he said he thought President Bush was unlikely to withdraw it, lest he face the wrath of Mr. Bolton's conservative supporters. "They would be pummeled from the right," he said.

Further down, White House spokesman Scott McClellan offers that the White House "was 'in touch' with Mr. Voinovich to help him resolve any doubts." Let's just hope Sen. Voinovich is checking under the body of his car.

And this piece raises the specter again of whether Mr. Bolton committed perjury in his testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations committee last week, in which he asserted that he never attempted to have Christian Westermann or other underling removed from their jobs. Four other witnesses interviewed by the Committee directly contradict that:

Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, questioned Mr. Bolton's veracity on Tuesday. Mr. Bolton had testified that he did not seek the dismissal of Christian Westermann, a low-level State Department intelligence official with whom he had clashed over weapons of mass destruction. But Mr. Kerry said that at least four witnesses had told the committee that Mr. Bolton did seek the man's removal.

Meantime, Chris Nelson reports tonight that

...Word today is that Ranking Democrat Biden, and chairman Lugar have agreed there will be a bipartisan staff investigation, starting tomorrow (Thursday) to look more deeply into a host of issues already raised, and to pursue many new issues raised, but not investigated...all to be consolidated into a “bill of particulars”.

-- our understanding is that the staff investigation will be bipartisan so long as there is mutual agreement on the questions. If one or the other side decides not to investigate a certain issue, however, the side urging that question will be free to do so on its own. What might the initial list of issues look like?

** testimony from the State Department legal counsel on which Taft staffer was subjected to pressure aimed at firing him?

** a deeper look into Sen. Hagel’s staffer, Rexon Ryu, whose firing was allegedly pursued with some vigor by Bolton;

** a legal deposition from the former AID staffer whose lurid tale of physical abuse at Bolton’s hands, back in 1994, has been in the press, but not investigated by the Committee;

** a deeper look into allegations Bolton sought NSA intercepts for information to use against colleagues;

** clarification of State’s claim that there were 400 requests for names from the NSA while Bolton was Undersecretary, but that only 10 came from Bolton, with a goal of determining if most of the requests were from intelligence staff, and therefore not potentially controversial, or exculpatory of Bolton...also why State is currently refusing to clarify this question;

** information on whom/why/if true Bolton tried to have a staff member of the International Religious Freedom Commission fired (an allegation similar to many already raised during the hearings);

** clarification from Secretary Rice that her pronouncement against “leaks” was not intended, and will not be interpreted by State personnel, as an “order” not to testify, or otherwise fail to cooperate with the Senate in this investigation...the subject of a letter to Rice today from Biden;

** “open” testimony from past or present State Department officials, including former Ambassador to S. Korea Tom Hubbard, who has been quoted in the press as denying Bolton’s claim that he “cleared” a controversial Bolton speech on N. Korea policy.

5. Sources indicate that the above is just a partial list from the projected “bill of particulars” to be negotiated at Thursday’s staff meeting. If the nomination is not withdrawn, the earliest another Committee vote could occur would be the week of May 9, at the conclusion of a recess. As to today’s perhaps paranoid rumor that the White House might decide to give Bolton a “recess appointment”, observers think this highly unlikely (however ill-advised) given the Cabinet status accorded the UN job...

Here is one Bolton supporter's advice to the president -- a recess appointment. Maybe what Nelson is hearing isn't so paranoid. Wouldn't the dictatorships at the UN love that - when a US Republican president doesn't have the judgment to nominate a candidate who can get confirmed by a Republican-majority Senate, just send him without confirmation. With that advice, what a shining example in failure of democracy the Bush team can send to a UN it complains is not sufficiently democratic. I assume this is why there are so few neoconservatives who run for elective office.

Have to run out tonight but more later.

Two pieces from the LA Times on l'affaire Bolton: Richard Simon mines Sen. George Voinovich's career to understand his surprise withdrawal of support for Bolton yesterday:

But Democrats, in considering who among the moderate Republicans might be persuaded to support their case against Bolton, knew Voinovich was a possibility, a Democratic staffer said.

That's because the Ohio lawmaker also sits on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, where "he has been a stickler on management issues and the way subordinates are treated," the staffer said. "He gets really incensed at jerks."

Voinovich's questioning of Bolton's nomination is certain to make him a target of heavy lobbying by the White House and fellow Republicans.

But he is in a particularly strong position to be independent: Unlike Chafee, another moderate with qualms about the nomination, Voinovich, 68, does not need the party's support for a reelection campaign in 2006. He was reelected to a second term in 2004 with 64% of the vote.

In other words, Voinovich can afford to tell Cheney when he calls, you know what. And the White House mafia failed to intimidate Voinovich a couple years ago, Simon reports:

When Voinovich was slow to back Bush's tax cuts, he was the target of a television ads in his home state that pictured him next to the French flag at a time when France was opposing the U.S. war in Iraq.

Lovely. Voinovich hates jerks. And he's golden in his home state. Honestly, it's so refreshing, when even Bolton's defenders' most ringing endorsement of the man is that his mistreatment of underlings shouldn't be an issue because others before him have behaved appallingly too.

Sonni Efron's piece on the Bolton hearings has new information on several of the cases of Bolton's alleged mistreatment of people, including a witness who corroborates the chaos in Moscow.

And wow, Covington and Burling did not invite former partner Bolton to return after he served in Bush I, because "of abusive treatment of subordinates there"? Is this a man who is in Republican administrations because he can't hold a job in the private sector because he's so abusive his firms would get sued? Have there been lawsuits settled against him? You and I know the type -- serial abusers, and Bolton is one, serial abuse, and there will be more people coming out of the woodwork.

And then there is the case of the former DOJ attorney Bolton tried to get dismissed for taking maternity leave. Joan Bernott, a Republican and Federalist Society member, is now a muckety muck at the Department of Commerce and perhaps the Senators should subpoena her to testify. Bolton's invasion of her privacy and sheer viciousness in that case is so appalling, it verges on the truly perverse. Senators Boxer and Biden need to follow up here with a conversation with Bernott.

Which brings me to the 10 times Bolton requested the identity of the US persons in classified NSA intercepts he had obtained, about which we will surely learn more. John Bolton misuses intelligence the way communists use it in police states -- against his internal enemies. It's classic police state tactics. But intelligence should be used in democracies to advance national security, not to gather ammunition on internal perceived bureaucratic enemies. Of course, Bolton just thinks of it as "opposition research" against the internal opposition. But using the vast reach of US intelligence powers to achieve opposition research crosses the line. Bolton behaves like a scheming apparatchik in a police state. Senators Biden and Lugar must press the State Department to release to the Senate Foreign Relation Committee the NSA intercepts that Bolton demanded he not only be provided with, but get the identities of the US persons redacted as a matter of US law. When Americans understand more about the lengths Bolton went to use US government intelligence to gather information on his colleagues, they will be appalled. I don't think it will sit well with the Senators either.

US official misuse of intelligence on American citizens is not something that sits well with Americans. You think a lot of people watched the hearing yesterday? The State Department switchboards were going nuts yesterday, Lugar mentioned during the hearing. Americans are paying attention, and they don't like what they're learning about Bolton or the Bush administration for making such a careless nomination. Why doesn't the Bush administration send someone to the UN who acts like a member of a liberal democracy, and not a police state apparatchik? Here are some more inspired choices that should sit well with Republicans and Democrats, those who care about UN reform and humanitarian causes.

What exactly did Condoleezza Rice suggest to her senior staff about not forwarding information that could be damaging to Bolton from State? Are you listening, Senators Lugar and Biden? Judd Legum suggests some clarification is in order.

Quote of the Day:

"This is a disgrace, the idea that temperament is suddenly important. There are legions who have gone before John, as well as members of Congress, who have behaved appallingly."

Danielle Pletka, Vice President of AEI, on Bolton's nomination setback, from the New York Sun.

So, who should be the Bush administration's nominee to be a pro-reform US ambassador to the UN? Why not former Reagan-era US ambassador to Hungary and vice president of the board of Freedom House and supreme expert on UN reform and democratization Mark Palmer? A Republican widely respected by both Republicans and Democrats for his incredible human rights advocacy with stellar credentials on democratization issues, Palmer would sail through confirmation hearings and would do miracles at the UN. Palmer was advocating democratization in the Middle East and around the globe before it was cool, and the man has a vision, not just a plan to kick the dog and break the crockery as Bolton. Palmer is not fuzzy eyed about the UN by any stretch of the imagination. And the people who worked for him actually respect him and speak highly of him, again unlike Bolton. As do Palmer's former bosses, like George Shultz.

Another suggestion? Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va) who has done more to try to mobilize Congressional and presidential action on the genocide in Darfur, to try to get Liberia's Charles Taylor extradited from Nigeria to face justice, on African life and death and human rights issues in general than most any other serving Congressman I've seen.

Wild card choice? Why not Bill or Melinda Gates?

Update -- Reader Suggestions: Reader Caitlyn Antrim, who directs the Center for Leadership in Global Diplomacy, suggests George H.W. Bush. "My wild card choice is former UN Ambassador George H.W. Bush. As a former UN rep and father of the President, he be the definitive representative. His reputation for honesty is better than that of his son. And unlike any other former president, there should not be concern that he will undercut the sitting president." And Bill Clinton would be just down the hall.

Wow. In a spectacular triumph for the Senate Democrats led by Barbara Boxer, Chris Dodd and Joseph Biden, and those who have been working so hard to bring to light John Bolton's unfitness for the UN Ambassadorship (Steve Clemons, Citizens for Global Solutions, etc.), and with the courage of Sen. Voinovich (R-Oh), the Senate Foreign Relations committee has delayed for at least two weeks a vote on Bolton's nomination. See below and definitely Steve Clemons' site for details. It may not be over. But indeed it is a real short term victory for the forces of reason. It also gives all of us time to get more details about Bolton's history of outrageously mistreating subordinates, outrageous misuse of intelligence, including to attack his bureaucratic opponents, and ideological agenda pushing to light. And this is a defeat, if only a temporary one, for the most dangerously extreme ideological forces in the Bush administration, and they truly deserved it.

Update: Voinovich deserves special support and is going to take special heat from the GOP machine that brought us Misters DeLay and Abramoff. Let him know you appreciate his courage. And the other Senators on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee should also be hearing from you, particularly the Republicans. Voinovich's courageous action today has given potential cover to one or more of his colleagues to vote their conscience.

Here's the NYT's take on the vote delay the minority achieved today: "But it seemed obvious today that even with 55 Republican votes in the Senate, the nomination is shaky."

Update II -- Does the White House Have Another Bernie Kerik on its Hands?: A reader responds to today's miraculous events:

It's great news, obviously. If I were John Bolton, I would see today's result as an unmitigated disaster -- nothing good comes out of a delay over his vote. And, even if the Committee somehow decided to vote out his nomination to the full Senate in early May, the entire chamber may well be in the throes of a complete shutdown over the filibuster issue, which would mean that John Bolton will not be reporting to Turtle Bay any time soon.

Who knows what compelled Voinovich to take such a dramatic stand at the last minute, especially when he didn't bother to show up for either of the hearings? Miracles do happen, even in the United States Senate.

The drip-drip of allegations will now intensify against Bolton -- folks at the White House may be wondering if they have another Bernie Kerik on their hands. It would not completely surprise me to see the nomination pulled in the next few days -- Bolton may well decide that he wants/needs to escape with at least a shred of dignity. Again, Bolton is in an unprecedented position -- he is now in a vulnerable and exposed position. The piling on is going to grow even more intense, as everyone he has pissed off/alienated over his career are coming out with knives.

Here's the deal. The truth is not on John Bolton's side. And time gives us an opportunity to get more of the facts out there.

Update III: Slate's Fred Kaplan was watching the stunning nomination hearing on C-Span and has great highlights plus analysis, already!:

The new allegations...are terrible in two senses. First, they make Bolton look like a thin-skinned creep who tolerates no disagreement from anyone around him. This is not an ideal quality for a diplomat...

The second factor is the key. An extended investigation can only make things worse. Every time there's been a delay, more and more bad stuff has come out about this guy; more and more officials, present and former, have mustered the courage to come forth and tell more. Beyond that, Bolton faces possible charges of perjury...

President Bush must choose between his two most trusted advisers, Cheney and Rice...

Update IV: John at Crooks and Liars has posted video excerpts of the hearing, including the surprise turning point.

Update V: Chris Nelson explains some of what's at stake in today's developments, that made it so dramatic:

...As we took the liberty of editorializing last night, the Bolton fight is not “merely” about the facts, at least not any more. It’s now mainly about power, specifically the power to force votes on ALL the president’s nominations, regardless of concerns.

That’s what this so-called “nuclear option” fight with Majority Leader Bill Frist is all about ... Frist wants to change the rules to make judicial nominations a simple majority vote, instead of the required super majority of 60. Lose on Bolton, which would take Republican “defections”, and the whole power play on conservative activist judges is at risk of unraveling. Many Republicans, not just centrist/liberals...have deep personal and political reservations about the White House decision to intervene in that tragic Florida right to die case. The President has since tried to pull back from the resulting, unprecedented Republican Leadership attack on an independent, secular-based judiciary. Quite rightly, this has politicians in both parties very uneasy, since the ugly threats are not new, but a cumulative process. In times where political intimidation is the coin of the realm, finding the courage to object can assume enormous consequence. Chuck Hagel and Bill Frist both want the Republican nomination to succeed George Bush in 2008...

Nelson gets everything right except the role Hagel played today, which wasn't especially heroic. Essentially, he spoke in favor of voting for Bolton in SFRC today, but didn't commit to voting for him in the full Senate. Then Voinovich said he'd missed so much the past week and the concerns expressed about Bolton were so intense he needed more time. Then Hagel came out in favor of a time limit on Dodd's proposal for a delay.

Update VI: As a friend and colleague just suggested, is Voinovich bulletproof to Republicans because he "is" Ohio for the GOP? Might the GOP's 2008 presidential candidate want to win Ohio? Vice presidential candidate Voinovich anyone?

Here's the Post's Dafna Linzer and Charles Babington, in a piece that is particularly interesting on the role of Voinovich. The AP has more on Voinovich who has become more popular in Ohio for opposing Bush's tax cut package.

Update VII: Democracy Arsenal's Suzanne Nossel gets this right -- the evidence debated by Senate Foreign Relations Committee members goes directly to Bolton's unfitness for the job:

Virtually everything ... negative I have heard about Bolton goes directly to his fitness for the job...All the other arguments against Bolton, including my 10 Reasons Bolton Should Not Be Confirmed, Bolton's indifference to genocide, his lack of respect for independent intelligence and dissenting views, his insubordination, his alleged abusiveness toward junior staffers, and his alleged lack of decorum and willingness to smear others (what am I missing . . .) all go directly to his ability to effectively represent the U.S. at the UN. The job of Ambassador is not one of ideologue, it is one of diplomat, policy shaper and manager...All the charges are germane to one or more of these key roles.

If you don't think this is about substance, about precisely why Bolton would not be an effective force for reform at the UN, you haven't been paying attention.

Bolton hearing in progress; after a total circus in which Frist took the whole Senate into recess to try to avoid Senate Democrats opting for a procedure to delay the vote, the SFRC went into a meeting on Bolton starting at 3:15pm. Biden requested that the SFRC go into closed session, Lugar overruled him. Now Dodd is speaking. Democrats say they have evidence of seven separate individuals who report being intimidated by Bolton. "It's a circus," says Dave Meyer who is covering the event for Tapped. Check it out on C-Span3. Stay tuned. Update: I do believe Biden's raised his voice, he's totally grandstanding, good for him. Norm Coleman: "This is not a criminal prosecution." Good point. Just debating Bolton's career, it sounds like one! Lugar: "Many people have testified about Bolton, his management style. This committee must vote and then the Senate must vote."

Update II: Lugar's calling for a vote. It's 4:35pm....Sarbannes is asking why they have to vote now if they have 'til 5pm....We could use the time for debate. The Chairman has moved to short circuit this entire process.

Lugar: The Chair gave a lot. The give is over.

Boxer: I pushed for the delay this morning.....It seemed extraordinary you wouldn't give us another week...We're trying to do our job because we feel so strongly about this.

Hagel: This is not over, regardless of the vote. If we take a vote today, it's not over, it goes to the Senate floor, where I expect they'll be very spirited exchanges and there should be. The charges that have been brought to this committee I think Sen. Dodd and Biden made are very important....

I am going to vote against the Dodd motion, I will vote for moving Bolton out (of the SFRC committee). That doesn't mean I will support his nomination on the floor. I think these charges are serious enought that they demand, they cry out for further examination. I think we should move this out today.

Update !!!: Surprise Republican voice against voting today. God bless Sen. Voinovich, (R-Oh) (4:35pm):

Voinovich: I heard enough today that I don't feel comfortable today voting for Mr. Bolton. ...I don't feel comfortable voting today on Mr. John Bolton. Maybe it would be in the best interest of this committee to take a little time. I can feel the passion (from the other side of the aisle).

(Wow, has it been delayed? Lugar sounds surprised.)

Biden: Let's just take the time to check out these accusations (of intimidation)...

Chafee: Mr. Chair, in view of Mr. Voinovich's comments, do you have any hesitation about going forward?

Lugar: No. (He's still surprised by Voinovich!). Trail of a similar pattern of delay, difficulty of scheduling meetings, stop the votes. At some point, members have to say aye or ney.

Barack Obama: I have to say that the allegatoins that have just come up are new to me. And have not been fully vetted. I don't even know if they are true or not. My sense is that they might make a difference in terms of how some people vote. I feel like Sen. Voinovich on this. Look, there are some of us who would ideologically support or oppose Mr. Bolton either way. But I think there are some people on the committee who are struggling with (issues about Mr. Bolton's temperament). We need to thoroughly vet these issues....

(IF you called Voinovich, give yourself a pat on the back. He may have just delayed the vote today!)

Biden: Biden is bringing up the NSA intercepts (!!) Bolton requested. On ten occasions Bolton sought the names of the American in NSA intercepts. Can anyone testify if that is an unusual practice? To seek the name of an American who is in on the intercept. Why? The detractors to try to identify American personnel who disagreed with his analysis. Supporters say, it's a standard practice. Does anyone here know if that's a standard practice. I tried to find out. I was on the phone last night til 1030pm.

Lugar, who was just handed a note: Apparently this hearing is being watched by a large number of people. The State Department sends along word that the NSA has received 400 requests coming from the State Department for NSA intercepts. Bolton's were 10 of those.

Biden: but did they ask for the identity of the US person?

Hagel: I suggest we might want to amend Sen. Dodd's amendment (to delay the vote)? The responsible thing is to put a time frame on the delay of the vote.

Allen: What happens if we get a tie vote? In the event of a tie vote would sink this nomination, strategically thinking, we need to plan....

Biden: Mr. Chair, can you ask State Department to be cooperative? It wasn't until your letter on Thursday that even got the State Department to even respond to requests we had in for two weeks.

Lugar: Let me ask the ranking member whether he would agree on good faith on dates certain for completion of various phases.

Biden: The answer is yes. There is one caveat. Let's assume there's some outrageous charge that appears credible....Yes, certainty of dates....I am prepared to agree on that right now. I am prepared to say that any day you suggest now in the open after we come back from that recess in two weeks-- whatever that day is, is fine with me, and I commit to it.

(Vote appears to have been delayed at least two weeks! Cheney will be irritated. ).

Biden: It's unreasonable we haven't seen those 10 intercepts.

Lugar: Chair set date after we return from April recess for a final business meeting that I will work with the ranking member to have examination of witnesses that might be material and offer additional information to this committee; we will encourage State and CIA to be cooperative. And then in that framework we will return at that date certain.

Bolton might be asked to come back for additional testimony.

VOTE DELAYED two weeks. GREAT.

Frist shuts down the Senate...to avoid Bolton vote delay?! Via Kevin Drum. Could the Bush administration be that worried? Vote now suspended 'til 4:30pm, Clemons reports. Ee gads, stay tuned, and send me updates, I have to run to a lunch event.

What a tragedy. My friends who knew her are heartbroken beyond what I've ever seen from them. RIP, Marla Ruzicka.

Bolton Update: Steve Clemons is quite right to urge SFRC Senators to take the time to examine still forthcoming evidence that Bolton requested NSA intercepts to spy not on the North Koreans but on his perceived bureaucratic enemies. Steve writes:

...Word is that John Bolton may have been snooping into the NSA intercepts that recorded conversations and interactions of other U.S. officials so as to spy on them, to disrupt their diplomatic efforts, and to learn what was being said, specifically, about him by his perceived enemies and rival in the State Department.

This is an outrageous, unacceptable abuse of power and privileged access to classified information.

One Senator -- any U.S. Senator -- can go down to the floor of the U.S. Senate today at 2 p.m. and say the following:

Mr./Madame Chairman:

As the U.S. Senate has been in session for more than two hours, I hereby object to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee meeting. . .until adequate and complete answers posed by esteemed Members of this Senate to the administration are responded to, in full, by the administration.

Until that occurs, I object to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee holding further meetings.

That would shut the committee down. It would create another delay, and every single day that there has been more time, another major story has emerged on John Bolton.

Call your Senators. This is important.

All par for the course in Bolton-world, but there it is.

Taking out ten floors at the UN wouldn't be enough for these guys, including the White House's former torture go-to attorney John Yoo. It seems UC Berkeley Law School could stand to lose a few floors while they're at it.

Bolton doesn't get results in North Korea. Stygius forwards this alarming report from Arms Control Wonk:

Since this is supposed to be part of Bolton's job -- North Korea has shut down its Yongbyong reactor in order to recover its plutonium. This represents an utter failure of the administration's non-policy towards NK, after Bolton worked to scuttle the Agreed Framework.

A stunning record of failure by Bolton and the Bush administration on North Korea. Truly stunning.

Powell Aide: Bolton Would be an "Abysmal Ambassador." Journalist Eric Umansky sends along this gem from tomorrow's NYT:

On Monday, one of former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's top aides spoke out in opposition to Mr. Bolton.

"Under Secretary Bolton was never the formidable power that people are insinuating he was in terms of foreign policy, or blocking the policies that Secretary Powell wished to pursue," Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Mr. Powell's chief of staff, said in a telephone interview.

"But do I think John Bolton would make a good ambassador to the United Nations? Absolutely not," Mr. Wilkerson said. "He is incapable of listening to people and taking into account their views. He would be an abysmal ambassador."

Neither Mr. Powell nor Richard L. Armitage, who served as deputy secretary of state under Mr. Powell, have commented publicly about Mr. Bolton's nomination. Their offices have not replied to repeated inquiries. Mr. Powell was not among a group of five Republican former secretaries of state who sent the committee a letter that endorsed Mr. Bolton's nomination.

Here's tomorrow's Post's piece, which details what I heard earlier from committee staff. Lugar rejected a request from Sen. Dodd to delay the vote further to examine new evidence of Bolton suppressing Iran intelligence from Powell and Rice, and barring a surprise, the vote is likely to fall along party lines, 10 to 8, for the nomination to proceed to the full Senate.

One other point, that will not endear me to some of the Dem party line voters out there. But Hagel is someone I could have potentially supported as a presidential candidate, as I was inclined to support McCain back in 2000. But this kowtowing to the party line when it counts, against the foreign policy principles he pretends to stand for, will cost him centrists like me. He's just another fake Republican-with-an-independent-streak, and I hope those of us angered by this vote tomorrow will remember their cowardice when Chafee goes up for reelection next year and Hagel strikes out for president in 2008.

The Bolton vote's going ahead tomorrow at 2:15pm. Dodd requested more time to examine new information coming to light and Lugar rejected it. Could Bush have someone in New York who will be less credible not only to the world, but to Americans, on rogue state proliferation, after all that's been uncovered about him? In the end, the Bush administration will lose face over this appointment going ahead, on issues where the US is seeking multilateral cooperation, Iran and North Korea. Sadly, so will this country.

Chris Nelson on the Bolton battle:

If the fight over John Bolton’s UN nomination were just about John Bolton, he’d be history already. But this isn’t about Bolton, it’s about the exercise of power. Same thing with House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. If this was even 5 years ago, he’d be toast. We are at the point now where the Republican Leadership refuses to allow the possibility of a loss on anything, regardless of the merits. This renders “debate” meaningless, since nothing said actually matters, so truth is irrelevant. “Science” depends on faith; everything is a test of power. Oppose something the President wants, and you aren’t just wrong, you are betraying the Party. The underlying message is that you are also offending a very particular definition of God.

The sad, sorry Bolton/DeLay spectacles are about total war, the kill-the-prisoners exercise of power that national US politics has become since the 2000 election. If it were merely about power, it wouldn’t be so terrifying. Washington is used to that...it’s what we exist for. But the fear, the self-loathing, the pathetic, cowardly, sniveling, excuse-making drivel from such “leaders” as Lugar, Hagel, Chafee, the entire House Republican Leadership under DeLay...and the ever-so-very carefully expressed angst of the Democrats...is about something far more dangerous to the Republic than mere political power. What we are seeing is a fight for the political soul of the nation. We’ve had these before, in the existential sense...in my political lifetime, the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam war movement, the women’s rights versus, to a certain extent, the right to life movement. But this time it’s totally and completely a fight about God...specifically, whether God is going to rule in the United States.

The Constitution says that would be illegal, and any serious expert can tell you that not only were the Founders liberal in their interpretation of the Deity, but they intentionally enshrined a purely secular civic government, including the courts. They didn’t think that Jesus had an official plan for us, much less did they think that politicians who defined their duties in secular terms were defying the word of God. Tom Delay manifestly believes this, and it sounds like any number of Senate Republicans either agree, or lack the imagination or moral courage to disagree...why else would some endorse threats against Republican-appointed judges who dare to interpret the law in secular terms? This is what the Bolton fight is really about: you can’t dump him, because that lets the Democrats win on both the facts and principle...fatal notions to a desire to pack the courts with religious and secular policy extremists. Why else would there be the constant drumbeat of attacks on the “liberal media”, except to undermine public trust in the Constitutionally provided mediator between the politicians and the people?

The Founders knew how to protect what they intended; this crowd has figured out how to undermine the very rule of law in the United States. Listen to what DeLay is arguing...that his excesses have nothing to do with his “persecution”, interesting choice of word, by the Democrats and their “liberal press allies”. If a majority of Congressional Republicans don’t, in their hearts, see the hypocrisy of all this, the Republic is doomed. The real story behind Bolton and DeLay is obvious, to anyone not already seduced by the dark side. Connect the dots. There’s still time.

Amen, brother. But as I just responded to Chris, there seems to be two Bush administrations. The Bolton issue is all about Cheney. The DeLay issue seems of a different strand, the GOP/money/machine part of the Bush administration.

One sees cracks in the Bush administration at the highest levels over Bolton. The Post piece today makes clear Rice herself doesn't trust him, and who is closer to Bush than Rice?

Bolton was nominated as a consolation prize for not getting deputy Sec State (in part because Rice doesn't care for him). So why would they be throwing their all behind him now? He doesn't seem like the kind of guy they would spend too much political capital on.

With the exception of Cheney. But how much power does Cheney hold over a Chafee or a Hagel? Hagel has presidential ambitions and Cheney will be annointing a Bush successor presidential nominee for 2008. But Hagel was never in line for that nod. As for Lugar, what a disappointment he's turned out to be.

Bolton Update: More from Clemons about Bolton's sources of bad intelligence. Among them, perhaps, Frederick Fleitz, his chief of staff on loan from the CIA's WINPAC division. (Remember how abominable was WINPAC's judgment concerning Curveball). This is the kind of very dangerous, ideologically-driven cherry picking by non intelligence professionals really rampant in the Bush administration that, had Senators Roberts done his job, the country might be in a better position going forward to prevent more of.

For now, one battle at a time. Lugar, Hagel and Chafee need to hear from you. Be polite; these are the GOP guys who have voiced willingness to hear the facts before making their vote. But the WaPo revelations overnight really reveal inside-Bush administration concerns about Bolton to a whole new degree of magnitude. This is a man neither Rice nor Powell trusted to be an honest broker on WMD issues, which was, after all, Bolton's job. They were, after all, Bolton's bosses. According to the WaPo's Dafna Linzer, Bolton has repeatedly suppressed Iran intelligence from his superiors, Powell, Armitage and Rice, to the point, Linzer reports, that Rice has quietly excluded Bolton from the State Department discussion on Iran.

This goes so far beyond the revelations that Bolton is an unpleasant person to work with, to demonstrating a private agenda obsession that puts this country's national security at risk. There's ample evidence that Bolton's bosses don't trust him, and that he gave them enormous reasons to distrust him, indeed, to set up alternative channels to get the information they required to serve the president and the country. Bolton has shown repeatedly that he is unwilling to respect the chain of command and that he went to some lengths to sabotage his superiors. He should be kept outside it. If the Vice President wants Bolton on his staff, he should hire him. Not make him his operative in NY, where Bolton would be about the least credible vehicle for bringing the case on Iran's nuclear program to the world that one could conceive of. Not even good soldier Condoleezza Rice will permit Bolton to participate in the State Iran debate, the Washington Post reports, because he deliberately withheld information on international opposition to his lobbying effort against the IAEA's ElBaradei from her. What more of a non-endorsement is there than that?

Update: A reader writes, a propos of Bolton's chief of staff, Frederick Fleitz, seconded from the CIA's WINPAC division:

...To me, there is a more straightforward reason for Bolton's level of unusual access [to raw intelligence]: his Chief of Staff. Fleitz freely admitted in the SFRC staff interviews that he maintained both hats during the past four years: 1) Chief of Staff to John Bolton; and 2) WINPAC analyst, even going so far as to reference "my two bosses". Fleitz, who routinely went back to Langley, would have been in a position to pick up preliminary reports that had not yet made their way to INR or into finished IC products. That detail always struck me as odd, since most of Bolton's other immediate staff were political appointees from places like AEI.

Fleitz' work patterns were unusual, at least from my perspective. Usually, when people are detailed from one agency/department to another, they cut off ties to their home agency, and act as virtual employees of their new posts. Sure, people talk offline, but Fleitz appeared to go to unusual lengths to maintain two very different positions at one time. And which naturally raised conflict of interest questions -- Fleitz was working for an intelligence consumer. He should have divorced all links to the intelligence producers.

As a friend and I just discussed, the investigation of Bolton is filling in a lot of holes.

Bolton Revelations Reaching Critical Mass.

The latest overnight revelations? Bolton's suppression of Iran intelligence from two Secretaries of State. Rice now excluding Bolton from Iran debate.

A quite well-informed reader responds to the latest Bolton revelations:

...I find it very interesting the one sentence here that Rice has excluded Bolton from discussions on Iran. That issue arguably is the most important item in the portfolio of the Undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security, Bolton's current position. If the Secretary of State does not have confidence in Bolton to do his current job, what makes her think he would be an effective UN Ambassador? [...]

This nomination, and the media coverage surrounding it, is quickly reaching critical mass -- the drip-drip of daily revelations is telling. If the Dems can succeed in having tomorrow's vote delayed, then for the first time, I would rate the likelihood that Bolton will be defeated as more likely than not. It's clear that civil servants at State and other political opponents of Bolton who have been bullied and intimidated for the past four years now view this time as open season on Bolton -- and are spilling everything to the press. I doubt that a Chuck Hagel or a Linc Chafee can justify a yes vote with another week's worth of news coverage. So the committee vote tomorrow is really key -- if it happens, then Bolton may still skate by with the skin of his teeth.

In response to your question posted online, it's clear who Bolton is working for -- always has been: the Vice President. Bolton was appointed to his current position as a representative of Cheney and he has treated that position thusly. We all should have recognized early on the frustrations Colin Powell would face in his job when this appointment was foisted upon him in early 2001...

And don't miss Steve Clemons' line into the half dozen NSA intercepts that Bolton requested to spy on his colleagues at State. Clemons writes that he "...has learned that what is being provided to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee are 'summaries' of the super secret transcripts Bolton looked at. [I] suggest that the Committee staff read what Bolton read. Read the intercepts. Don't give any parties the ability to smudge over or hide what Bolton was up to."

As the evidence becomes overwhelming that John Bolton's bosses and colleagues at State truly don't trust him on the most pressing foreign policy challenge the second Bush administration faces, the Foreign Affairs committee has an awesome responsibility to examine why not, and prevent this nomination from going forward.

Breaking Bolton News. It's late, so just go read Dafna Linzer's piece in tomorrow's Washington Post:

John R. Bolton -- who is seeking confirmation as the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations -- often blocked then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and, on one occasion, his successor, Condoleezza Rice, from receiving information vital to U.S. strategies on Iran, according to current and former officials who have worked with Bolton.

In some cases, career officials found back channels to Powell or his deputy, Richard L. Armitage, who encouraged assistant secretaries to bring information directly to him. In other cases, the information was delayed for weeks or simply did not get through. The officials, who would discuss the incidents only on the condition of anonymity because some continue to deal with Bolton on other issues, cited a dozen examples of memos or information that Bolton refused to forward during his four years as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security.

Two officials described a memo that had been prepared for Powell at the end of October 2003, ahead of a critical international meeting on Iran, informing him that the United States was losing support for efforts to have the U.N. Security Council investigate Iran's nuclear program. Bolton allegedly argued that it would be premature to throw in the towel. "When Armitage's staff asked for information about what other countries were thinking, Bolton said that information couldn't be collected," according to one official with firsthand knowledge of the exchange.

Intra-agency tensions are common in Washington, and as the undersecretary of state in charge of nuclear issues, Bolton had a lot of latitude to decide what needed to go to the secretary. But career officials said they often felt that his decisions, and policy views, left the department's top diplomat uninformed and fed the long-running struggles inside the agency.

Bolton's time at the State Department under Rice has been brief. But authoritative officials said Bolton let her go on her first European trip without knowing about the growing opposition there to Bolton's campaign to oust the head of the U.N. nuclear agency. "She went off without knowing the details of what everybody else was saying about how they were not going to join the campaign," according to a senior official. Bolton has been trying to replace Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who is perceived by some within the Bush administration as too soft on Iran.

Publicly, Rice has staunchly defended Bolton's credentials and urged the Senate to quickly confirm him. But privately, officials said, she has kept him out of key discussions on Iran since taking over in January...

So who is John Bolton really working for, if not for the Secretary of State? The President of the United States nominated Colin Powell and then Condoleezza Rice to be his boss, but Bolton seems to have had a problem abiding by the chain of command as it stood. Under whose authority did he operate outside normal channels and withhold vital Iran intelligence from his superiors? And who will he really be answering to in NY? Truly disturbing behavior that harkens back to Iran Contra in so many ways. You will want to read this.

Senators Hagel, Chafee, Lugar: Is this really the man you want representing the United States at the UN when Washington presents its case on Iran's nuclear program to the world? Most importantly, the case, coming from Bolton or Secretary of State Rice withheld information by Bolton, will fail to persuade the American people. He's truly discredited among the colleagues he has worked with at the State Department the past four years, a back stabbing ideologue not working for the president or the American people, but serving his own agenda. The evidence is there for all to see, John Bolton cannot be trusted by the people he is supposed to be serving.

[Thanks to eagle-eyed JR.]

Update: There's also more in the Linzer piece about why Bolton wanted the young State Department nonproliferation analyst Rexon Ryu removed from his duties at State (and indeed, Ryu was transferred, first to Armitage's staff, and he now works for Senator Hagel). Apparently Ryu worked mightily to get the worst excesses out of Powell's UN speech. From the WaPo:

In February 2003, Bolton reportedly accused the young career official, Rexon Ryu, of concealing information and of insubordination when he failed to produce a copy of a cable he had written about the work of U.N. inspectors in Iraq. Ryu's immediate superiors investigated the charge and found it baseless. But Bolton wanted Ryu removed from his duties, officials said.

Just weeks before the incident, Ryu had been among a small number of State Department officials who accompanied Powell to CIA headquarters to review the presentation Powell would give to the U.N. Security Council on Iraq's alleged weapons programs. Officials said Ryu had been instrumental in getting the most controversial allegations out of Powell's speech.

Ryu is clearly the kind of guy you want to have working for you. Unless you're Bolton and the facts are threatening to the pre-ordained agenda you serve.

The US dumps Israel from development of the F-35 Joint Strike fighter, Reuters and the Jerusalem Post report. From the Post's Arieh O'Sullivan:

The Defense Ministry is downplaying reports from Washington that it was so angry over Israeli arms transfers to China that it suspended Israel from participating in the development of the prestigious JSF fighter.

United States Defense officials, quoted by Reuters, said over the weekend that Israeli representatives were no longer invited to participate in discussions about the design of the Joint Strike Fighter, known as the F-35, the next-generation warplane...

While a blow to Israel's prestige, suspending Israeli participation is considered more of an expression of disappointment than a punishment, since Israel is merely an observer to the program and not a full-fledged partner.

The move came amid a simmering disagreement between the Pentagon and the Defense Ministry over arms sales to China. The most recent flap concerns the radar-hunting Harpy drones that the US believes Israel is currently upgrading for Beijing.

But following up on Brian Bender's excellent report in the Boston Globe last Sunday, is this really to do with Israeli upgrades to China's Harpy drone, or really to do with the design of the Israeli Lavi warplane turning up in the Chinese J-10 warplane, that the US fears it could face over Taiwan? And save for the Globe's Bender, why on earth haven't any of the big US dailies with fleets of reporters in the Pentagon, Jerusalem, Beijing, etc. reported on a single aspect of this apparently quite massive dispute between the Pentagon and the Israeli Ministry of Defense?

When the Heritage Foundation went from being a think tank to a lobbying organization. The WaPo reports:

For years, the Heritage Foundation sharply criticized the autocratic rule of former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad, denouncing his anti-Semitism, his jailing of political opponents and his "anti-free market currency controls."

Then, late in the summer of 2001, the conservative nonprofit Washington think tank began to change its assessment: Heritage financed an Aug. 30-Sept. 4, 2001, trip to Malaysia for three House members and their spouses. Heritage put on briefings for the congressional delegation titled "Malaysia: Standing Up for Democracy" and "U.S. and Malaysia: Ways to Cooperate in Order to Influence Peace and Stability in Southeast Asia."

Then-Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad was assailed by the Heritage Foundation but later honored by its president. (Andy Wong -- AP)

Heritage's new, pro-Malaysian outlook emerged at the same time a Hong Kong consulting firm co-founded by Edwin J. Feulner, Heritage's president, began representing Malaysian business interests. The for-profit firm, called Belle Haven Consultants, retains Feulner's wife, Linda Feulner, as a "senior adviser." And Belle Haven's chief operating officer, Ken Sheffer, is the former head of Heritage's Asia office and is still on Heritage's payroll as a $75,000-a-year consultant...

The close relationships between the think tank and lobbying interests were apparent on the 2001 trip to Malaysia. Heritage paid expenses for DeLay, Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Ander Crenshaw, both Republicans from Florida, and their spouses; Edwin and Linda Feulner, and Sheffer. Joining them on the trip but paying his own way, according to Edwin Feulner, was Buckham, the former DeLay aide and chairman of the Alexander Strategy Group...

During the same period as the Heritage-funded Malaysia trip, Jack Abramoff, a former Republican lobbying powerhouse who was close to DeLay and to Alexander Strategy Group lobbyists, was indirectly paid by the government of Malaysia, according to documents and accounts from two former Abramoff associates.

The funds were paid to Greenberg Traurig, Abramoff's former law firm, through an advocacy group set up by Michael Scanlon, a former DeLay aide who did public affairs work with Indian tribes who were Abramoff's lobbying clients.

Will their tax filing status as a nonprofit catch up? Are think tanks the new front organization for foreign lobbying without registering as such?

Hagel's support for Bolton is wavering, the LA Times' Sonni Efron reports. Update: Want a serious person to nominate for full time US ambassador to the UN? You could hardly do better than this guy.

Terrorism incidents are increasing in the world. So what is the Bush administration's solution? Stop publishing the State Department's Patterns of Global Terrorism. From Jonathan Landay:

The State Department decided to stop publishing an annual report on international terrorism after the government's top terrorism center concluded that there were more terrorist attacks in 2004 than in any year since 1985, the first year the publication covered.

Incredible. Praktike has the story.

Housekeeping Notes: My host seems to be acting up. That, plus family visiting, means blogging will be light this weekend. But we will be checking for more Bolton news. Check out Steve Clemons' latest information on the issue, including that Hagel may get out front of Chafee in doing the right thing. He has reason. Hagel's own staff person was one of the victims of one of Bolton's purges of the State Department.

"There is certainly something odd about sending someone to deal with transparency, corruption, and management problems at the United Nations when he himself seems to operate with so many of the same behaviors as the institution he is criticizing," Steve Clemons writes of only the latest Bolton revelation, that he got a highly respected young State Department nonproliferation staffer, Rexon Ryu, transferred from his job in 2003. As a reader pointed out to me, it's pretty clear Ryu isn't the source of this latest evidence that Bolton is a serial abuser of underlings who Bolton feels don't support his ideology. After all, Ryu is now working for Chuck Hagel, who sits on the Foreign Relations committee deciding on Bolton's nomination.

No, this reader points out, it seems the revelation suggests that one of Bolton's former very close hand-picked associates has had a reason to point out this Bolton transgression:

This article points to a broader story -- the complete falling out between John Bolton and John Wolf. Wolf had worked for Bolton as a DAS in the Bureau of International Organizations during the first Bush Administration and was widely considered a Bolton protege. In 2001, he was hand-selected by Bolton to be his Assistant Secretary for Nonproliferation. But Wolf and Bolton clashed over a variety of issues. When Powell named Wolf his special envoy for Middle East peace talks, it was a move in part to remove Wolf from Bolton's circle. Rexon, who directly worked for Wolf when he was A/S and during his time as envoy to the Middle East, appears to be a casualty of this wider Bolton-Wolf battle.

Now, Wolf is speaking very highly of Ryu to the WaPo, and not of Bolton. Meantime, Clemons alerts us that something explosive is coming down the pike.

VOA is outsourcing its late-night news writing jobs to...China.

Reader mail on Bolton and Lugar, the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations committee:

Laura,

As this Bolton nomination story continues to evolve and we see more and more instances of his unfit behavior for office, it is time for the media and the progressive community to begin focusing attention on Dick Lugar. Lugar receives a pass from foreign policy moderates, because he is not a neo-con/hardliner and has made clear his discomfort with certain elements of the Bush foreign policy.

But another picture needs to emerge -- and that is of Lugar as a political coward. He is willing to vote against his personal beliefs/predilections when that is required to make peace with the conservative wing of his party. The most notable example was his 1999 vote on the CTBT. He waited until several days before the climactic floor vote in the Senate before announcing his opposition, which had the net result of bringing a number of other GOP fence-sitters to the "no" side. It was widely understood that Lugar voted against the CTBT to ensure that conservatives would not mount a challenge to his future chairmanship of the SFRC, once Jesse Helms retired. Lugar got his chairmanship in 2003, but at the price of paving the way for the first Senate rejection of an influential treaty since the ignomious rejection of the League of Nations in 1917.

This Bolton vote is shaping up as the second major betrayal by Lugar. In all of his actions since the Bolton nomination was announced (no statement of support for Bolton immediately following his nomination, a curious opening statement on Monday that appeared to castigate Bolton for his temparement and use of provocative rhetoric), Lugar has made clear his distaste for this nomination, based on Bolton's policy views and actions in office alone. But, instead, Lugar this week has hardened his resolve to steamroll the nomination through the Committee. Lugar's distaste for Bolton centers on two relatively wonky issues: 1) Bolton's refusal to seriously negotiate a resolution to the liability dispute (now in its third year) hampering various "Nunn-Lugar" projects in the former Soviet Union; and 2) Bolton's attempts to undermine ratification of the Law of the Sea Treaty, even though it is Bush Administration policy to support this treaty. In fact, in January, Lugar personally warned Condi Rice that Bolton would not get through his Committee if he was nominated as Deputy Secretary. Rice listened, and now you have the compromise -- Bolton for the UN.

One would suspect that all the revelations about Bolton's bullying management practices and intimidation of intelligence analysts would be enough for Lugar to say, "Enough is enough". He dragged his feet on pressuring the State Department to make available witnesses and documents to Democratic staff until late last week. He has rejected Senate Democrats' call for an additional hearing and subpoena the various State Department officials who have alleged intimidation. (Carl Ford was able to testify only because he no longer works in government. The other witnesses can only be called to a public hearing by subpoena if the State Department refuses to make them available.) He only reluctantly moved the Committee vote on the nomination from yesterday to next Tuesday. He knows the longer this goes on, the more trouble the Bolton nomination is in -- and therefore is attempting to run the clock out. For whatever reason, though, Lugar has decided that he must get this nomination through, no matter that it goes against every foreign policy principle and cause he has advocated during his career.

Thanks for letting me vent.

Emphasis added. Absolutely agree. Moderates like Lugar fail the American people when they crave to the party fold against all their principles. And of course, it's not just Lugar.

The WaPo's Dafna Linzer uncovers a third attempt by John Bolton to purge a deputy:

In 2003, John R. Bolton, President Bush's choice for U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, ordered a young official working closely with then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell removed from duties in the State Department's nonproliferation bureau in what U.S. officials described as a third attempt by Bolton to purge career officials he perceived as impeding his policy goals.

The officials, who would discuss the incident only on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss it, said Rexon Ryu, an expert on nonproliferation issues in the Middle East, was transferred to another bureau after he failed to produce a document requested by Bolton's chief of staff...

A graduate of Princeton University, Ryu was described by officials as a rising star in the State Department who quickly won the confidence of Powell and Wolf, the former assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation who was also Bush's envoy to the Middle East.

At the time of the incident with Bolton, Ryu was working closely with Powell on sensitive issues related to Iraq and traveling with Wolf to Jerusalem. He was also about to take on an additional portfolio -- nonproliferation discussions with Group of Eight countries -- which Bolton directed...

After Bolton accused him of concealing the document sought by his chief of staff, the nonproliferation bureau determined that Ryu's actions were unintentional.

"We looked into the concerns, found the omission was inadvertent and that there was no basis to the allegation," said Wolf, who left the State Department last year and now runs the Eisenhower Fellowships in Philadelphia. "Rexon has provided inspired and loyal service to his country, the president, Secretary Powell and to me as his immediate supervisor."

Ryu, who was then 30, was transferred to the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs and then spent eight months working for Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage.

The officials said Bolton never demanded that Ryu be fired. But one of them said, "If Bolton says he doesn't want him working on any issues, what are you going to do?"

And Ryu was transferred as a result of Bolton's hysterical paranoia and bullying.

Mr. Chafee, if this isn't a pattern, what is?

And what did the documents concern?

And in light of Farah Stockman's story in the Boston Globe yesterday, is there a fourth instance of Bolton's effort to get a fourth deputy removed, involving an analyst on China?

Here is the Agonist's report on the MEK conference held today near the White House. I talked to the State Department this morning and they were well aware of the gathering in advance, and referring all questions to the Justice Department. The conferees were addressed by MEK leader Maryam Rajavi by live video feed and were waving MEK flags, in case the authorities needed any hints that this was a front for the State Department-listed foreign terrorist organization. So what's with Condi Rice's "a terrorist is a terrorist is a terrorist?" -- just hot air? In all seriousness, why did the administration allow this large conference of a designated terrorist group to take place within a stone's throw of the White House? Several Iranian-Americans I know have been on Iranian TV the past few days fussing that the Bush administration was allowing this terrorist group to have a rally here, TV which is beamed into Iran. What's more, the firm, Premiere Speakers Bureau, recruiting speakers for the MEK event told me Dick Armey vetted the group for them, including by checking with the State Department, and got the go-ahead from State. (I called State for confirmation on this today and was not given a clear answer). Was this what the administration intended? Did they want Teheran to see that they were allowing this MEK conference?

I know for a fact that Premiere was made well aware of who they were recruiting speakers for. They were also the speaker recruitment firm for the conference last year that MEK leader Maryam Rajavi also addressed by live video feed, that was monitored by the FBI, and was reported on by the Washington Post. Indeed, Premier's rep told me about the article and the problems for speaker Richard Perle with the conference's MEK association. But it was Premiere's impression from Dick Armey that State had cleared this conference, the organizers and the financing. Hey, Washington Iran experts, what does that mean?

Anyhow, back to the conference. Here is some of the Agonist's Nick Hoover's very interesting report:

..."Freedom and democracy and support for Rajavi," supporters urged in unison.

"God bless you, Rajavi," the people cried after urging from an older Iranian man who sat near the back of the large hall.

Another speaker at the event, Neil Livingstone, is often interviewed by the press as a terrorism expert. He has been quoted as saying he has had good relations with the MEK for 30 years and also advised Ahmed Chalabi's INC. Livingstone urged the government to step up its efforts to destabilize the Iranian government, saying "we must recognize the Iranian government in exile." This refers to Rajavi, who was declared by her movement to be President-in-exile. "We are all members of the Iranian Resistance," he closed.

Two of the speakers at the event were American soldiers who dealt with the group at Camp Ashraf in Iraq, where the U.S. government has detained and disarmed them.

Lt. Col. Thomas Cantwell was the commander of the 324th MP Batallion at Camp Ashraf from June through December 2003.

"Our assessment was that the mujahideen represented a minimal threat to U.S. forces," he said.

He also questioned the designation of the MEK as a terrorist group. "If we have a terrorist group in Ashraf, where are the terrorists?" he asked. He said this despite admission in a later interview that he was not "routinely granted access" to intelligence on the group and left Camp Ashraf before debriefings of MEK members there moved into full swing.

Captain Vivian Gambara was a Jag officer who participated in disarmament negotiations with the MEK. Although, by her own admission, she was one of the most junior lawyers there, she said that she and special forces soldiers around her recognize the security possibilities that the MEK represented.

It's worth noting that according to the LA Times' Ken Silverstein and Walter Roche Jr., former CIA director James Woolsey is a paid advisor to Livingstone's Washington-based firm, GlobalOptions. More on the conference here.

Update: USA Today's Barbara Slavin has a report from Tehran on her interview with an imprisoned MEK member. Arash Sametipour, 29, originally of Burke, Virginia, was jailed for trying to assassinate a former police chief:

[Sametipour] says he became involved in the Iranian opposition group in the late 1990s when he developed a crush on one of its members. In love and convinced that the group was working for the good of Iran, he agreed to go to an MEK base in Iraq for military training. In 2000, he says, he was selected to go to Iran to assassinate a former police chief.

The murder attempt failed and Sametipour tried to commit suicide by swallowing cyanide. But the poison had lost its potency so he detonated a grenade, blowing off his right hand. Iranian authorities jailed him for four years. One of six former MEK members produced by the Iranian government to talk to a reporter here, he acknowledges that his criticism of the MEK serves the Islamic government but says his main motivation is to stop others from joining the group.

A very worthwhile piece.

Knight Ridder's Hannah Allam had a very good piece on the MEK members living at Camp Ashraf in Iraq in the Philly Inquirer a couple weeks back.

Chris Nelson on the "Battle over Bolton":

There seems to be in-fighting over the previously gentlemanly agreement between Chairman Lugar and Ranking Dem Biden, and it’s not clear if the Dem’s threat to filibuster Bolton next week is serious, or a holding play to give State Department career professionals more time to come forward with evidence proving charges that Bolton falsified testimony prepared for Condi Rice, and/or took classified intel from the NSA to try and punish then-DPRK negotiator Jack Pritchard, among the stories circulating today. It also sounds like Rhode Island Sen. Lincoln Chafee is starting to realize that if he’s 20 points down now for reelection, standing by Bolton may not be a smart move. So stay tuned...all it takes is one Republican committee defection to kill the nomination.

The Boston Globe's Farah Stockman reports that Senate Foreign Relations committee staff are examining a third case of Bolton intimidation of a subordinate, this one involving China:

Lugar agreed to postpone the vote to give committee members enough time to read State Department documents about Bolton that had not been made available earlier.

Congressional aides said that they would issue written questions to the witnesses and that they were also probing another possible allegation that Bolton had intimidated a third analyst, this time on an issue involving China.

Meantime, Stockman quotes Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on the management practices that she expects from Bolton, which are in stark contrast to those testified to by Carl Ford on Tuesday. Said Rice:

''He has a lot of people who have worked for him who are loyal to him, and where he has brought out the best in his people. And that's the management that I expect from John and I fully expect to see," Rice said.

But Rice may be headed for trouble if she expects peace among Bolton's subordinates at the UN. Check out Jason Vest's piece in the Village Voice today, that draws on Bolton's time in Ed Meese's Justice Department, where, among other controversies he was involved in, Bolton tried to have an attorney there fired for taking maternity leave:

After his stint at USAID, Bolton went in 1985 to Ed Meese's Justice Department as Assistant Attorney General for Legislative Affairs—in effect, Justice's lobbyist in Congress. By 1988, according to Washington lawyers and published accounts, Bolton was itching to leave government service for the world of high-priced lobbying. Yet Bolton stayed on at Justice, moving laterally to head the department's civil division, for a reason almost unheard of in a town that worships at the altar of the revolving door: No one would hire him to work as a lobbyist.

Why? According to a March 1988 Legal Times article, while many of the dozen-plus lobbying firms Bolton interviewed with acknowledged his formidable intellect, they nonetheless saw him as a liability on account of an "abrasive and combative tone [that has] cost him friends on Capitol Hill." ...

As Bolton shifted to the head of Justice's Civil Division in 1988, it seemed to many in Washington that he couldn't possibly do anything more to endear him to Congress less. Yet he promptly became then representative Pat Schroeder's whipping boy for trying to fire a Civil Division lawyer. The lawyer's firing offense, in Schroeder's view? Trying to take maternity leave.

He was ultimately overruled by his Reagan era DOJ superiors. Go read.

As we said earlier, Bolton proves again to be the anti-mensch; the kind of guy who, when witnessing a robbery across the street, walks away thinking it's not his concern, as he told Bill O'Reilly.

Bolton is so bad on Kosovo, it is horrifying. Check out his making an utter fool of himself for a second time that week, on Fox's Crier Report back in March 29, 1999. Bolton comes off as something like Noam Chomsky crossed with Pat Buchanan, queasy to use force and American isolationist at the same time, without a moral fibre in his soul. And to think he was hanging his hat at AEI at the time:

...
CRIER: John Bolton, before the KLA came into being, what was the ethnic cleansing, the refugee problem like?

BOLTON: Well, it was -- I think it was less severe than it is now, and I think one of the problems that the American bombing campaign has exacerbated is the fact that there is a legitimate civil war going on in Kosovo. I just don't believe that there's a sufficient American interest to take the side either of the Kosovar Albanians or of the Serbs. We have no interest in the outcome of that war, and yet de facto now, by the bombing campaign, we've taken the side of the Kosovar Albanians. I think inserting ground troops, even in an effort for humanitarian purposes, just risks getting us involved in a civil war we're not going to get out of for a long time.

CRIER: Bob Dornan, even if we're in to go in for humanitarian reasons, by hurting the Serbs, we're helping the KLA. Are you comfortable with that? Do you -- do you feel that this is a democratically-based organization? There are certainly reports out now that they're getting their money from drug running and they're Marxist in nature. Are you comfortable with this group?

Hey Catherine, so is the MEK Marxist, but Bolton thinks the US should work with them for Iran intel.

Back to the Crier interview, where next up the journalist Jonathan Landay makes absolute mincemeat of Bolton's contention the US has absolutely no moral interest in the then raging Balkan conflict:

...LANDAY: ...But I think we're being a little bit forgetful of history here. The fact is that the United States interests there were established by the Bush administration when it issued the 1992 Christmas warning to Mr. Milosevic that the United States would take unilateral action in the case he moved against the Kosovar Albanians.

What we're looking at right now, whether we like it or not, are enormous interests that are at stake. If you look at what happened in Lebanon, and if you look at what happened in Afghanistan, if you look at what happened in Kurdistan, what we're looking it potentially are two million stateless people in the heart of Europe, with the potential of continuing cross-border attacks in Serbia, sowing instability in Macedonia and Albania. Certainly, what's going on now in Montenegro, the tiny republic that also is part of Yugoslavia, is a major concern. And that has all the potential of exploding -- of taking this crisis across other borders in that region....

CRIER: So John Bolton, what do you do, if, in fact, the instability comes primarily from the refugees and the disruption in the world seeing the cleansing? What do you do?

BOLTON: Well, the instability that exists now, in large part caused by the administration's policy, I think can be alleviated by trying to go to what we should have done, frankly, back in the Bush administration, which is through a congress of Europe-type procedure, try and get everybody together and, in fact, impose the proper solution in the Balkans. If we were -- we're accused already of acting in a hegemonic fashion, which would not be half bad, from my perspective. The problem is we're not acting in a hegemonic fashion. We are wrapped around the axle of the Kosovar Albanians, and there's no telling how campaign the better

Wow, what a thoughtful response. So Bolton believes in Europe after all, when he can't think of anything better. Of course, it was the borders imposed by the Congress of Europe the last time round which had become part of the problem during the break up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Truly, what utter use will this dial-an-insult loudmouth be at the UN? Come on, the Bush administration can do better than this. The American people deserve better than this. This guy is a hack, a destructive, ill-qualified, unthoughtful, unstable, vindictive, and ineffective partisan hack, one who appeased genocide every time it occurred in the 1990s.

Update: Here's Bolton making a fool of himself on Crossfire in 1993. It's breathtaking. After the Bush I administration he served in sent US troops to Somalia, he accuses the Clinton administration of engaging in emotion-driven humanitarian interventions in places like....Somalia. His hypocrisy is truly staggering. Here's Bolton speaking with Bob Beckel, on August 8, 1993:

BECKEL: Welcome back to Crossfire. The conflict in Somalia has claimed more American lives, four U.S. servicemen killed by a land mine, believed to have been planted by renegade warlord Mohammed Fahda Aidid. Given President Clinton's vow to respond, the U.S. is now at risk of being drawn deeper into Somalia's civil war, but has that civil war become a quicksand, and is it time for America to pack her tent and come home? We're putting that question to Edward Luck, President of the United Nations Association, and John Bolton, an Assistant Secretary of State during the Bush administration.

John, conservatives in America seem to be developing a new foreign policy of nonintervention. Now, when it was your guys' great idea to intervene, we continued the intervention in Vietnam to supposedly fight communism, worst war we ever had, when Ollie North decided to break the law and continue to intervene in Nicaragua, when we intervened in the internal affairs of Chile, we did all those things, conservatives seemed to-

Mr. BOLTON: So many times-

BECKEL: No, no, but you guys all seemed to like those interventions. Can you name me one place now, besides England and Canada, where you might deem to intervene to help- where you see as United States security interest? Just name me one example. I'd like to know.

Mr. BOLTON: Don't count on England and Canada.

BECKEL: Oh, they may not be willing to go there either. Pat [Buchanan's] not willing to go to Newark.

Mr. BOLTON: I would say Republicans are adults on foreign policy questions, and we define what we're willing to do militarily and politically by what is in the best interest of the United States. That's the only question that matters.

Mr. LUCK: Isn't George [H.W.] Bush a good Republican? Didn't he send the forces there [to Somalia]?

Mr. BOLTON: If- he did. If there were a strategic interest in Central Europe or elsewhere, then I believe we would be prepared to intervene. What we are not prepared to do is what I think the Clinton administration wants to do, which is wholesale intervention everywhere on abstract human rights or humanitarian grounds. I don't deny that there are important humanitarian and human rights interests in Somalia and in other places, but I think before the United States commits its forces, I think we have to define why it's in the best interest of the United States....

[Edward LUCK, UN Association]: Name one place where the Clinton administration has wanted to intervene where the Bush administration had not already intervened. Is there one country that you can name?

Mr. BOLTON: Well, I would not have intervened in Somalia.

...

Mr. LUCK: Well, but George Bush did. ...

Incredible. Bolton never misses an opportunity to put partisan opposition to Clinton above doing the right thing in the face of genocide or starvation. He was a non interventionist before he got on the payroll with the (Republican) interventionists. But he doesn't support any of their ideals, not the use of US power or leadership to stop genocide or promote democracy. The only thing they come together on is hatred of abstract, strawmen theories of world government. And that's enough for his supporters? Are they that cheap?

The Anti-Schindler

John Bolton has asserted he would stand by as a million people are slaughtered. But his supporters dig it as long as he keeps up his harangue against the UN. How's that for priorities?

Well, David Brooks gets Bolton half right:

I don't like John Bolton's management style. Nor am I a big fan of his foreign policy views. He doesn't really believe in using U.S. power to end genocide or promote democracy.

As far as I am concerned, those are the chief qualities that disqualify Bolton from a position that other US ambassadors to the UN have used to mobilize coalitions and armies to stop genocide and massive humanitarian suffering, even when that action ultimately bypassed the Security Council. Bolton is indifferent to human suffering and is apparently quite consistently content to let the millions perish. He doesn't believe in either US or UN intervention to stop humanitarian suffering. Read his comments on not being inclined to act to stop genocide in Rwanda or Kosovo. It's genuinely shocking stuff. Bolton is the anti-mensch, the anti-Schindler. Not exactly the kind of guy with a vision, and not a humanitarian impulse in his body.

But then Brooks starts poking at a strawman that no Democrat I know believes. "Other people saw [the UN] as the beginnings of world government...We'll never accept it, first, because it is undemocratic. "

Oh, please. Why does the right imbue the UN with powers or a moral authority that it does not have? Of course it is undemocratic, and it has no real teeth, and certainly no teeth the US has to be so exercised about. Brooks is really poking at a strawman here.

Look, as I just wrote a friend, the left and right can agree that the UN is no good at controversial political questions. It can't even come up with a definition of terrorism. The one thing even neocons like Joshua Muravchik who is writing a book on the issue acknowledge is that the UN is good at humanitarian missions such as post-conflict peace building, refugee relief, etc. etc. Missions that are not terribly politically controversial. It is essentially useful to the US as a forum for mobilizing international coalitions to do missions we would otherwise have to neglect or do alone. And its agencies -- particularly the UN Development Program and the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) -- have built up real, unparalleled institutional knowledge and expertise at saving lives and rebuilding countries. The utterly unglamorous nitty gritty grind that transforms wartime hell holes into places with sustainable life. This is just the kind of stuff the right has argued is not the best use of the US Army in a time of conflict!

So why send someone to the UN who doesn't have a humanitarian impulse in his body? Who proudly rejects US or UN intervention to stop genocide? Who doesn't concern himself with ending humanitarian suffering? Who has no inclination to make the famously messy UN more effective? Who's whole reason for being there is to take it down a peg?

Just to send someone who rejects UN moral authority is pointless. U.S. administrations Democratic and Republican have consistently acted to reject the UN's non-authority over national foreign policy decisionmaking when it saw fit, along with most of Europe, as during the Kosovo crisis; as it has enlisted it to grant a patina of international legitimacy to an intervention, as during Gulf War I. At no cost to our sovereignty.

That's my point. Bolton may have a place somewhere as a rejectionist to global cooperation; but that place is not as Washington's chief representative to the UN, at a time when even the Bush administration has discovered it wants to use the UN for missions where it otherwise would have to act alone or not at all (Liberia, Sierra Leone, Haiti, etc.)

Update I: Look, the cause of stopping a genocide or massive humanitarian suffering goes beyond partisan politics. It is something that Americans on the right and left overwhelmingly agree on. It is also something that the US can't do alone. The US ambassador to the UN plays perhaps the most crucial role at the UN in exercising leadership to mobilize support both in Washington, New York, and foreign capitols in overcoming the tremendous obstacles logistical and political to save human life. Darfur presents that kind of challenge today, and Chinese opposition on the Security Council to a more robust intervention is not something Clinton didn't face regarding the Kosovo intervention six years ago. John Bolton has no interest in playing that role of exercising leadership at the UN to save lives. He wants to use it to bash the UN. For people who care about this mission, it should automatically disqualify him. Either it's more important to stop genocide, or it's more important to kick the UN, not both.

Bolton nomination news:

It may be just postponing the agony, but Steve Clemons reports Chafee may still be wavering.

And a reader has just sent me the transcripts of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff interviews concerning Bolton, here. Apparently there are three additional US officials beyond Carl Ford who have told committee staff of Bolton's inappropriate efforts to retaliate against underlings he despised. Any hints as to the NSA intercepts he was trying to get hold of? Do they concern Charles Pritchard, as Steve Clemons suggests?

The Forward reports that Jack Abramoff denies the recent Newsweek story in which Abramoff's lunch companion quoted him as saying Tom DeLay knew all the details concerning financing for his overseas junkets. Newsweek is standing by the story. More on Abramoff's National Center for Public Policy Research which paid for DeLay's trips to the UK and Moscow from the WSJ.

Seize the moment, David Ignatius advises Democrats.

Life as the governing party has been as corrosive for the GOP as it was for the Democrats during their era of dominance. That's the real import of the Tom DeLay case...

So how can the Democrats steal a march on their disorganized rivals? They must show the country that they are ready to tackle the nation's toughest economic problems. They must present themselves as the party of responsible government. To adopt the shorthand used by columnist Michael Kinsley, they must cast aside a generation of Mommyism and become the "Daddy Party."

Or as Amy Sullivan put it last week, reinvent themselves as the party of reform.

More on Thursday's pro-MEK rally in DC from the Agonist. What seems to be an open front group for a designated terrorist organization is holding its annual conference just a few blocks away from the White House. Here's some information on the speaker recruitment effort I came upon yesterday.

Breaking Bolton News, from the NY Times:

John R. Bolton, nominated to be the next ambassador to the United Nations, used his position as a senior State Department official to obtain details about intercepted communications involving other American officials that were monitored by the National Security Agency, according to Mr. Bolton's own account.

The identities of American officials whose communications are intercepted are usually closely protected by law, and not included even in classified intelligence reports. Access to the names may be authorized by the N.S.A. only in response to special requests, and these are not common, particularly from policy makers.

Testifying Monday to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Mr. Bolton acknowledged that he had made such requests "on a couple of occasions, maybe a few more." Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut, has requested that Mr. Bolton explain each request, Democratic Congressional officials said.

Mr. Bolton told the committee that his only motivation had been "to better understand" a summary of an intercepted conversation, saying that on some occasions, "it's important to find out who is saying what to whom."

A former senior intelligence official said it was uncommon but not unheard of for a senior government official to request such information. "Access is not granted lightly and circulation of such data is very restricted," this former official said. The official said such requests were approved only when learning the name was crucial to understanding the intelligence gathered.

On Wednesday the Senate panel's Democrats opposed any swift vote on the appointment, forcing the Republican chairman, Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, to agree to postpone any vote until next week. But a spokesman for Senator Lugar said he did not support Mr. Dodd's request for additional information. "We are prepared to vote," the spokesman, Andy Fisher, said.

Mr. Dodd asked Mr. Lugar on Wednesday to hold a third public hearing on Mr. Bolton's nomination, to allow testimony from a top Central Intelligence Agency official and three State Department officials. In closed-door interviews conducted with the panel's staff, all four officials have provided accounts of two episodes in which, they said, Mr. Bolton sought to remove intelligence analysts from their posts. ...

In another criticism, a former United States ambassador to South Korea, Thomas C. Hubbard, disputed Mr. Bolton's assertion on Monday that a speech Mr. Bolton delivered in Seoul in 2003 on North Korea had been fully approved by Mr. Hubbard. "At the very least, he greatly, greatly exaggerated my comments," Mr. Hubbard said in an interview.

In requesting additional details on Mr. Bolton's requests about intercepted communications, Mr. Dodd appears to be trying to determine why and how often Mr. Bolton sought to learn the names of officials whose conversations were monitored. A copy of Senator Dodd's request, provided by a Congressional official, notes that all such requests should have been logged by the State Department's bureau of intelligence and research. Congressional officials who discussed the request would not let their names be used.

A senior State Department official said the department had received the request from Mr. Dodd late Wednesday and was reviewing it. The official estimated that Mr. Bolton had sought such information "about a half dozen times, maybe a few more, over a four-year period." ...

The issue of the eavesdropping by the National Security Agency, particularly when it involves Americans whose conversations with foreign surveillance targets are intercepted, is a sensitive one and its details are highly classified...

A Democratic official said Mr. Dodd appeared to be trying to determine whether Mr. Bolton's requests focused on any particular subject area or official, and what use he might have made of the information. Unless it gets a warrant from a special court, as in cases of suspected terrorists, the agency is not permitted to identify as a deliberate target an American citizen or permanent resident for eavesdropping. But its global eavesdropping net regularly picks up communications involving Americans, including phone calls, faxes, e-mail messages and other communications...

Under the rules, the names of ordinary citizens generally must be removed from any report of the intercept, with the phrase "U.S. person" substituted. But there is an exception for "senior executive branch officials," including ambassadors and dozens of senior State Department officials, who may be identified in reports by their titles. ...

So who did he request intercepts of?

Steve Clemons suggests Dick Cheney has threatened Lincoln Chafee if he doesn't vote for Bolton. Mafia politics. Update: Bolton vote pushed back to next week.

Writing in the LA Times, the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict's Peter Ackerman and AEI's Michael Ledeen explain that Washington should take its cues from Iranians in trying to assist democracy efforts in Iran:

Finally, outsiders seeking to aid democratic revolutions must remember this: Only indigenous forces can be the prime movers. There must be no replay of 1953 in Iran, when the United States and Britain stage-managed mass demonstrations against the government in order to restore the shah to his throne. We must trust the judgment of the people who are, in all cases, the foundation of lasting change.

If they want open support, they should get it. If they want it delivered discreetly, donors should respect their wishes.

The advice comes as the US Congress releases the first $3 million for pro-democracy efforts in Iran. I wrote about the convergence of neoconservatives like Ledeen and the Serbia/Kiev-style peaceful revolution advocates like Ackerman in the Boston Globe last fall. A nonviolent revolution in Iran is an appealing prospect, given the alternatives, but can regime change there come before Washington is pressed to act to prevent Iran acquiring nuclear weapons?

Update: A couple readers have written in response to the LA Times piece above with comments along the lines of this letter from O:

Here's another question: Would a democratic Iran give up the quest for nuclear weapons? That's clearly the assumption of the Bush administration - publicly, at least. But why the optimism on that front? Would Iran's democratic leaders buck the military and turn away from that conception of Iran's national security interests? Would Iran's democratic leaders give up on trying to spread Iran's influence in the region?

I'm not so sure.

My sense is that this is right. Some of the neoconservatives advocating regime change in Iran have expressed the conviction that it's the nature of the regime, not the nuclear capabilities per se, that are of most pressing concern. See the last graphs here for example.

Who knew the Islamic Republic had a Jewish MP? It's in a Reuters story about Iran's parliament condemning Iranian State TV for running anti-Semitic programming, and published in Ha'aretz. Update: Iranian-California reader F writes in response to the above that minority rights in Iran are as you would expect quite limited: "Armenians, Asserayian, Jews and Zoroastrians have had representatives in Iranian Parliament from Shah's period on. However with little power. All minorities have lost their control over their local private schools. Each minority school must have an Islamic principal now and the language can not be taught during normal school hours. However they're free to do whatever they want within their secluded sports and cultural clubs...And no minority can work for government agencies, I remember the Armenians complained and they got no where."

The NYT on Bolton:

Mr. Bolton tried to convince the senators that he was just being provocative with those remarks and that as U.N. ambassador, he would confine his utterances to official policy vetted by appropriate agencies, like the State Department. But much of the hearing focused on Mr. Bolton's contempt for that process, especially on his attempts to have a State Department intelligence analyst punished for stopping him from misrepresenting intelligence on Cuba...

Mr. Bolton's attempts to dodge accountability were almost comical. At one point, explaining a trip to the C.I.A. in which he tried to have an analyst for Latin America on the National Intelligence Council removed for a similar act, Mr. Bolton said he had gone there only to learn what the council does. The explanation was not remotely believable from someone with Mr. Bolton's background in national security...

Carl Ford Jr., who led the State Department's intelligence office at the time and is now retired, flatly contradicted Mr. Bolton's claim that he hadn't tried to have the State Department analyst fired...Mr. Ford called Mr. Bolton a "kiss-up, kick-down sort of guy" and said the intimidation had had a lasting effect on his department...

With America's credibility as low as it is, the last thing the nation needs is a United Nations envoy who tries to force intelligence into an ideological construct.

Bolton Genocide Appeasement Watch II. Six years ago, back on March 24, 1999, John Bolton told Bill O'Reilly he thought that the US had no business intervening to stop massive Serb ethnic cleansing and killing of Kosovo Albanians. What a wuss! This is a guy who doesn't think the US can challenge a two bit bully in the Balkans!

I change my mind. Bolton is the PERFECT Bush administrative representative to the UN! He stands for nothing. He's a bully to his subordinates but rolls over at the slightest sign of strength from an opponent. He is "a quintessential kiss-up, kick-down kind of guy. He's got a bigger kick, and it gets bigger and stronger the further down the bureaucracy he's kicking," as former assistant secretary of state Carl Ford characterized him today. Big bark, very little stick. As Albert Wohlstetter characterized the stance to Frank Gaffney's group during the Bosnia genocide, Bolton epitomized the consummate "surrealist" appeaser of genocide in Bosnia and Kosovo and Rwanda.

Here's the O'Reilly-Bolton interview, courtesy of Nexis:

BOLTON: I think that the United States is now involved in a conflict where it has no tangible national interest, where it has no clear objectives in mind, and where the ultimate outcome could be very risky for what our real interests are, as evidenced by the fact that we've already severely strained relations with Russia.

I think this is a mistake. I think it continues a series of mistakes that the Clinton administration has made in former Yugoslavia. And I'm very uneasy about the situation tonight.

O'REILLY: All right. Now let's say you and I were walking down the street in Washington, DC. And across the road we saw a gang beating up a woman and hurting a woman. We didn't know that woman at all. And it wasn't in our interests personally to stop the beating.

But I think you and I would cross the street. Don't you, Mr. Bolton?

BOLTON: Well, maybe. Or we might call the police. Or we might do something else. But I think it's very misleading...

O'REILLY: I'll tell you what. I would cross the street right there.

BOLTON: ... Good for you.

O'REILLY: OK.

BOLTON: I think it's very misleading to try to analogize what's going on in the Balkans with a street crime in the United States. What the Kosovar-Albanians and the Serbs are fighting about has deep historical roots, where the United States basically has no interest in whatever the outcome is. The Serbian...

O'REILLY: Well, I would agree that we don't have an immediate interest. But on a humanitarian basis, both you and I know the Serbian army can go into Kosovo and crush those people and do pretty much what they want to do to them. And they will, based upon what they've done in Bosnia, based upon what they tried to do in Slovenia.

These are brutal, brutal people. They are not a civilized, disciplined army.

And I find it difficult to stand by and watch another Cambodia, another Rwanda, unfold. And I believe the United States has a responsibility here.

BOLTON: Let me ask you this, Mr. O'Reilly. How many dead Americans is it worth to you to stop the brutality?

O'REILLY: I don't think I would quantify that because...

BOLTON: I think you have to quantify it. I think if you don't answer that question...

O'REILLY: ... I think if you're going to be a superpower...

BOLTON: ... you're ducking the key point that the commander in chief has to decide upon before putting American troops into a combat situation. We are now at war with Serbia. And the president has to be able to justify to himself and to the American people that Americans are about to die, or may well die, for a certain specific American interest.

O'REILLY: And I think the American military people over there understand that because of the status of America as the superpower policeman of the world, which we are whether we like it or not, there are some situations where we will have to put ourselves at risk for a long-term objective. And that long-term objective is basically not letting butchers like Milosevic run around and do what they want with impunity while we have the power to stop it.

My G-d. Here's O'Reilly sounding like Dick Cheney and Bolton sounding like Michael Moore. Incredible. Taiwan can get him cheap again after his term is up.

I've gotten ahold of some documents that show that a speakers association is currently offering some prominent neoconservatives $15,000 a pop to speak at a pro-MEK rally Thursday. So far, several have turned them down, I hear. I talked to the firm trying to recruit speakers for the event, and they said they've done their due diligence. (The firm's rep mentioned the Washington Post article that embarrassed Richard Perle last year; Perle apparently wasn't aware until too late that he was speaking at a pro-MEK event, which had been billed as a Bam earthquake relief fundraiser. In case you were wondering, this is the same firm recruiting speakers with a letter that never mentions the MEK but has plenty of hints.).

The speakers' bureau says this year, the Iranian organizers flew down to Texas to meet with former House Majority leader Dick Armey, and he has assured the speakers' bureau that the Iranian American group is ok. They have also checked out the funding sources of who's writing their checks, and it's all Iranian American money (as it was last year, dingbats). Someone named Nasser Rashidi. All I can say is for the negative publicity the firm could draw upon itself for the second year in a row, it would seem they must be being paid an arm and a leg (so to speak). (Here's some background on the MEK).

So, will the FBI be there on Thursday at the DAR Constitution Hall, to see who's come to represent the group? And how much is Armey being paid to support this effort? Hey, if the MEK just waits a few months, next year they can probably get DeLay to represent them.

I'm waiting for a call back from Mr. Armey so expect an update. And the Agonist will have a correspondent at the Thursday event.

Post-Bolton Hearing Update -- A Third Case of Intimidating a Subordinate. What happens now? Talked with committee staff. There is apparently a third case of alleged Bolton intimidation and bullying of a subordinate, that the committee only became aware of late last night. Will get more on this out later today.

The Foreign Relations committee staff are also reviewing a batch of classified documents they received only yesterday from the State Department including emails and other correspondence concerning Bolton's alleged mistreatment of subordinates. Depending on what they find and if it prompts them to call more witnesses, the Foreign Relations committee Senators will either vote Thursday, or next Tuesday, on whether to forward Bolton's nomination to the full Senate. After all this, it still seems to all come down to one guy. Keep watching Steve Clemons' site for analysis.

Update to the Update: Just talked to a colleague who's an ideological supporter of Bolton. He says he talked with Chafee after the hearing today and Chafee is still inclined to vote for Bolton.

Here's my feeling, and forgive the language. One could perhaps respect a bully if that bully was a bully in the cause of making the UN an institution that saved human life more effectively. Some might say Richard Holbrooke fits this model. But you can't respect a bully just because he's a bully. From Bolton's testimony yesterday about not having any particular interest in the UN intervening to stop genocide in Rwanda, even with the benefit of all that we know now that close to a million innocent people were slaughtered, it's clear Bolton's bullying is in no service to the good of making the UN save lives, or preventing North Korea from getting nuclear weapons, or Iran. His grandstanding has done nothing to prevent North Korea from becoming a nuclear power. It's just asshole for the sake of being an asshole. It's in the service of nothing. The worst you can really say about Mr. Bolton is not that he's a bully, but that he's a failure. So why vote for this guy, Mr. Chafee? [Apparently, serious pressure from the OVP.]

BOLTON "SERIAL ABUSER." Former Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research, Carl Ford, a Republican appointee, says "John Bolton went so far over the line in harrassing Christian Westermann that he has seen nothing like it in his entire career." From Steve Clemons, who reports, "Watch out. The currents of this nomination may have just changed." Go watch on C-SPAN3.

Update: Now Barack Obama's questioning of Ford has revealed that Bolton would seem to have lied in his testimony yesterday about whether he pushed to have INR analyst Westermann removed from his job.

Update II: Chafee has to vote against this bully. Chafee should take courage from the honorable example Ford himself set today: face the wrath of the GOP machine and do the right thing and vote his conscience against Bolton.

Update III: Ford: "Just don't give him [Bolton] any responsibility for people." ..."In my long experience, I have never seen anyone so abusive to a subordinate."

Update IV: Kerry's questioning of Ford: "How many years of government service" (do you have)? Ford: "Thirty years." Ford has never seen anyone so abusive to a subordinate as Bolton was to Westermann in thirty years. What does that genuinely say about Bolton's psychological fitness for the job? Ford: "No one has ever done what Sec. Bolton has done. It's different in the degree and in the details." Ford in questioning by Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fl): "Analysts are supposed to have views, they are supposed to have strong views." Not if they work for Bolton. Bolton likes only 'yes' men, a sign of the deepest intellectual insecurity and irrationality and weakness. What's seriously wrong with this guy? Did his father beat him? Any political psychologists out there?

Update V: shorter Sen. Biden -- Bolton's treatment of Christian Westermann is no aberration..."I believe Mr. Bolton is a very bright man without a governor, who shaded the whole truth before us about what his motivations were relative to the INR analyst and the NIO analyst..."

Update VI: Sen. Lugar: "This may be the most controversial nomination President Bush has made..." ..."They [the Bush administration] will find another ambassador in the event this one is not satisfying." ...

12:30pm. Hearing adjourned.

Verdict? Ford's testimony was nothing less than devastating for Bolton. Bolton clearly mischaracterized under oath his campaign to retaliate against Westermann. Several other witnesses have testified to Committee staff that Bolton's bullying of and retaliation against Westermann were no aberration in his management practices either. Is Chafee as courageous as Ford to do the right thing on this one?

Post-Hearing Update here.

Bolton Genocide Appeasement Watch. This is really stunning. Bolton would not even in hindsight have the UN intervene to stop the genocide of 800,000 people in Rwanda. From Fred Kaplan's Slate piece on the Bolton hearings:

The second reason-Bolton's non-position on whether genocide should prompt U.N. action-was taken up by only one senator today, but, in an age of great debate over "humanitarian interventions," it should be a major issue. Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., asked Bolton what he thought about the United Nations' inaction during the Rwandan genocide. Bolton evaded, saying it wasn't a "U.N. failure" but a failure of the member nations. OK, Feingold came back, what would you have done had you been the ambassador back then-and had you known everything that we know now? Bolton replied, "We don't know if, logistically, it would have been possible to do anything differently at the time." Feingold seemed dumbfounded by the answer. He said only, "Your answer is amazingly passive," then went on to another issue. But the answer was much more than that; it was a shocking evasion. Feingold was asking a pointed hypothetical question-whether we should have done something, if we had known exactly what was going on. It was meant to get at whether Bolton sees the United Nations as an organization that should intervene in such crises. Bolton reduced it to a question of logistics and refused to answer. Someone should ask him again and insist on a full answer. (In general, while a few senators asked Bolton about his views on U.N. structural reform, they showed an appalling lack of curiosity about his views of the world and the United Nations' place in it.)

So all of Bolton's tiresome UN bashing and bull dog yap yap yap is not designed to make the UN more effective at carrying out the primary mission it was created for in the wake of the Holocaust: to save human life and stop genocide. It's purposeless, empty, hot air, designed to make the American right wing feel good about themselves.

Look, it doesn't take courage to bash the UN. The Democratic critique of the UN has been articulated perfectly well by people like Samantha Power and Richard Holbrooke. And that is, that it is structurally flawed at intervening quickly to stop genocide and avert humanitarian catastrophe.

But what's the Bolton/right's critique of the UN? That it somehow restricts American moral authority in carrying out its foreign policy. That's phony. The UN has hardly tied down any US administration from carrying out the national security policy it has intended to pursue, whether NATO intervention during the Clinton administration to stop mass ethnic cleansing in Kosovo or the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq.

That Bolton's UN bashing serves no purpose, that it isn't designed to 'tough love' that institution to be more effective at saving human life demonstrates how utterly cynical is this Bush administration appointment. And it shows that Bolton would appease genocide while sitting in New York, just like his Russian and Chinese and Sudanese counterparts, who he believes poking at is his whole reason for being there. He's just a loud-mouthed appeaser of evil, not a genuine proponent of reform. Whether he survives this nomination hearing or not, Bolton's testimony yesterday on Rwanda makes clear he is a human being worthy of our deepest contempt.

Sharon told NBC News Monday that, "the atmosphere here looks like the eve of the civil war," Haaretz reports. He also told NBC that measures are being taken to protect his life from right wing assassins. Is it just me, or does the American press not seem to be covering this very much?

Meantime, Hezbollah flew an unmanned surveillance plane over northern Israel. This follows its November flight of a small reconnaissance drone into Israel from Lebanon.

Bolton hearings from the WaPo:

Some of the sharpest questioning challenged Bolton's efforts to remove two career intelligence analysts from their posts, allegedly because they had objected to language that Bolton wanted to include in a May 2002 speech on the existence of a secret biological weapons program in Cuba. One official, Christian Westermann, the chief bioweapons analyst at the State Department, refused to clear the speech because the proposed language went beyond current intelligence assessments, Democrats said. The other official allegedly targeted by Bolton was an unidentified analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency's National Intelligence Council.

Bolton denied that he sought to have Westermann and the other official fired from their jobs, but he acknowledged under questioning that he had complained to their superiors that he found their conduct "unprofessional."

He said this was not because of any dispute over the substance of the intelligence but because they had tried to go behind his back with their concerns and he had lost confidence in them.

Looking forward to Carl Ford's testimony tomorrow, to resolve the question on whether Bolton attempted to retaliate against two intelligence professionals who dared disagre with him.

Update: Go check out Dave Meyer's round up of the hearings coverage.

Creepy incident at the Capitol.

Working both ends against the middle -- the Ralph Reed, Jack Abramoff, Mike Scanlon winning formula. From Peter Stone's September 18, 2004 National Journal piece, dateline Rehoboth Beach, Delaware:

There's yet another twist in the widening story of consultant -- and former Christian Coalition leader -- Ralph Reed and the $4.2 million he was paid in 2001 and 2002 for running grassroots campaigns against Indian casino operations and other gambling ventures. Of the total amount that went to Reed's consulting firms, more than half -- $2.4 million -- came from an obscure think tank located in Rehoboth Beach, Del., called the American International Center. The now-defunct center was formed in early 2001 by Washington PR man Michael Scanlon, a former aide to then-House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, R-Texas. At the same time the center was created, Scanlon was working with Jack Abramoff, then a prominent Indian casino lobbyist with the firm Greenberg Traurig.

Two of Abramoff and Scanlon's Indian casino clients... wanted to block gambling competition from rival tribes. Scanlon paid Reed, who is an old friend of Abramoff's, to help with that effort...

In one case, Reed's work benefited the Louisiana Coushattas by generating conservative support for a lawsuit filed by the Texas attorney general that led to the closing of casinos run by the Tigua Indians of Texas and by the Alabama-Coushatta Tribe of Texas in February 2002.

Then Abramoff goes to the Tigua Indians and says if they pay him $120,000+ per month, he will work to win them gambling rights (what Ralph Reed, tasked by Scanlon for a million-dollar plus payoff, had worked up conservative Christian support against). As the New York Times reports today:

The messages document how [Abramoff and Scanlon] maneuvered secretly in 2001 to organize a campaign to pressure the Texas state government to shut down a casino owned by the Tigua tribe of western Texas, only to then turn around and present themselves as the casino's savior. Mr. Abramoff offered his services to the tribe for a suggested monthly lobbying fee of $125,000 to $175,000 a month.

Hey, Reed had to be paid his share too.

Also we hear that much partying and stuff went on in those Rehoboth beach house Scanlon's foundation owned (and where, the National Journal reported, one "top officer" in Scanlon's bogus foundation included the local "lifeguard of the year"). Stuff involving a cocktail waitress that apparently made a couple of Scanlon's ex and current wives angry enough to send some documents to the Washington Post. Honestly, the writers of the Sopranos and Desperate Housewives couldn't make this stuff up. Who gets the movie rights?

"No GOP politician wants to be the handmaiden of DeLay's Democratic detractors," Bob Novak writes today, in a piece that alleges the NYT oped page solicited a DeLay-should-resign oped from a former Republican politico, Bob Livingston. (Novak didn't manage to get a copy of the NYT email itself, but said an official from Livingston's lobbying group read it to him).

But then Novak writes, "Since Bob Livingston would not get the ball rolling, the campaign to get DeLay still needs a major anti-DeLay Republican to go public." Seems Novak wrote the piece before Shays went on record calling for DeLay to resign yesterday? And before Newsweek cited Abramoff warning he's prepared to go through his receipts for the Feds?

More from Garance Franke-Ruta, who wonders if Novak has ever participated in a Preston Gates junket to Saipan.

The NY Sun's Eli Lake has a pretty incredible story today. A political leader from the Iranian- and Syrian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah tells two former CIA operatives in a recent meeting that in the aftermath of 9/11, an American official approached the group to feel out cooperation in the war on terror. The Bush White House denies it. But Milt Bearden, who recently met with Hezbollah officials at a European-backed open session in Beirut, says the Hezbollah official insists on the US overture:

Mr. Bearden recalled that the leader of the Hezbollah delegation said: "The Americans came to us after 9/11 wanting to open a dialogue, at a political level. ... 'It came through the Israeli gate,' meaning the Israelis brokered it." Mr. Bearden added that the representative said his organization would "be open to a direct approach from the Americans."

Another former CIA operations officer who was there, Graham Fuller, told The New York Sun the message was delivered by Hezbollah's chief of international relations and top political adviser, Nawaf Mousawi.

Lake unpacks a lot of information in this piece, which necessarily has a lot of "he said, he said" dispute as the White House will not admit to any such overtures. But reading it, it seems the other side of the piece Sy Hersh reported on Syria-US cooperation in the aftermath of 9/11. Lake's piece is a fascinating glimpse as well of a European channel to Hamas, Hezbollah, Pakistan's Jemaat Islamiya, and the Muslim Brotherhood. Go read.

This is almost comical. As Dave Meyer recounts from the Bolton nomination hearings, Bolton is currently espousing the four principles of the United Nations that he has embroidered on a pillow on the loveseat in his office.

The kind of folk DeLay and the boys hang with. Not exactly the poster boys for moral virtue at their chapels, eh? But of course, Abramoff was serving a higher purpose -- apartheid! What's wrong with finding some common interests by running a cut out for apartheid military intelligence anyhow, and channeling some money to the like minded folks in the GOP? And recreating the paradigm for Russian security interests? How come Chris Shays doesn't get it? So was Bolton working for Helms when Helms was the beneficiary of apartheid military intelligence largesse via the International Freedom Foundation?

Good news for Greeks! America is now the most hated country in Turkey:

Polls suggest that few countries have turned more dramatically against the United States than Turkey.

The latest survey, gathered in February by the private Metropoll organization, found that four in 10 Turks regard the United States as their country's "biggest enemy." That is more than double the number who named Greece, the ancient rival Turkey has come to the brink of war with three times in the last half-century.

From the Washington Post's Karl Vick.

Here's some background as to why Chris Shays is the first Republican Congressman to jump ship from the beleaguered SS DeLay. It came from a reader S in response to what I posted Friday about the leadership by DeLay's former favorite lobbyist, Jack Abramoff, of an apartheid-era South African military intelligence-funded pseudo think tank, the International Freedom Foundation:

Laura, there is another connection for International Freedom Foundation it might be useful to rediscover and recall.

I believe this happened in 1991 -- it was clearly during the Bush One Administration, but it was a goodly case of "blackmail" that emerged from House Hearings on the Administration of HUD during the Reagan years. At the time the committee was headed by Tom Lantos, and Chris Shays was either ranking Republican -- or most vocal Republican. It involved the use of HUD rehab and repair funds as political pay-offs during the Samuel Pierce secretaryship (Reagan), and the pay off's to political committees that were expected (required) of grantees. One channel for this was the support of International Freedom Foundation dinners through the purchase of tables and individual tickets with the literature about the organization focused on the support of anti-communist organizations doing charitable work in South Africa. In essence, if you wanted a HUD grant, you had to kick back by supporting this organization.

I know some folk went to jail on this scandal (among them the step-daughter of Nixon era AG, John Mitchell, who was a Pierce consultant), and there were others who plead, and took fines. I don't believe the work of DOJ was finished on it till well into the Clinton Administration. Anyhow, a full description of how the International Freedom Foundation blackmail worked was in the public testimony, and I am sure it was covered by the press in some detail. Of course what it really represented was turning HUD appropriations into support for the South African Apartheid regime.

It might be worth it to bring this issue up again, particularly since Chris Shays was so vocal in his condemnation of the effort to Blackmail, just in case he needs an additional reason not to support DeLay...[redacted]. Anyhow, what the investigations revealed was the use of HUD as a piggy bank for supporting Republican interests other than low income housing. If I remember rightly, Secretary Kemp was actually somewhat supportive of the congressional investigative effort because it "forced" him and HUD to get rid of several layers of rot.

There's some more in the letter which requires some follow-up before posting. [Thx to KB and DT for the corrections.]
Late Sunday Update: Shays calls on DeLay to quit.

"DeLay knew everything," Abramoff tells a lunch companion interviewed by Newsweek's Michael Isikoff. "He knew all the details."

It is a Washington melodrama that has played out many times before. When political figures get into trouble and their worlds collapse, they look to save themselves by fingering others higher in the food chain. Will Abramoff attempt to bargain with federal prosecutors by offering up DeLay—and does he really have the goods to do so? Abramoff has at times hinted he wanted to bargain—possibly by naming members who sought campaign cash for legislative favors, says a source familiar with the probe.

I suspect Abramoff is the kind of guy who has the goods and the bads. Let the fun begin.

Update: Matt reminds us there's already an August 2004 Russian press report that DeLay knew NaftaSib was financing his Moscow junket. From the Kommersant report Matt caught:

Kulakovsky and Nevskaya are not particularly well known in Russia, but are more familiar to Americans. In August 1997, NaftaSib paid for the Moscow leg of US House of Representatives leader Tom DeLay's trip to Moscow. Nevskaya accompanied him in Moscow. It was claimed in the American press that she taught at the Military Diplomatic Academy, where personnel for the Main Intelligence Division of the Russian Joint Staff are trained.

Perhaps what's under investigation in the States now is well known in Russia's petrol-business community. One other point: wasn't NaftaSib one of the bidders on Mikhail Khodorovsky's Yukos when the Russian state seized and sold its assets last year? Don't Khodorovsky's supporters (and he has them in this town too) have dirt to dish? Take it away, Moscow correspondents.

The Boston Globe has a very interesting article on an issue we have been following here pretty closely: the Pentagon's concerns about Israeli technology transfer to the Chinese military. What's new? A forthcoming classified Pentagon report that alleges that China has in the past two years vastly improved its military capabilities regarding Taiwan. And that the Chinese military's new J-10 warplane closely resembles the Israeli Lavi, designed with US assistance:

By strengthening its air power and acquiring dozens of new warships and submarines, China is close to having the ability to knock out Taiwan's airfields and ports before the United States could intervene, the sources said...

The official said the Chinese military would soon be able to breach Taiwan's defenses before the US military could stop it...

The new J-10 fighter, which is expected to be launched this year, was built with the aid of Israeli technology, either by copying a design or through assistance from Israeli industries, according to the officials. The jet is China's most sophisticated fighter to date, and on a par with the US F-16, intelligence officials said.

But don't automatically take the report's findings at face value, warn some Asia watchers cited in the article:

Some nongovernment analysts see the warnings about China as a way to justify greater US spending on ships and planes.

''A great deal of self-serving distortion makes its way into analysis," said James Lilley, the former top US diplomat in both China and Taiwan. Lilley says the China threat is being exaggerated by some in the Pentagon to justify increased weapons spending.

Remember Team B's vast overestimates of Soviet strengths.

This is a big story, one the NYT and Wash Post have done nothing to advance, that I've seen. Good for the Globe's Brian Bender for jumping on it.

It also raises a lot of questions. For one, the Israeli press has been reporting for months that the nature of the dispute between the Pentagon and Israeli Ministry of Defense concerns Israeli technological upgrades to China's Harpy drone. But was it really all this time about the Lavi plane design turning up in the Chinese military J-10? Was the Harpy story just a cover story put out by Israeli defense sources to minimize the substance of the dispute?

And who wrote the Pentagon report? Bender suggests DoD neoconservatives, but who exactly? And is this Team B all over again?

Update: More from Matt.

As Sharon arrives in Texas for meetings with Bush, really ominous developments in Israel, with fears of a clash between far right groups organizing a protest in Jerusalem's Old City and police encircling it averted yesterday when the crowds did not show up. Ha'aretz reports here and here. "The events in the Gaza Strip are liable to deteriorate into an overall violent conflict between two Jewish states with different goals," writes Ze'ev Schiff.

One is the State of Israel, and the other is the state of the settlers.

Despite the profound ties between them, each of them feels threatened by the other. The major clash is expected when the State of Israel carries out the disengagement from the Gaza Strip and northern Samaria. But it would be a mistake to think it will end with that. If the Israeli government really intends to carry out its commitments to the road map, the conflict between the sides will probably intensify.

The State of Israel established the state of the settlers and, in the final analysis, the golem is rebelling against its creator.

Abramoff and South Africa's apartheid regime. The post below reminded me of something I was told about Abramoff last year, in the context of researching an entirely different story. Along those lines, it's worth revisiting an extraordinary July 16, 1995 Newsday article by Dele Olojede and Tim Phelps, Front for Apartheid: Washington-based think tank said to be part of ruse to prolong power. It's about a "think tank," the International Freedom Foundation (IFF), set up in 1986, that Abramoff helped run, that turned out to have been created and financed by the apartheid era South African defense forces. Its purpose? To improve the apartheid government's image in the West, and demonize its opponents, the African National Congress and Nelson Mandela, as communist stooges.

The Newsday piece is mentioned on the Internet, but I could only find the whole piece available through Nexis. Here are some relevant excerpts:

Johannesburg, South Africa - A respectable Washington foundation, which drew into its web prominent Republican and conservative figures like Sen. Jesse Helms and other members of Congress, was actually a front organization bankrolled by South Africa's last white rulers to prolong apartheid, a Newsday investigation has shown.

The International Freedom Foundation, founded in 1986 seemingly as a conservative think tank, was in fact part of an elaborate intelligence gathering operation, and was designed to be an instrument for "political warfare" against apartheid's foes, according to former senior South African spy Craig Williamson. The South Africans spent up to $ 1.5 million a year through 1992 to underwrite "Operation Babushka," as the IFF project was known.

The current South African National Defence Force officially confirmed that the IFF was its dummy operation.

"The International Freedom Foundation was a former SA Defence Force project," Army Col. John Rolt, a military spokesman, said in a terse response to an inquiry. A member of the IFF's international board of directors also conceded Friday that at least half of the foundation's funds came from projects undertaken on behalf of South Africa's military intelligence, although he refused to say what these projects were except that many of them were directed against Nelson Mandela's African National Congress.

A three-month Newsday investigation determined that one of the project's broad objectives was to try to reverse the apartheid regime's pariah status in Western political circles. More specifically, the IFF sought to portray the ANC as a tool of Soviet communism, thus undercutting the movement's growing international acceptance as the government-in-waiting of a future multiracial South Africa...

The South Africans found willing, though possibly unwitting, allies in influential Republican politicians, conservative intellectuals and activists. Sen. Jesse Helms, now chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, served as chairman of the editorial advisory board for the foundation's publications. Through a spokesman, Helms said that he did not know anything about the foundation...

Rep. Dan Burton, who was the ranking Republican on the House subcommittee on Africa, and Rep. Robert Dornan were active in IFF projects, frequently serving on its delegations to international forums. Alan Keyes, currently a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, also served as adviser. (He did not return a call seeking comment.) The Washington lobbyist and former movie producer Jack Abramoff, and rising conservative stars like Duncan Sellars, helped run the foundation.

All those contacted denied knowing that it was controlled and funded by the South African regime.

Although there are strong indications that U.S. laws may have been broken - some IFF officials have admitted in interviews that they knew that South African military intelligence money helped pay for the foundation's activities in Washington - there is no clear evidence that the politicians associated with IFF either took campaign contributions or otherwise directly benefited financially from the foundation.

Under U.S. law, anyone who represents a foreign government, or acts under its orders, direction or control, has to register with the Justice Department as a foreign agent. Asked if a "think tank" set up and supported by a foreign government has to register, a Justice official said, "If the foreign [government] has some say in what they are doing - and, obviously, if they are funding it they probably do - then they probably do have to register." Violation of the law carries a fine up to $ 10,000 and a prison term up to five years.

Several key figures involved in the IFF and contacted by Newsday denied any knowledge that the foundation was a front for the political agenda of a foreign government. ...

Williamson said that the operation was deliberately constructed so that many of the people would not know they were involved with a foreign government. "That was the beauty of the whole thing - guys pushing what they believed," he said...

Doesn't that sound so very familiar. As the Post this week reported about DeLay's 1997 Moscow junket, "Aides to DeLay, who is now the House majority leader, said that despite the presence during the [1997] trip [to Moscow] of the two registered lobbyists, DeLay thought the nonprofit organization -- the National Center for Public Policy Research -- was funding the trip on its own."

The Newsday piece continues:

But in some cases, such as Abramoff's, the relationship with the South African security apparatus was more than merely coincidental, according to Williamson and others. A former chief of intelligence, now retired, said emphatically that the South African military helped finance Abramoff's 1988 movie "Red Scorpion." The movie was a sympathetic portrayal of an anti-communist African guerrilla commander loosely based on Jonas Savimbi, the Angolan rebel leader allied to both Washington and Pretoria. Williamson also said the production of "Red Scorpion" was "funded by our guys," who in addition provided military trucks and equipment - as well as extras.

Abramson reacted with anger when told of the allegations Friday, saying his movie was funded by private investors and had nothing to do with the South African government. "This is outrageous," he said.

Good to pause for a moment.

OK, here's more:

On the surface, the IFF's headquarters was in northeast Washington, D.C., at 200 G Street, next door to the Free Congress Foundation, another conservative institution. From that base, it launched campaigns against communist sympathizers and perceived enemies of the free market. It broadly supported Reaganism, and its principal officers ran with the Ollie North crowd. But it always paid special attention to the ANC. When Mandela made his first visit to the United States in 1990, following his release from prison, the IFF placed advertisements in local papers designed to dampen public enthusiasm for Mandela. One ad in the Miami Herald portrayed Mandela as an ally and defender of Cuba's Fidel Castro. The city's large Cuban community was so agitated that a ceremony to present Mandela with keys to the city was scrapped...

But its [the IFF's] main purpose was always to serve the ultimate goals of the South African government, according to those who helped nudge it in that direction. The former senior South African military intelligence official said he traveled to the United States and Canada in 1988 as a guest of the IFF...

Far from being a mere branch of the IFF, the Johannesburg office was in fact the nerve center of IFF operations worldwide...

Although he insisted that the IFF was no clandestine operation, Russel Crystal, who ran the Johannesburg office, said it was vital to the foundation. He said Friday in an interview that "jobs" for South Africa's military intelligence provided at least half of total IFF revenue, and that he sometimes asked military intelligence to send the fees from these "jobs" directly to the Washington office of the IFF.

I haven't until recently been paying close attention to the details of the investigations into DeLay/Abramoff. And what's new to me is certainly old news to some of the people who have long been working this. But the pattern this 1995 piece lays out of Abramoff being involved in running pseudo-think tanks financed by (nasty elements of) foreign regimes, to build improper alliances with hardline conservative American legislators, seems really quite stunning to me. And the excuse that he had no idea who was really behind them becomes increasingly implausible.

Update: If we didn't know better, that Abramoff and DeLay were ideologically on the same side, the whole thing almost reminds one a bit of intelligence tactics one used to hear about in the former Soviet bloc and other third world regimes. Of intel agents trying to get highly embarrassing evidence of corruption or other reputation-shattering, incriminating material on politicos, that could be used to blackmail them. Remember the whole Montesino affair in Peru. Creepy stuff.

Writing in Slate, the FT's James Harding has at the relationship Tom DeLay can't shake:

Where to begin examining the extraordinary career of Jack Abramoff? His work trying to secure a visa for the great Zairean kleptocrat Mobutu Sese Seko, perhaps, or the bilking of an estimated $66 million out of Native American tribes, clients he described as "monkeys," "troglodytes," and "idiots"? Or his leadership of a 1980s think tank financed, unbeknownst to him apparently, by the intelligence arm of South Africa's apartheid regime?

No, the chapter of our man's story that matters most at the moment begins with a toast given by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay during a New Year's trip they both took to Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands in 1997. "When one of my closest and dearest friends, Jack Abramoff, your most able representative in Washington, D.C., invited me to the islands, I wanted to see firsthand the free-market success and the progress and reform you have made," DeLay said before an audience of Abramoff's clients in the islands' garment industry—whom, upon his return to Washington, he helped win an extended exemption from federal immigration and labor laws.

The most salient fact about Abramoff these days is that he may prove DeLay's undoing...

Since Abramoff's troubles began, he and DeLay have sought to distance themselves from the other. But DeLay can't shake Abramoff loose so easily—not after their trips abroad, the major role Abramoff played in DeLay's well-financed and successful run for whip, the public praise DeLay heaped on Abramoff for helping to bring Native Americans into the Republican fold. Abramoff has hired a number of ex-DeLay staffers, worked closely with the congressman on trade issues, and was partly responsible for DeLay's trips to Britain and Russia. And he has contributed tens of thousands of dollars to DeLay's various political organizations. Given the unfolding details of Abramoff's extraordinary three-ring circus of lobbying, political fund-raising, and supposed nonprofit work, the danger for the House majority leader is that the Abramoff story has only just begun to come out.

Abramoff's relationship with figures from South Africa's apartheid regime is ugly reading, and there's more on this sure to come out. More on Abramoff's lobbying links to the Russian security services and Yugoslavia's Milosevic-era government here and here from The American Prospect's Garance Franke-Ruta.

Editor & Publisher's dispatch from the much pre-publicized National Press Club event on blogging and journalism today. Apparently Gannon did not get a daily White House press pass right away, but the process involved some wait. Am waiting for more than this from panelist Matt Yglesias.

The European Union fails to observe the travel sanctions it itself imposed. Where's the respect for human rights here, folks?

What would Emily Post do? Handshakes observed among dignitaries and sworn enemies in Rome for the Pope's funeral. The Iranian-born Israeli president Moshe Katsav was observed shaking hands with Syria's President Assad, twice, and then spoke Persian with Iranian president Khatami:

"The Syrian president sat in the chair behind me ... we exchanged smiles and shook hands," Katsav, who holds a largely ceremonial post, was quoted as telling the Web site of Israel's Maariv newspaper on Friday.

The Iranian-born Katsav also said he spoke at the Vatican funeral in his native Farsi with Iran's president, Mohammad Khatami, about their common city of birth. Iran officially seeks Israel's destruction.

"The president of Iran extended his hand to me, I shook it and told him in Farsi 'may peace be upon you'," Katsav told the Web site.

He said he later shook Assad's hand a second time during the funeral. "This time it was the Syrian president who held out his hand to me," Katsav was quoted as saying.

Somewhere the Pope is smiling.

Al Kamen is on a roll.

Remember when Tom DeLay thought that Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic couldn't be defeated by NATO? How defeatist was that! to think how the GOP would have howled had the Democrats contended Saddam Hussein couldn't be defeated by the US led invasion in 2003. Sayeth DeLay, as noted by Slate's William Saletan at the time, in the midst of the NATO air war in 1999 (with US military personnel lives on the line), "He's stronger in Kosovo now than he was before the bombing. ... The Serbian people are rallying around [Milosevic] like never before. He's much stronger with his allies, Russians and others." Of course, within weeks, Serbia had raised the white flag and retreated from Kosovo and Milosevic agreed to allow 37,000 NATO-led peacekeepers into the province (a deal brokered with the reluctant assistance of Russian Yugoslavia envoy and DeLay golfing buddy Victor Chernomyrdin), and a little over a year later, the Serbian people peacefully turned Milosevic out of office after elections. A year after that, Serbian authorities rounded up Milosevic and sent him off to the Hague to face war crimes charges. When you see things through Moscow's eyes, as DeLay is apparently wont to do, you can just find yourself on the wrong side of history.

What kind of signal is Bush sending about the MEK, Newsweek asks. Arms Control Wonk parses Bolton's statements on the group as well.

Friday Update: The Agonist has a heads up on a pro-MEK conference in Washington planned for April 14th.

Zalmay Khalizad nominated to be US ambassador to Iraq.

Read Slate's Fred Kaplan for a disheartening analysis of why the Pentagon apparently can't manage to teach soldiers foreign languages.

Old Guard continues to depart Pentagon. Chris Nelson reports in tonight's Nelson Repot that Bill Luti, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Plans and Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs, who oversaw the Office of Special Plans for Doug Feith, is headed back across the Potomac to the Old Executive Office Building:

DOD’s Bill Luti is moving to the NSC to take the defense portfolio of Frank Miller, departing for the presumed lucre of private practice. An experienced observer offers this heartening endorsement: “Luti is widely judged one of the real crazies at the Pentagon, so he should fit in just fine in the OEOB.” We’ve not met the gent, and probably, after this, are unlikely to. Oh well...

With the respected career diplomat Eric Edelman replacing Feith as undersecretary of defense for policy, Navy Secretary Gordon England replacing Wolfowitz, and now Luti reported to be leaving Special Plans as well, one could dare to hope for a breakout of sanity in Bush II's DoD after all. And who knows how much longer Rumsfeld will stay. Then again, Luti is leaving DoD to be even closer to White House defense planning, and Edelman -- and potentially Luti's replacement as well? -- come from the orbit of Cheney's office.

As Kevin Drum notes, one notable signature is missing from the list of Republican former secretaries of state urging Richard Lugar to confirm Bolton as UN ambassador -- that of his boss, Colin Powell.

Update: A reader who wishes to remain anonymous writes:

Laura,

I'm surprised that this letter was released, given that the news coverage would focus on who did not sign the letter rather than who did sign the letter. Although an open Beltway secret, Bolton's outright insubordination of his nominal masters -- Powell and Armitage -- has not been given proper due in press coverage. Over the past four years, Bolton viewed his true master sitting in the OVP and was Cheney's eyes and ears at the State Department. Bolton and Armitage in particular despised each other. It got to the point where I recall a [Senate Foreign Relations Committee] hearing where Senator Biden was lecturing Secretary Powell on the need to corrall Bolton when Powell temporarily lost his cool and asserted "Mr. Bolton works for me." We all know, if that were truly the case, those words would never have been uttered.

It appears that Feingold is hardening in his opposition to Bolton and Chafee becomes the real fulcrum point. But keep in mind: even if Bolton is locked up inside the Committee, I would not be surprised to see conservatives press Frist to use a parliamentary procedure to bring the nomination directly to the floor. I have not studied either Committee or Chamber rules in depth recently, but I suspect this could be an option. Since Chairman Lugar presumably will vote for Bolton (despite his personal reservations), he will be hard-pressed to openly object on account that this dilutes his Committee's power. This could be the second front of the overall "Filibuster War".

Plame investigation effectively over? Journalist Murray Waas reports in The American Prospect that Plame special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald filed court papers last month saying "he completed virtually all aspects of his federal grand jury investigation as long as six months ago." Even awaiting the (unforthcoming) testimony of reporters Matthew Cooper and Judith Miller to "close out the case", people familiar with the investigation tell Waas the fact that the criminal investigation was completed more than six months ago means indictments seem unlikely. Waas promises more reporting on the case this week at his site. Late Wednesday Update: More from the Washington Post: "The sources ... said Fitzgerald may instead seek to charge a government official with committing perjury by giving conflicting information to prosecutors."

Back in Baghdad, the INC's intel chief, Aras Karim, who fled shortly before the US raided Chalabi's compound last May to Tehran. What's he been doing there all this time?

Heather Hurlburt on the Bolton nomination and hearings as an opportunity for Dems:

...This ain't about personalities. That's why I wonder whether the John-Bolton-has-three-heads strategy is really the right one.

From outside the Beltway, it looks like more politics-as-usual and personal attacks. And it seems overwhelmingly likely to fail. Progressives could have used the hearings as an occasion to get together around four or five big principles of how the US ought to be acting in the world -- ones that resonate with regular folks -- and then seek Bolton's pledge that he would act in accordance with them.

Those principles -- respect other nations' priorities if we want them to support ours; follow through on promises we make; live by the same rules we ask others to live by; etc. -- are ones that everybody gets, whether or not they are able to name all the members of the Security Council. They are a critical tool in explaining why Bolton's views and actions are a hindrance to US foreign policy.

Unfortunately, Bolton seems to represent a key strand of the Administration's views on the UN perfectly well - one that takes a certain zealous pleasure in throwing the china at all the principles Heather lays out.

AEI's Norm Ornstein is on NPR's Diane Rehme show, passionately slamming DeLay and the other guest, the American Conservative Union's David Keane, for trying to tie the conservative cause to DeLay's quickly sinking fate. The Weekly Standard's Matthew Continenti is firmly with Ornstein.

Hey, Abramoff has the receipts. DeLay wined, dined and feted by lobbyists for the Russian government, including Abramoff, on a 1997 junket to Moscow:

The expense-paid trip by DeLay and four of his staff members cost $57,238, according to records filed by his office. During his six days in Moscow, he played golf, met with Russian church leaders and talked to Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, a friend of Russian oil and gas executives associated with the lobbying effort.

DeLay also dined with the Russian executives and two Washington-based registered lobbyists for the Bahamian-registered company, sources say. One of those lobbyists was Jack Abramoff, who is now at the center of a federal influence-peddling and corruption probe related to his representation of Indian tribes.

House members bear some responsibility to ensure that the sponsors for their travel are not masquerading for registered lobbyists or foreign government interests, legal experts say. House ethics rules bar the acceptance of travel reimbursement from registered lobbyists and foreign agents...

The 1997 Moscow trip is the third foreign trip by DeLay to be scrutinized in recent weeks because of new statements by those involved that his travel was directly or indirectly financed by registered lobbyists or a foreign agent.

Media attention focused on DeLay's travel last month after The Washington Post reported on DeLay's participation in a $70,000 expense-paid trip to London and Scotland in 2000 that sources said was indirectly financed in part by an Indian tribe and a gambling services company. A few days earlier, media attention had focused on a $106,921 trip DeLay took to South Korea in 2001 that was financed by a tax-exempt group created by a lobbyist on behalf of a Korean businessman.

More from the American Foreign Policy Council about the cut out that sponsored DeLay's trip:

...Russia is sending a second naval spy ship into the Adriatic theater where U.S. carrier groups are deployed against Yugoslavia, TASS reports. A Russian naval official tells TASS that the Kildin, a Moma-class reconnaissance vessel with the Black Sea Fleet, has left its home port of Sevastopol. TASS says the Kildin will relieve another spy ship, the Liman.

[Editor's note: The Russian oil company that has supplied fuel to the Liman, the Kildin, and the rest of the Black Sea Fleet, has been bankrolling a political influence operation in Washington. Working through a cutout in the Bahamas, NaftaSib is paying a prominent D.C. law and public relations firm, Preston Gates Ellis & Rouvelas Meeds, to influence congressional staff, lawmakers, editorial writers and journalists. A NaftaSib executive involved in the influence effort is tied to GRU military intelligence. Most of the targets are conservative Republicans. In 1995, the same lobbyists were paid to represent the then Milosevic-controlled government of Montenegro, Yugoslavia.] [...]

The gang's all here.

Sad news about Saul Bellow. I had the chance to read Ravelstein and the Dean's December over the past few months, which both captured something about the contemporary political/philosophical debate the country has been grappling with. (Nicole Krauss' 2003 review.) Bellow's literary heir? My vote is a more recent transplant to Chicago, Bosnia's Aleksandar Hemon.

Journalist Murray Waas is promising to deliver a scoop on the Plame investigation soon. [Thx to RP].

More from this Ha'aretz piece on acrimony between Sharon and Netanyahu, who met last weekend at Sharon's ranch to try to broker a truce. Columns in the Jerusalem Post have taken an increasingly strident anti-Sharon line (and praise for DeLay for trying to kill US assistance to the Palestinians.) More here on the meeting next week in Washington between Sharon and Bush. "At stake is a final settlement to the Jewish state's conflict with the Palestinian Arabs."

Is message discipline the secret of Republican success, asks David Brooks in this oped? On the contrary, he argues, it's in disunity that conservatives have found strength, he says:

Conservatives have not triumphed because they have built a disciplined and efficient message machine. Conservatives have thrived because they are split into feuding factions that squabble incessantly. As these factions have multiplied, more people have come to call themselves conservatives because they've found one faction to agree with.

In the early days of National Review, many of the senior editors didn't even speak to one another...

It's been like that ever since - neocons arguing with theocons, the old right with the new right, internationalists versus isolationists, supply siders versus fiscal conservatives. The major conservative magazines - The Weekly Standard, National Review, Reason, The American Conservative, The National Interest, Commentary - agree on almost nothing.

This feuding has meant that the meaning of conservatism is always shifting. Once, Republicans were isolationists. Now most Republicans, according to a New York Times poll, believe the U.S. should try to change dictatorships into democracies when it can. Meanwhile, 78 percent of Democrats believe the U.S. should not try to democratize authoritarian regimes.

Moreover, it's not only feuding that has been the key to conservative success - it's also what the feuding's about. When modern conservatism became aware of itself, conservatives were so far out of power it wasn't even worth thinking about policy prescriptions. They argued about the order of the universe, and how the social order should reflect the moral order...

Conservatives fell into the habit of being acutely conscious of their intellectual forebears and had big debates about public philosophy. That turned out to be important: nobody joins a movement because of admiration for its entitlement reform plan. People join up because they think that movement's views about human nature and society are true.

Liberals have not had a comparable public philosophy debate.

Update: Matt Yglesias says Brooks is wrong:

The conservative predilection for arguing about philosophy rather than policy is both cause and effect of the conservative inability to frame or implement any workable policies. Even when you get a basically correct, basically conservative policy idea -- welfare reform, say -- without hefty liberal input into program-design you would just have a fiasco on your hands. So I think this is more a problem for conservatism than a source of strength. The conservative policy vision keeps running into trouble because it basically doesn't make sense and nobody's really bothered to think through what they're trying to do now that they've captured political power.

But Brooks is probably right to say that this sort of disinclination to discuss the big, airy philosophical questions is a problem for liberals at the polls. It goes to "the vision thing" or, rather, the perception that liberals don't have one.

More from Ron Brownstein on the risks to Republicans of holding all the cards.

Talk about political pressure on US intelligence analysts! Check out Mark Hosenball's latest on Bolton. Which part of trying to get an intel analyst who disagreed with Bolton's Cuba bioweapons pronouncements transferred couldn't be construed as political "pressure?" And trying to get another one fired?

"Pro-democracy, anti-US," is the headline of this Zvi Bar'el Ha'aretz article, which argues the "Arab failure to accept Israel has little to do with the absence of democracy":

The sad part of all these examples ... is that the American adminstration and Bush in particular are perceived as a scourge. Reform movements in Egypt, Iran, Lebanon or Syria, whose members are ready to be killed for democracy in their country, go berserk the moment they are accused of receiving American funds or contributions.

To attain public legitimacy, it appears that each of these movements needs an anti-American slogan in addition to the pro-democracy slogan...

The leaders of the opposition in Lebanon, who bring masses to the streets with the slogan for "liberty and democracy," are careful not to be identified as supporters of the United States. So are the reform activists in Iran.

The result borders on the absurd: To build a democracy in the Middle East, at least some reform movement leaders believe they must paint themselves with anti-American colors. One sign raised in the demonstration in Egypt said, "No to America, Yes to democracy."

Sadly, one of our own seems to have gone mad.

Former assistant defense secretary Ash Carter's oped in the Washington Post about the Silberman-Robb WMD panel report is so worth reading, I am tempted to post the whole thing. The gist is that better intelligence on Iraq, Iran and North Korea would hardly have mattered to an administration that has no policy, or a predetermined policy, toward those places:

The fallacy in the administration's appointment of a commission to study intelligence failures is that there is almost never such a thing as a pure intelligence failure. Intelligence failure is usually linked to policy failure.

It's easy to see why Bush, or any president, would not want to call attention to that link. But the commission should have.

Let's take the case of North Korea. While the commission's chapters on North Korea's nuclear program are rightly classified, the unclassified summary suggests that spies and satellites have yielded very little information about that country's nuclear weapons efforts. But what does it matter? North Korea has admitted, indeed boasted, of its growing nuclear arsenal, and the United States has done nothing to stop it. How could a few more details provided by the CIA make a difference? If you don't have a policy, intelligence is irrelevant. North Korea's runaway nuclear program is a policy failure, not an intelligence failure.

What's worse, policy failure has actually caused intelligence failure in North Korea...

The "intelligence failure" that prompted the creation of the Robb-Silberman commission was, of course, Saddam Hussein's missing weapons of mass destruction...But Bush has since made it clear that even if he knew then what we know now... he would have invaded anyway...

It therefore is a fact that in the three most important cases studied by the commission -- Iraq, Iran and North Korea -- the intelligence failures the commission so carefully identifies and makes recommendations to correct made no difference to policy success or failure.

Go read.

The Boston Globe's Peter Canellos examines John Bolton's biography, discovering a hard-core conservatism that dates back to his days as a scholarship student and Barry Goldwater supporter at a military boarding school in Maryland, and later at Yale, where he headed the Yale Political Union's conservative party and edited a political magazine during the Vietnam war. Citizens for Global Solutions and Steve Clemons are relentlessly pursuing opposition to the Bolton nomination at their sites, and Dave Meyer is blogging the nomination hearing (scheduled for Thursday) at Tapped. Update: Former Richard Holbrooke staffer Suzanne Nossel sets out the top ten reasons why Bolton should not become US ambassador to the UN.

Monday Update/Reader mail -- Bolton supporters push back: A reader and Hill veteran who wishes to be anonymous writes:

By now, you probably have seen the letter organized by Frank Gaffney's Center for Security Policy, which features "some of America's most accomplished defense and foreign policy practicioners." [...] Yet a close look at some of the signers would indicate that the description of the signers hardly fits... [Several of the signers] has never held a foreign or defense policy position...Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Meese, although accomplished individuals, are not or have never been defense and foreign policy practitioners. If Mr. Gaffney wanted to advertise this letter as being signed by 'leading conservatives,' 'national leaders,' or 'high-ranking former U.S. government officials,', they would all be appropriate. But this letter is trying to say, just as there are former diplomats who have spent careers in the practice of U.S. foreign and security policy opposing Bolton, so there are supporting him. Some of the people on the Gaffney letter fit that description, but others do not. The coup de grace is that Alan Keyes is also one of the signers. His signature on this document completely undermines its seriousness and credibility...

"Israel, Palestinians united in praise of Pope," Ha'aretz reports:

...At the age of 79 and already ailing, the Pope embarked on a grueling seven-day pilgrimage to Israel, the Palestinian territories and Jordan in March 2000 that took him to the very roots of the Roman Catholic faith...

For Israelis, two images stand out: the Pope's pilgrimage to Yad Vashem, Israel's memorial to the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust, and his prayer at Jerusalem's Western Wall for forgiveness for historic Christian mistreatment of Jews.

"I would describe him as a great hero of Catholic-Jewish reconciliation," said Rabbi David Rosen, who was part of the Israeli team that negotiated the establishment of diplomatic relations between the Vatican and the Jewish state in 1993...

Jewish leaders had long praised the Polish Pope's repeated condemnation of anti-Semitism as a sin against God and man and his description of Jews as the Church's "dearly beloved elder brothers".

"He was the first Pope to apologize to the Jews," said an official in Israel's Chief Rabbinate. "In the past 10 years, ties have warmed and there is a tight connection between the Rabbinate of Israel and the Vatican."

During the Pope's reign, the Vatican and Israel exchanged ambassadors for the first time, marking a historical change in the Holy See's attitude towards the Jewish state...

A testament to the idea Pope John Paul II fiercely advocated, that each individual life is sacred, and that individuals can make a difference. RIP.

Sunday Update: Juan Cole lays out some reasons why the pope was a sometimes inconvenient ally for the right, and the left. A reader D writes, "Never forget he beatified the founder of Opus Dei and gave Bishop Romero the cold shoulder. The CHURCH gets to decide the value of the individual life, as far as this Pope was concerned. There is no inherent value in your own individual life. Romero's mistake was to think that each one of those poor downtrodden folks he tried to desperately to help had the right to feel valuable -- silly Romero. The Church is not about liberation; it's about vassalage." The writer of this letter published in the Washington Post Sunday, a former refugee from Ethiopia, explains why he considers the Pope a personal hero.

A horrifying "he said, he said" LAT post-mortem of a dispute within the CIA over whether CIA handlers told top CIA officials of overwhelming doubts about Curveball's credibility. Tyler Drumheller, former chief of the CIA Europe division, and James Pavitt, former deputy director of operations, insist that their bosses, then CIA director George Tenet and deputy John McLaughlin, were informed that Curveball was a fabricator, and had no idea that so much weight was being given by the White House to Curveball's information. Tenet and McLaughlin can't recall any such doubts being raised:

"My people were saying: 'We think he's a stinker,' " Pavitt said. But CIA bioweapons analysts, he said, "were saying: 'We still think he's worthwhile.' " Pavitt said he didn't convey his own doubts to Tenet because he didn't know until after the March 2003 invasion of Iraq that Curveball was "of such import" in prewar CIA assessments provided to the president, Congress and the public.

"Later, I remember the guffaws by myself and others when we said, 'How could they have put this much emphasis on this guy? … He wasn't worth [anything] in our minds," Pavitt said.

There's so much astonishing in here, about how a fairly obvious fabricator manages to find a few key defenders in US policy circles, because he provides information they desperately want to hear. With a miniscule supply of worthy intelligence sources on Iraq, and an infinite appetite, even the obvious junk becomes prized. (I've written about another case here). For instance, from the LAT piece:

*German authorities didn't let US intelligence officials interview Curveball, their source, until March 2004, a year after the Iraq invasion.

*German authorities told CIA Europe director Drumheller flat out at a lunch in October 2002, "Don't even ask to see him [Curveball] because he's a fabricator and he's crazy."

*The only US official who met with Curveball before the war, a DIA medical technician, also expressed doubts about Curveball.

*Despite all these doubts from Curveball's own handlers in Germany and those they liaised with directly at the CIA and DIA, the person considered most expert on Curveball at the CIA, an analyst in the WINPAC division, won out at a December 2002 CIA meeting to discuss Curveball:

The Curveball expert from WINPAC angrily argued back and apparently prevailed, the commission found. An official summary of the meeting later "played down" any doubts and said Curveball had been judged credible "after an exhaustive review."

*Despite all that, Tenet and McLaughlin insist they don't recall two separate specific warnings about Curveball from Drumheller.

Several weeks later, Drumheller discovered that his warning had been ignored when his executive officer brought him an advance copy of Powell's Feb. 5, 2003, speech to the U.N.

Drumheller said he then arranged a meeting in McLaughlin's office and described what the German operative had told him over lunch several months earlier. After listening for 10 minutes, Drumheller said, McLaughlin responded by saying, "Oh my! I hope that's not true."

McLaughlin, who retired in January after 32 years at the CIA, said he did not recall the meeting and denied that Drumheller told him Curveball might be a fabricator.

"I have absolutely no recall of such a discussion. None," McLaughlin said in a statement Friday. "Such a meeting does not appear on my calendar, nor was this view transmitted to me in writing." He said he was "at a loss" to explain the conflicting accounts.

But another red flag appeared. On Jan. 27, 2003, the CIA's Berlin station warned in a message to headquarters that Curveball's information "cannot be verified."

Drumheller, meanwhile, said he never heard from McLaughlin or anyone else to confirm that Curveball's material had been deleted from Powell's speech. So when Tenet called him at home on another matter the night before Powell was to speak in New York, Drumheller said he raised the Curveball case.

"I gave him the phone number for the guy he wanted," Drumheller recalled. "Then it struck me, 'I better say something.' I said, 'You know, boss, there's problems with that case.' He says, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm exhausted. Don't worry about it.' "

Of course, Curveball's information featured prominently in Powell's speech.

It will be worthwhile to see what our German colleagues can turn up about who really is Curveball, how he made his way into the German intelligence system, and how German authorities seemed to screw up mightily on their own end as well in giving him political asylum for his bogus information, determining him "crazy and a fabricator" fairly late in the game.

As to the political atmosphere in which this kind of horse manure was elevated to justify policy, Spencer Ackerman argues in this piece today that every administration is vulnerable to it, and the Silberman-Robb panel recommendations do nothing to ward against it:

Though the problem has been particularly pronounced in the Bush administration, Bush officials are hardly the only ones vulnerable to these temptations. Policymakers across the political spectrum have every reason to hold fast to their cherished theories--after all, they're often what officials owe their prominence to. Reforming the nation's intelligence apparatus won't only stumble on the shoals of recalcitrant agencies, but on the fixed ideas of policymakers who see no need to similarly reevaluate their approach to intelligence.

Update: Here's a year old piece from Der Spiegel that has a few more details about Curveball and Germany's BND.

Tad Szulc's 1978 New Republic essay on the global political implications of the election of Poland's Karol Cardinal Wojtyla to the papacy stands up remarkably well to the test of time:

Unlike his predecessors in recent centuries, John Paul II comes to Rome as a hardened political fighter, as well as an impressive theological intellectual...

When I met Cardinal Wojtyla in Warsaw last November--he was on one of his periodic visits to the capital from his Krakow archdiocese--I was impressed by the depth of his detailed understanding of foreign policy problems. He was interested in the prospects of Soviet-American detente under the Carter administration, the president's human rights policy, Middle Eastern and African developments and third world tensions.

As we talked about human rights, the cardinal spoke with passion of the need to advance them in Poland. And from the point of view of the church, he told me, "the most important thing is not obtaining permits to build more churches, but winning the right to teach religion in the schools and--crucially--to assure access by Catholics to the mass media without official censorship." [...]

Given all this background, John Paul II looms as an eminently modern pontiff operating on a top level of international politics. His election has already enhanced the political role and the prestige of the church in a world where Catholicism has been suffering a loss of influence...

Should, indeed, the election of John Paul II trigger a new wave of dissent, the problem facing Warsaw--and Moscow--will be how much tolerance can be afforded without undermining of the Communist system in the long run. The decision will be immensely difficult, given Poland's deep economic troubles and the consequent danger that any return to a hard line toward the church and its spiritual and political followers could touch off an explosion...

"What will Warsaw and Moscow do if a 'Prague Spring' emerges in Poland with church support?" a diplomat in Washington asked, referring to the aborted Czechoslovak experiment in socialist freedom in 1968. "Will they intervene decisively with a Polish Pope on the throne in Rome?" It is in this sense that the accession of John Paul II has created a new dimension in Communist and East-West politics, a dimension that cannot yet be precisely defined, but that cannot fail to significantly affect the overall picture.

David Ignatius on the WMD panel report and the politics of self-deception:

The report blamed everyone involved in the WMD fiasco except the Bush administration officials who actually made the decision to go to war. "[W]e were not authorized to investigate how policymakers used the intelligence assessments they received," the commission explained. That omission is unfortunate. If there's one thing that has become clear in the history of U.S. intelligence over the past 50 years it is that the CIA is not in fact a rogue agency. It is shaped, often to a fault, by the priorities and pet projects of whoever is in the White House. Intelligence supports policy, but it doesn't make it.

The Bush administration must examine its role in the process of self-deception over Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, above all to guard against future mistakes. It wasn't Saddam Hussein who deceived American leaders; he claimed repeatedly that he had no WMD. It was America that deceived itself. The commission said it didn't find evidence of any direct political pressure on analysts to skew their judgments. But it hints at the real-life Washington atmosphere in which the disastrous mistakes were made: "[I]t is hard to deny the conclusion that intelligence analysts worked in an environment that did not encourage skepticism about the conventional wisdom."

Worth reading.

Readers with clearances respond to Berger case. Earlier today, I asked for feedback about whether Sandy Berger's behavior is as baffling to those with security clearances as it was to me. Several people responded, and a few have agreed to let me post their perspectives anonymously.

Reader J:

Responding to your question, and having held Top Secret clearances now for the last six years, I am at a loss to explain what Berger was thinking. The GOP charges that Berger was engaged in some type of cover-up are difficult to believe -- the 9/11 Commission had full access to the Clarke report that Berger purloined -- it did not need the National Archives copy. That report was fully referenced in the final Commission report. If Berger did all this to cover something up, he is more stupid than criminal.

I have heard the following explanations:

1) Berger is, and always has been, an incredibly sloppy man, both in his
personal appearance and his work organization. The initial claim that this
was an inadvertent mistake fits into that caricature, although Berger has
now admitted the removal was intentional.

2) This memo in question was drafted by Richard Clarke, but ultimately was
signed out to the President under Berger's signature. Why couldn't he take
home a document that he "authored"? It was not as if he was learning anything new. I suspect this attitude permeates many national security officials, including myself at times. Rampant and needless overclassification afflicts our government. 50% of classified material does not contain sensitive materials that could compromise the security of our nation; more often than not, they are classified to avoid embarrassing U.S. officials or embarrasing foreign officials. But to argue that "loose lips sink ships" is a gross distortion of truly sensitive material, i.e. Ahmed Chalabi telling the Iranians the U.S. have broken the code to their electronic communications, versus more routine material that still is
classified, e.g. notes on a meeting between low-level U.S. officials meeting
with their low-level German counterparts.

3) Finally, hubris. Berger was the NSC Advisor and a highly influential foreign policy official for decades. He is used to having assistants bring him documents and them remove them for storage in safes. Now, here he was, sitting at the National Archives, reviewing a ton of documents, without even one aide to help him. Why should a man like he, who served at the pinnacle of U.S. government, have to check his documents in and out with menial National Archives staff? "Pride goeth before the fall."

Whatever the case, contrary to the Times speculaton, Berger's career as a U.S. government official is over. He is guilty of committing a misdemeanor,
a charge that would disqualify you or I from ever holding a U.S. security clearance. Imagine a confirmation hearing for Berger.

Reader C:

Having served on international delegations for the State department that involved classified materials, I know that the expectations on us were far tighter than apparently applied to the senior political people. I assume they don't have their trash baskets inspected by marines who write them up for security infractions, have their desks checked for unfiled classified documents or other actions meant to keep classified materials under control. Perhaps working in the White House or the CIA director's office with assistants and staff who deal with the mundane security details keeps the senior people from being aware of what is expected of them.

Perhaps the experience of coming in to his office, finding the trash basket turned over on his desk and receiving a message to report to the security officer's office to explain a violation might have been a good thing for Berger to experience a few years ago.

Regardless of the reason, I am truly disappointed in Mr. Berger's actions and am embarrassed by the image it portrays of democrats and national security issues.

Reader P:

It sounds awfully suspicious to me. The question I have is whether there were other copies of ALL of those copies. If there weren't then...

I was always frightened to death that I might inadvertently take classified information and leave it out on my desk, or take it home without realizing it. The classified data I had access to was far more classified. It was top secret crypto...

Reader D:

People who have security clearances for certain kinds of documents, and who deal with a lot of them for a long period of time, sometimes get into a state of denial that the rules don't apply to them because of their position, or former position. What happens is that they then get into a lot of hot water, which Berger surely has done, because they forget that the rules apply to everyone all the time. It is a perception of privilege, or perceived positional waiver of the law, which is, of course, a fantasy. Berger's subsequent actions look like a panic attack when he realized what he'd done. Fantasy over, bubble burst, end of story...

Sounds plausible to me that Berger might have been used to staff handling such mundate details. In any case, as reader J notes, Berger's career in the US government sounds to be over. (Then again, Elliot Abrams, John Negroponte, John Poindexter, and others have gotten in worse trouble to come back).

Saturday Update: More from the LAT's Johanna Neumann.

Berger was notorious for having a desk that looked like it had been hit by a hurricane, and his defenders seemed to be suggesting he had held onto some copies and cut up others in order to avoid losing them.

Berger's sentence clouds his career but may not end it. More than one Washington figure has recovered from scandal to return to power.

Elliott Abrams, who pleaded guilty to withholding information from Congress about funding for the Nicaraguan Contras, serves in President Bush's National Security Council as head of the Mideast bureau. Retired Adm. John M. Poindexter, also implicated in the arms-for-hostages scandal as national security advisor in the Reagan administration, has periodically served as a consultant to the Pentagon.

Sharon-Netanyahu truce? See here for some background.

Chalabi's supporters are correct on this point. Curveball is not INC, as was originally publicly indicated by the Senate Select Intelligence Committee report last July. But this WSJ editorial seems to imply that the US went to war in Iraq based pretty much solely on false allegations about mobile biological weapons labs provided by a single defector, Curveball. Of course, as is obvious, Curveball is hardly the only defector to have deliberately misled the US government and the media with fake information about Saddam's WMD connections and Saddam-al Qaeda connections, and at least three of those were provided by the INC, as its officials themselves admit. As this CJR article reported, "the INC claims it supplied just three defectors to the media through the ICP [information collection program]. But by my count it’s at least six: the three who talked about Salman Pak; al-Haideri; Mohammed Harith; and a sixth defector who talked with The Kansas City Star about seeing an American pilot, Scott Speicher, who was reported missing in action in the first Gulf War, in a jail in Baghdad. As noted, some think the tally might go quite a bit higher." More on what Iraq intelligence allegations the INC provided from Knight-Ridder. If you read my post from mid July, you'll see the INC's denials about a connection to Curveball were pretty convincing even back then. All the more so because they don't deny providing three other defectors who did mislead the US intelligence community and the press about Iraq WMD.

Baffling:

When the issue surfaced last year, Mr. Berger insisted that he had removed the classified material inadvertently. But in the plea agreement reached with prosecutors, he is expected to admit that he intentionally removed copies of five classified documents, destroyed three and misled staff members at the National Archives when confronted about it, according to an associate of Mr. Berger's who is involved in his defense but who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the plea has not been formalized in court...

On Sept. 2, 2003, in a daylong review of documents, Mr. Berger took a copy of a lengthy White House "after-action" report that he had commissioned to assess the government's performance in responding to the so-called millennium terrorist threat before New Year's 2000, and he placed the document in his pocket, the associate said. A month later, in another Archives session, he removed four copies of other versions of the report, the associate said.

Mr. Berger's intent, the associate said, was to compare the different versions of the 2000 report side by side and trace changes.

"He was just too tired and wasn't able to focus enough, and he felt like he needed to look at the documents in his home or his office to line them up," the associate said. "He now admits that was a real mistake."

Mr. Berger admits to compounding the mistake after removing the second set of documents on Oct. 2, 2003, the associate said. In comparing the versions at his office later that day, he realized that several were essentially the same, and he cut three copies into small pieces, the associate said. He also admitted to improperly removing handwritten notes he had taken at the Archives, the associate said.

I'm curious from readers and friends who have security clearances if this behavior is as baffling to them as to me. Did he destroy the three after action review documents so as not to have to return them to the Archives where he would have gotten in trouble for taking them in the first place? Did he think they were just copies? They were just copies, right? So is this like former CIA director Deutsch getting caught having classified material on his home office computer just for the sake of convenience, or what?

Wolfowitz will be succeeded as deputy defense secretary by Navy secretary Gordon Englund, the WaPo reports. And former Cheney advisor, and more recently US ambassador to Turkey Eric Edelman, will replace Douglas Feith as undersecretary of defense for policy. Meantime, a study by the Rand corporation commissioned by Rumsfeld has been harshly critical of the Pentagon Iraq post-war planning, another Post piece reports:

Planning for the invasion's aftermath rested with the Defense Department, the report recalls, rather than with the State Department or the National Security Council. "Overall, this approach worked poorly," the report says, noting that the Pentagon lacked the expertise, funding authority and contacts with civilian aid organizations for the job.

When the insurgency arose, the report says, U.S. authorities failed to understand how it differed from past "wars of national liberation" or from a "classical guerrilla-type campaign."