The Bolton Endgame (Laura Rozen)

[swag]

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20050511/the_bolton_endgame.php

Laura Rozen covers foreign policy and national security from Washington, D.C. as a journalist for the American Prospect and for her weblog, War and Piece .

On the eve of the Bolton vote, a dizzying stream of new information continued to wash in, filling in the portrait of Bolton and his loyalists as a kind of rogue political force engaged in all-but-open warfare against their bureaucratic enemies in the State Department and the U.S. intelligence community, and openly working to undermine the president's policies of supporting multilateral negotiations on North Korea and Iran's nuclear programs.

Emerging this week were more revelations about the unorthodox staff arrangements Bolton had, including the high-priced management consultant Matthew Freedman, who worked as a consultant for Bolton on a six-figure, taxpayer-funded salary with security clearance while also maintaining a side business consulting private clients whose identities he refused to disclose to the Senate committee staff. Also unusual was the fact that Bolton's acting chief of staff, Frederick Fleitz, worked simultaneously for Bolton and for his home agency, the CIA's non-proliferation department, WINPAC.

Then, on Wednesday, The Hill reported that some Democrats believe Bolton started to avail himself of an alternative intelligence operation bulked up during Bolton's tenure at State which some Democrats said resembled Doug Feith’s alternative intelligence shop at the Pentagon that produced hyped and misleading assessments of Saddam's collaboration with Osama bin Laden and Iraq's nuclear program. All these latest revelations were just more data points in the amply documented portrait of Bolton as a paranoid rogue operator who behaved as if he were dropped behind enemy lines while working in Colin Powell’s State Department, and using wired-in operatives to spy on his American bureaucratic enemies.

This persistent stream of revelations continues to damage Bolton, the moderate GOP senators who may vote for him (under tremendous threats and pressure from the White House), and the Bush administration. Indeed, this kind of all-or-nothing White House fanaticism shows how terrified the administration is to lose party discipline on any single issue.

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[LSparkle]

1. Not to mention Larry Flynt's investigative work

If we can't march him out the front door, let's push him through the back door. It may have to be his personal life that gets him scuttled, but hey, as long as his nomination is toast, I don't care.

[peacetalksforall]

2. So other threads are predicting a Bolton at the UN - an insult to the

world.

Hello world...Bolton isn't our fault - he is the fault of the PNAC, cabal, Fed Society, Carlyle and all the foundations and organizations that make up the cabal - an un-elite and diabolical banking, intelligence, corporate, military, religious, and politician cabal.

You and we citizens are all here to be sublimated and silenced. We are nothing to these people except as targets for theivery, lies, manipulation, and ridicule. They sneer-laugh at us all.