Reply #25: Fred Kaplan in Slate

[whometense]

http://slate.msn.com/id/2116567/

Bolton's appalling confirmation-hearings performance.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Monday, April 11, 2005, at 3:56 PM PT

<snip>

The charge, as revealed at today's hearing, is that in 2002, as the undersecretary of state for arms control, Bolton wrote a speech claiming that Cuba has an offensive biological-weapons program and is providing bio-weapons assistance to rogue regimes. The chief bio-weapons analyst in the State Department's bureau of intelligence and research challenged this view, as did the CIA's national intelligence officer for Latin America. As a result, Bolton tried (unsuccessfully) to get both analysts reassigned.

Bolton denied this charge, saying that his only problem with these analysts was "procedural." They engaged in "unprofessional conduct"—for instance, the State Department official, he said, went behind his back—so Bolton "lost confidence" in them and wanted them reassigned to other portfolios.

Bolton's account is most implausible. First, neither analyst worked under Bolton, so it's irrelevant that he lost confidence in them. Second, the "unprofessional conduct" amounted to the State Department analyst's sending Bolton's proposed speech and his own proposed modification to other intelligence officials—standard procedure for official speeches mentioning intelligence. Third, some of the panel's Democrats—Sens. Joseph Biden, Christopher Dodd, and John Kerry—cited interviews, which the bipartisan staff has recently conducted with these officials and their superiors, to bolster the accusation. For instance, the State Department analyst's immediate superior was quoted as saying that Bolton "said he was the president's appointee and … he wasn't going to be told what to say by a midlevel Munchkin."

What a SCHMUCK.