Bolton's Adagio in DU minor ......

"The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the US government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the reason."-- Paul Wolfowitz; Vanity Fair; Jan 2004In 1998, Paul Wolfowitz and John Bolton were among the neoconservatives who wrote an infamous letter to President Bill Clinton, demanding that the United States remove Saddam Hussein from power. This was to become an obsession with them. In "The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill," by Ron Suskind, we find that in the very first National Security Council meeting (1-30-01), it was decided to make the removal of Saddam the primary focus of Middle Eastern policy.O'Neil states that, "From the start, we were building the case against Hussein ans looking at how we could take him out ... It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The President was saying, 'Fine. Go find me a way to do this.'"On May 8, 2001, President Bush issued a statement called "Domestic Preparedness Against Weapons of Mass Destruction." In it, Bush noted, "Some non-state terrorist groups have ... demonstrated an interest in acquiring weapons of mass destruction .... It is clear that the threat of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons being used against the United States -- while not immediate -- is very real."In "Worse Than Watergate," John Dean notes that at this time, President Bush "asked Cheney 'to oversee the development of a coordinated national effort so that e may do the very best possible job of protecting our people fromcatastrophic harm.'" Bush then created an Office of National Preparedness within FEMA to implement Cheney's recommendations. This was a way, Dean explains, to derail the Rudman-Hart commission's proposals. (see pages 108-110)VP Cheney's plans to protect the USA apparently failed on 9-11. Richard Clarke, who had served in high-level positions for four presidents, would later detail being pressured by President Bush to connect 9-11 with Saddam. (See "Fahrenheit 9/11" by Michael Moore for a film clip of Clarke, as well as numerous examples of Bush officials lying to the American public about the "threat" Saddam posed to this country with his WMDs.)In "Losing America," Senator Robert Byrd tells of his frustration in trying to get the truth about Iraq and WMDs from Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. Thus, he requested that CIA Director "George Tenet brief us privately prior to the Iraq war, back when the administration was conjuring up visions of 'mushroom clouds' and death-dealing vials of germ warfare carried by missles aimed at U.S. cities. Tenet told us then, that no tangible evidence connected Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 attacks. He also had no hard evidence confirming development of a nuclear program in Iraq. There was virtually no link between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein in the days before we created a hotbed for terrorist wrath by attacking Iraq." (pages71-2)If no such evidence existed, who might have come up with all the lies fed to the American public? In "The Politics of Truth," Joe Wilson explains, "The neoconservatives who have taken us down this path are ... a small pack of zealots whoe dedication has spanned decades, and ...through years of recruitment has become a government cult with cells in most of the national security system. Among those cells are the secretive Office of Special Plans in the Department of Defense ... and a similar operation in the State Department that is managed in the office of Undersecretary for Disarmament John Bolton." (page 432)In September of 2002, the first public mention of an Iraqi attempt to buy yellow cake uranium from Niger was made in a British "White Paper." However, as we know, Wilson had already investigated this, and concluded it was not true. Two other US investigators had reached the same conclusion before Wilson. (The UN's IAEA would soon call the documents the US provided them on the Niger uranium "forgeries.") And the UN weapons inspectors were finding no evidence of WMD production, which threatened to expose "the one issue that everyone could agree on," to quote Wolfowitz, as a fabrication.So on December 19, 2002 the State Department issued a "fact sheet" of Iraqi WMD violations. Included in the first draft was "a reference to Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Niger. The reference was apparently scrubbed soon after, and the Niger charged was removed -- at least for a time. News reports after the fact suggested that the neoconservative mole in the State Department, John Bolton, the under secretary for Arms Control, had slipped the reference into the first version, but someone at State had caught the mistake and deleted it." (Wilson; page 302.)In time, Wilson would expose the Niger lie for what it was. The Bush administration reacted by exposing his wife's identity as a covert CIA agent. I believe that Bolton's role in that is indicated in the following, from page 445 of his book: "In fact, senior advisors close to the president may well have been clever enough to have used others to do the actual leaking, in order to keep their finger prints off the crime. John Hannah and David Wurmser, mid-level political appointees in the vice president's office, have both been suggested as sources of the leaks. I don't know either, though at the time of the leak, Wurmser, a prominent neoconservative, was working as a special assistant to John Bolton at the State Department. Mid-level officials, however, do not leak information without authority from a higher level. They would have been instruments, not the makers, of decisions."I think that it is important that DUers take the time to write a LTTE of their local paper, explaining that the democratic opposition to John Bolton becoming UN Ambassador isn't based on him being a grumpy fellow. It's based on his being a criminal.