Ray McGovern
[LEAKGATE] John Bolton, the yellowcake liar
Sat May 14, 2005 23:22
64.140.158.26
John Bolton, the yellowcake liar
http://www.antiwar.com/mcgovern/?articleid=5934
May 13, 2005
John Bolton's Yellowcake
by Ray McGovern
What role did John Bolton play in the Bush administration's efforts to manufacture the intelligence needed to justify the invasion of Iraq? As it turns out, a hidden but important role. Remember the "yellowcake from Niger"?
Briefly reported last week in Steve Clemons' The Washington Note was that a Congressional subcommittee, citing a State Department inspector general's report, found that Bolton ordered and received updates on the notorious "Fact Sheet" of Dec. 19, 2002, that claimed Iraq had been trying to procure uranium "yellowcake" from Niger. In other words, John Bolton played a key role in ordering that discredited intelligence be used to support the president's case for war, three months before the attack on Iraq.
A Plan to Fix the Facts
TomPaine.com readers, unlike those malnourished by "mainstream media," were among the first to learn of the leaked document published by the London Sunday Times on May 1, in which the head of British intelligence told Prime Minister Tony Blair that President George W. Bush had decided to make war on Iraq. The date, you will remember, was July 23, 2002 – long before the president consulted Congress, and long before any intelligence was cooked up to "justify" such a decision.
The official minutes of that meeting show that the U.K. intelligence chief, Richard Dearlove, just back from consultations in Washington with then-CIA director George Tenet and other officials, announced matter-of-factly that the attack on Iraq is to be "justified by the conjunction of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction." British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw is quoted as confirming that Bush had decided on war, but interjects ruefully that the case for WMD was "thin." Not a problem, says Dearlove: "Intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
Boltonization
But how does this kind of "fixing" play out? Insights leap out of recently declassified e-mail messages from the office of Undersecretary of State John Bolton, archdeacon of politicization. I was particularly struck to learn from the Washington Post that Bolton's principal aide and chief enforcer, Frederick Fleitz, is actually a CIA analyst on loan to Bolton. In this light, his behavior in trying to cook intelligence to the recipe of high policy is even more inexcusable. CIA analysts, particularly those on detail to policy departments, have no business playing the enforcer of policy judgments, have no business conjuring up "intelligence around the policy."
Fleitz must have flunked Ethics and Intelligence Analysis 101. Or perhaps the CIA does not offer the course any more. This is the same Fleitz who "explained" to State Department intelligence analyst Christian Westermann that it was "a political judgment as to how to interpret this data [on Cuba's biological weapons program] and the I.C. [intelligence community] should do as we asked."
E-mails released more recently show Fleitz acting as stalking horse for Bolton to make sure the intelligence fit the policies Bolton was pushing. Fleitz is furious that State Department intelligence experts feel it their duty to demur on Bolton/Fleitz judgments regarding the efficacy of missile export controls against China. Fleitz, whose home office at CIA is the one which gave us "high confidence" judgments on the presence of WMD in Iraq, apparently ordered up analysis from CIA to suit his boss' strongly held judgment that the controls on exports to China were deficient.
Not surprisingly, Bolton liked the analysis that was served up by Fleitz' CIA colleagues and told him to pass it to Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. But State's intelligence analysts had the temerity to do their job, and attached a cover memo taking the opposite position, viewing the export controls positively. Questioned on this by Senate staffers last week, Fleitz admitted that his experience in his CIA home office gave him a personal stake in how the analysis was treated. This is doubly inappropriate.
The idea of seconding intelligence analysts to policy departments dates back almost three decades to a time when many analysts found themselves working in a vacuum, blissfully unaware of policymakers' interests and needs. The analysts' (otherwise laudable) search for relevance has now swung the pendulum too far in the other direction, with folks like Fleitz "cherry-picked" by folks like Bolton to "support" policy in wholly inappropriate ways. That top CIA officials allow the Boltons of this administration to get away with that shows CIA managers to be weak, witting, and willing accomplices in this corruption of the intelligence process.
Enter the Yellowcake
The Fleitz technique is one way to Boltonize intelligence, but there are other ways to counter attempts by intelligence analysts to "tell it like it is," when "like it is" needs to be "fixed" around a policy. Just go around the analysts.
An instructive example of this can be seen by harking back to a key juncture in the saga on Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction," in which Bolton achieved his aims by simply cutting State Department intelligence analysts out of the flow.
Painful as it is to bring up the embarrassing canard about Iraq seeking uranium in Niger, that sad chapter illustrates how Bolton operates when he knows he cannot bully intelligence community analysts to come up with the desired "analysis." Before President Bush's key speech on Oct. 7, 2002, setting the stage for Congress' vote on the war three days later, then-CIA director Tenet personally intervened to prevent the president from using spurious "intelligence" on the alleged attempts to acquire "yellowcake" (slightly enriched uranium) from Africa.
Just two months later, however, this canard reappeared in an official State Department "Fact Sheet" dated Dec. 19, debunking Baghdad's submission to the UN Security Council accounting for Iraqi weapons programs. The "Fact Sheet" directly cited the "yellowcake" deal as proof that Saddam Hussein was lying to the United States about his nuclear program (which had been "reconstituted" only in the rhetoric of Bolton's patron, Dick Cheney).
Small problem: State's intelligence analysts had long shared CIA's skepticism about that report. Indeed, in the National Intelligence Estimate of Oct. 1, 2002, they had branded it "dubious."
What accounts for new life being injected into this canard? We learned some time ago from a former senior Bush State Department official that the impetus came from Bolton's office. And now we have documentary proof, thanks to a State Department Inspector General investigation, the results of which were shared with a congressional subcommittee. In sum, when Bolton realized that the Iraq-Niger report itself left most analysts holding their noses (even before it was established that it was based on crude forgeries), his office inserted the bogus story into the official State Department "Fact Sheet" without clearing it with the department's own intelligence analysts. Easy.
This strongly suggests that it was also no accident that a month later the yellowcake fable found its way into the president's State of the Union address. Bolton's rogue operation ensured the subsequent embarrassment of one and all when the head of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohammed ElBaradei, declared the reports "not authentic," forcing both White House officials and George Tenet to apologize.
Bolton kept his head down during all this, doing all he could to disguise his involvement in the "Fact Sheet" misadventure. Indeed, the House Committee on Government Reform's Subcommittee on National Security found that "the State Department deliberately concealed unclassified information about the role of John Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control, in the creation of a fact sheet that falsely claimed that Iraq sought uranium from Niger."
In a letter of Sept. 25, 2003, State told the subcommittee that "Bolton did not play a role in the creation of this document." However, subcommittee investigators subsequently obtained access to a State Department inspector general report that showed that Bolton not only ordered that the fact sheet be created, but also received updates on its development.
Later, Bolton fell back on his default modus operandi: the by-now-familiar attempts to fire for their insolence analysts, managers, senior UN officials – it doesn't matter. Late last year, Bolton led a one-man, one-country vendetta aimed at preventing the well-respected ElBaradei from getting another term as director of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency. That quixotic campaign was unprecedented in its vindictiveness and won the U.S. no friends.
And this is the president's nominee for ambassador to the United Nations. Remarkable.
This article reprinted courtesy of TomPaine.com.
================================================
"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed.
Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being
self-evident."
-- Arthur Schopenhauer
"The truth is incontrovertible, malice may attack it,
ignorance may deride it, but in the end; there it is."
-- Sir Winston Churchill
"We are apt to close our eyes against a painful truth."
-- Patrick Henry
"During times of universal deceit, telling
the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
"The greatest kindness one can render to any man consists
in leading him from error to truth."
-- St. Thomas Aquinas
"Dissent is the highest form of patriotism."
-- Thomas Jefferson
"On the altar of God, I pledge undying hostility to any
government restrictions on the free minds of the people."
-- Thomas Jefferson - The favored quote at the highest point
in the Rotunda at the Jefferson Memorial.
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president,
or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is
not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable
to the American public."
-- Theodore Roosevelt
"Patriotism means to stand by the country.
It does not mean to stand by the President."
-- Theodore Roosevelt
"Patriotism is not loving your Government, A Patriot is one
that loves their country and watches their Government."
-- Unknown
"Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a
little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free...
it expects what never was and never will be."
-- Thomas Jefferson
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely
believe they are free."
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"He who is the author of a war lets loose the whole contagion
of hell and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death."
-- Thomas Paine
"Every gun that's made, every warship launched, every rocket fired,
signifies a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who
are cold and not clothed. This world in arms...is spending the
genius of its scientists, the sweat of its laborers,"
-- Dwight David Eisenhower
"The problems in the world today are so enormous they cannot
be solved with the level of thinking that created them."
-- Albert Einstein
"The process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary
change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic
and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor" (2000)
-- Project for a New American Century
"We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need
is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the
New World Order."
-- David Rockefeller
"All it takes for evil to flourish is for good men (and women)
to do nothing."
-- Edmund Burke
"Fear can only prevail when victims are ignorant of the facts."
-- Thomas Jefferson
"He who knows nothing is nearer to the truth than he
whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors."
-- Thomas Jefferson
"I am concerned for the security of our great nation, not so
much because of any threat from without, but because of the
insidious forces working from within."
-— General Douglas MacArthur
"It is well that the people of the nation do not understand our
banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there
would be a revolution before tomorrow morning."
--Henry Ford
"The first stage of fascism should more appropriately be called
Corporatism because it is a merger of State and corporate power."
-- Mussolini
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing,
Those who count the votes decide everything."
-- Josef Stalin
"The last time we mixed religion and politics - people
were burned at the stake."
"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped
in the flag and carrying the cross"
-- Sinclair Lewis
"There is nothing more frightening than active ignorance."
-– Goethe
"A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves."
"In America, the criminally insane rule and the rest of us,
or the vast majority of the rest of us, either do not care,
do not know, or are distracted and properly brainwashed
into acquiescence."
-- Kurt Nimmo
"It is the nature of power that it attracts the very
people who should not have it."
"If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility
of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom,
go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your
arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your
chains set lightly upon you; and may posterity forget that
ye were our countrymen."
-- Samuel Adams
"Propaganda is 95% truth, rat poison is 98% grain food -
The result is the same."
-- unknown
Get Ready for More
http://www.netctr.com/
May 13, 2005
John Bolton's Yellowcake
by Ray McGovern
What role did John Bolton play in the Bush administration's efforts to manufacture the intelligence needed to justify the invasion of Iraq? As it turns out, a hidden but important role. Remember the "yellowcake from Niger"?
Briefly reported last week in Steve Clemons' The Washington Note was that a Congressional subcommittee, citing a State Department inspector general's report, found that Bolton ordered and received updates on the notorious "Fact Sheet" of Dec. 19, 2002, that claimed Iraq had been trying to procure uranium "yellowcake" from Niger. In other words, John Bolton played a key role in ordering that discredited intelligence be used to support the president's case for war, three months before the attack on Iraq.
A Plan to Fix the Facts
TomPaine.com readers, unlike those malnourished by "mainstream media," were among the first to learn of the leaked document published by the London Sunday Times on May 1, in which the head of British intelligence told Prime Minister Tony Blair that President George W. Bush had decided to make war on Iraq. The date, you will remember, was July 23, 2002 – long before the president consulted Congress, and long before any intelligence was cooked up to "justify" such a decision.
The official minutes of that meeting show that the U.K. intelligence chief, Richard Dearlove, just back from consultations in Washington with then-CIA director George Tenet and other officials, announced matter-of-factly that the attack on Iraq is to be "justified by the conjunction of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction." British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw is quoted as confirming that Bush had decided on war, but interjects ruefully that the case for WMD was "thin." Not a problem, says Dearlove: "Intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
Boltonization
But how does this kind of "fixing" play out? Insights leap out of recently declassified e-mail messages from the office of Undersecretary of State John Bolton, archdeacon of politicization. I was particularly struck to learn from the Washington Post that Bolton's principal aide and chief enforcer, Frederick Fleitz, is actually a CIA analyst on loan to Bolton. In this light, his behavior in trying to cook intelligence to the recipe of high policy is even more inexcusable. CIA analysts, particularly those on detail to policy departments, have no business playing the enforcer of policy judgments, have no business conjuring up "intelligence around the policy."
Fleitz must have flunked Ethics and Intelligence Analysis 101. Or perhaps the CIA does not offer the course any more. This is the same Fleitz who "explained" to State Department intelligence analyst Christian Westermann that it was "a political judgment as to how to interpret this data [on Cuba's biological weapons program] and the I.C. [intelligence community] should do as we asked."
E-mails released more recently show Fleitz acting as stalking horse for Bolton to make sure the intelligence fit the policies Bolton was pushing. Fleitz is furious that State Department intelligence experts feel it their duty to demur on Bolton/Fleitz judgments regarding the efficacy of missile export controls against China. Fleitz, whose home office at CIA is the one which gave us "high confidence" judgments on the presence of WMD in Iraq, apparently ordered up analysis from CIA to suit his boss' strongly held judgment that the controls on exports to China were deficient.
Not surprisingly, Bolton liked the analysis that was served up by Fleitz' CIA colleagues and told him to pass it to Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. But State's intelligence analysts had the temerity to do their job, and attached a cover memo taking the opposite position, viewing the export controls positively. Questioned on this by Senate staffers last week, Fleitz admitted that his experience in his CIA home office gave him a personal stake in how the analysis was treated. This is doubly inappropriate.
The idea of seconding intelligence analysts to policy departments dates back almost three decades to a time when many analysts found themselves working in a vacuum, blissfully unaware of policymakers' interests and needs. The analysts' (otherwise laudable) search for relevance has now swung the pendulum too far in the other direction, with folks like Fleitz "cherry-picked" by folks like Bolton to "support" policy in wholly inappropriate ways. That top CIA officials allow the Boltons of this administration to get away with that shows CIA managers to be weak, witting, and willing accomplices in this corruption of the intelligence process.
Enter the Yellowcake
The Fleitz technique is one way to Boltonize intelligence, but there are other ways to counter attempts by intelligence analysts to "tell it like it is," when "like it is" needs to be "fixed" around a policy. Just go around the analysts.
An instructive example of this can be seen by harking back to a key juncture in the saga on Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction," in which Bolton achieved his aims by simply cutting State Department intelligence analysts out of the flow.
Painful as it is to bring up the embarrassing canard about Iraq seeking uranium in Niger, that sad chapter illustrates how Bolton operates when he knows he cannot bully intelligence community analysts to come up with the desired "analysis." Before President Bush's key speech on Oct. 7, 2002, setting the stage for Congress' vote on the war three days later, then-CIA director Tenet personally intervened to prevent the president from using spurious "intelligence" on the alleged attempts to acquire "yellowcake" (slightly enriched uranium) from Africa.
Just two months later, however, this canard reappeared in an official State Department "Fact Sheet" dated Dec. 19, debunking Baghdad's submission to the UN Security Council accounting for Iraqi weapons programs. The "Fact Sheet" directly cited the "yellowcake" deal as proof that Saddam Hussein was lying to the United States about his nuclear program (which had been "reconstituted" only in the rhetoric of Bolton's patron, Dick Cheney).
Small problem: State's intelligence analysts had long shared CIA's skepticism about that report. Indeed, in the National Intelligence Estimate of Oct. 1, 2002, they had branded it "dubious."
What accounts for new life being injected into this canard? We learned some time ago from a former senior Bush State Department official that the impetus came from Bolton's office. And now we have documentary proof, thanks to a State Department Inspector General investigation, the results of which were shared with a congressional subcommittee. In sum, when Bolton realized that the Iraq-Niger report itself left most analysts holding their noses (even before it was established that it was based on crude forgeries), his office inserted the bogus story into the official State Department "Fact Sheet" without clearing it with the department's own intelligence analysts. Easy.
This strongly suggests that it was also no accident that a month later the yellowcake fable found its way into the president's State of the Union address. Bolton's rogue operation ensured the subsequent embarrassment of one and all when the head of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohammed ElBaradei, declared the reports "not authentic," forcing both White House officials and George Tenet to apologize.
Bolton kept his head down during all this, doing all he could to disguise his involvement in the "Fact Sheet" misadventure. Indeed, the House Committee on Government Reform's Subcommittee on National Security found that "the State Department deliberately concealed unclassified information about the role of John Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control, in the creation of a fact sheet that falsely claimed that Iraq sought uranium from Niger."
In a letter of Sept. 25, 2003, State told the subcommittee that "Bolton did not play a role in the creation of this document." However, subcommittee investigators subsequently obtained access to a State Department inspector general report that showed that Bolton not only ordered that the fact sheet be created, but also received updates on its development.
Later, Bolton fell back on his default modus operandi: the by-now-familiar attempts to fire for their insolence analysts, managers, senior UN officials – it doesn't matter. Late last year, Bolton led a one-man, one-country vendetta aimed at preventing the well-respected ElBaradei from getting another term as director of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency. That quixotic campaign was unprecedented in its vindictiveness and won the U.S. no friends.
And this is the president's nominee for ambassador to the United Nations. Remarkable.
This article reprinted courtesy of TomPaine.com.
================================================
"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed.
Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being
self-evident."
-- Arthur Schopenhauer
"The truth is incontrovertible, malice may attack it,
ignorance may deride it, but in the end; there it is."
-- Sir Winston Churchill
"We are apt to close our eyes against a painful truth."
-- Patrick Henry
"During times of universal deceit, telling
the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
"The greatest kindness one can render to any man consists
in leading him from error to truth."
-- St. Thomas Aquinas
"Dissent is the highest form of patriotism."
-- Thomas Jefferson
"On the altar of God, I pledge undying hostility to any
government restrictions on the free minds of the people."
-- Thomas Jefferson - The favored quote at the highest point
in the Rotunda at the Jefferson Memorial.
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president,
or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is
not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable
to the American public."
-- Theodore Roosevelt
"Patriotism means to stand by the country.
It does not mean to stand by the President."
-- Theodore Roosevelt
"Patriotism is not loving your Government, A Patriot is one
that loves their country and watches their Government."
-- Unknown
"Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a
little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free...
it expects what never was and never will be."
-- Thomas Jefferson
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely
believe they are free."
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"He who is the author of a war lets loose the whole contagion
of hell and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death."
-- Thomas Paine
"Every gun that's made, every warship launched, every rocket fired,
signifies a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who
are cold and not clothed. This world in arms...is spending the
genius of its scientists, the sweat of its laborers,"
-- Dwight David Eisenhower
"The problems in the world today are so enormous they cannot
be solved with the level of thinking that created them."
-- Albert Einstein
"The process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary
change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic
and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor" (2000)
-- Project for a New American Century
"We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need
is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the
New World Order."
-- David Rockefeller
"All it takes for evil to flourish is for good men (and women)
to do nothing."
-- Edmund Burke
"Fear can only prevail when victims are ignorant of the facts."
-- Thomas Jefferson
"He who knows nothing is nearer to the truth than he
whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors."
-- Thomas Jefferson
"I am concerned for the security of our great nation, not so
much because of any threat from without, but because of the
insidious forces working from within."
-— General Douglas MacArthur
"It is well that the people of the nation do not understand our
banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there
would be a revolution before tomorrow morning."
--Henry Ford
"The first stage of fascism should more appropriately be called
Corporatism because it is a merger of State and corporate power."
-- Mussolini
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing,
Those who count the votes decide everything."
-- Josef Stalin
"The last time we mixed religion and politics - people
were burned at the stake."
"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped
in the flag and carrying the cross"
-- Sinclair Lewis
"There is nothing more frightening than active ignorance."
-– Goethe
"A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves."
"In America, the criminally insane rule and the rest of us,
or the vast majority of the rest of us, either do not care,
do not know, or are distracted and properly brainwashed
into acquiescence."
-- Kurt Nimmo
"It is the nature of power that it attracts the very
people who should not have it."
"If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility
of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom,
go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your
arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your
chains set lightly upon you; and may posterity forget that
ye were our countrymen."
-- Samuel Adams
"Propaganda is 95% truth, rat poison is 98% grain food -
The result is the same."
-- unknown
Get Ready for More
http://www.netctr.com/
Message Board by American Patriot Friends Network [APFN]
