Bolton's actions justify rejection

By MELVIN A. GOODMAN
BALTIMORE SUN
The supporters of John R. Bolton as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations believe that the charge that he politicized intelligence on a series of international issues is no more than a smokescreen to block his confirmation.
In fact, his political handling of intelligence materials on Cuba, Iraq and North Korea should disqualify him from any high-level position in the Bush administration.
There is no question that Bolton and others misused intelligence on weapons of mass destruction to make the case for going to war against Iraq and to block political dialogue with Cuba and North Korea. In U.S. history, intelligence has been misused to justify the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War and the Vietnam War. But the wholesale misuse of intelligence by senior officials in the run-up to the war against Iraq is unprecedented.
The Robb-Silberman report on intelligence capabilities, which documented that the CIA was "dead wrong" about Iraq's WMD, absolved the Bush administration of manipulating the intelligence used to launch the Iraq war even though the report recounted numerous incidents of politicization.
Senior officials no longer understand the ways and means of politicizing intelligence. The March 31 report, for example, concludes that "there was no 'politicization' of the intelligence product on Iraq."
Pandering
Yet the report documents ways in which the CIA did politicize intelligence or pander to policy-makers. It says the CIA failed to admit that key reports were fabrications, failed to publish corrections of specious intelligence assessments, failed to protect those few analysts who called for an intelligence investigation and failed to permit debate on serious analytical differences. In other words, the process of politicization has been so insidious that senior officials don't even recognize it.
The CIA's failure to track the decline of the Soviet Union in the 1980s was chiefly because of pressure from the policy community and the efforts of CIA Director William J. Casey and his deputy, Robert M. Gates. They supported White House efforts to paint the Soviet Union as a growing threat in order to justify huge increases in defense budgets.
The Bolton case is particularly interesting because it reveals that CIA and State Department analysts on Cuba were willing to stand up to pressure but that CIA analysts on Iraq were mostly unwilling to do so.
It needs to be understood that there will never be a paper trail in any debate on politicization that documents the efforts of a senior official to direct a particular line of analysis or to make changes in intelligence estimates.
The CIA's handling of documents on Iraqi WMD provides a more accurate picture of politicization, including manipulation of the analytic process by changing either personnel or procedures, encouraging the publication of reports that take the preferred line and repressing reports that do not support the preferred line.
These methods were used during the Casey/Gates era to affect intelligence production on the Soviet Union, Central America and Southwest Asia and during the era of CIA Director George J. Tenet to affect production on Iraq's WMD and so-called links to terrorist organizations.
Phony case
The CIA's papal assassination assessment of 1985 used all of these methods to make the phony case for Soviet complicity in the attempt on the life of Pope John Paul II in 1981. The national intelligence estimate on Iraq in October 2002 and the CIA's draft speech for Secretary of State Colin L. Powell to the United Nations in February 2003 used similar methods to make the case for war.
In 1991, Gates was confirmed as director of central intelligence despite unprecedented opposition within the Senate and documented cases of politicized intelligence. Although he served only 15 months as CIA director, he was able to advance the careers of many of the key officials in the directorate of intelligence -- including former Deputy Director John McLaughlin -- who played key roles in the politicization of intelligence on Iraqi WMD.
If the Senate were to confirm Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations, it would send the signal that the Senate Intelligence Committee has no interest in the politicization of intelligence. It would make it even more difficult for National Intelligence Director John D. Negroponte to correct the systemic problems in the CIA and the entire intelligence community.
X Goodman, senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, was a CIA intelligence analyst from 1966 to 1990. Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service