Bolton will harm credibility of U.S.

The juxtaposition of two political bombshells in Washington last week was dizzying.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee sent the controversial nomination of John Bolton for U.N. ambassador to the full Senate. Meantime, America's spy agencies disagreed over whether North Korea is planning to make more nuclear bombs or to conduct its first nuclear test.
What's the connection? A man known for politicizing intelligence about "rogue" states is being pushed by the White House toward another high post, even as the North Korean situation reminds us how little we know of that country.
The last thing the United States needs is political twisting of intel on "axis of evil" countries such as Iran or North Korea. The Iraq intelligence debacle should have taught that lesson.
Yet the White House is relentlessly pushing the Bolton nomination. Why?
A stream of witnesses, including senior Republican appointees and top intelligence officials, told Senate staffers how Bolton tried to pressure intelligence analysts who disagreed with his conclusions -- on Cuba, Syria and other issues. If the analysts refused, Bolton tried to get them removed from their posts.
Cooking the intel
It was Bolton's bent to cook the intel, as a senior State Department official, that made some GOP senators reluctant to endorse him. The committee sent his nomination to the floor without recommending approval.
This wasn't a case of a man who challenged analysts to think outside the box. Bolton wanted intelligence analysts to endorse his views that Cuba and Syria had far more advanced nonconventional weapons programs than the evidence showed. He wanted to give speeches that presented his views as if they were government policy, based on vetted intelligence.
Here's how Robert Hutchings, the former chairman of the government's National Intelligence Council, explained Bolton's technique to Senate staffers:
"I wouldn't say he (Bolton) was making up facts. Let's say that he took isolated facts and made much more of them to build a case than I thought the intelligence warranted. It was a sort of cherry-picking of little factoids ... that were drawn out to present the starkest-possible case."
At a time when America's intelligence agencies are struggling to improve their product, the promotion of someone who twists the intel sends bleak signals. Why bother with a massive reform of intelligence agencies if you reward those who politicize the result?
The Bolton nomination is a bracing reminder of something the administration has never admitted: the huge intelligence failure on Iraq was due as much to politicization of intel as to intelligence gaps.
Consider the notes from a July 23, 2002, meeting between Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of the British foreign intelligence service MI6, and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, recently leaked to the Sunday Times of London. Dearlove had returned from Washington and told Blair that President Bush wanted to remove Saddam Hussein through military action, "justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD" -- weapons of mass destruction.
"The [U.S.] intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy," Dearlove reported. "The case was thin."
Raw data
Indeed, the Pentagon set up a Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, a rotating two-person office tasked with looking at raw CIA and other intelligence data to find links between state sponsors of terrorism, such as Iraq, and terrorist groups.
In principle, there is nothing wrong with such an idea. In practice, the group aimed to convince top administration officials there was an operational link between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaida. Such a link remains unproven. But, because of constant official repetition, a huge percentage of Americans became convinced it existed.
Rather than encourage alternative views from intelligence analysts, the Bolton approach was to suppress them in favor of his own.
In the cases of North Korea and Iran, where some Bush officials seek regime change, the intelligence on nuclear-weapons programs is opaque. It must be carefully analyzed. Cherry-picking is highly risky and could lead to grave mistakes.
X Trudy Rubin is a columnist and editorial-board member for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.