Just another Reality-based bubble in the foam of the multiverse.

Tuesday, March 08, 2005

The PNAC-AEI Delegate at the UN

President George W. Bush just tapped a man known for hating the United Nations to serve as U.S. ambassador to the UN...

He began excoriating evil in the Reagan administration when, despite a lack of experience in developing countries, he held a series of posts in the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) before winding up as one of Attorney General Edwin Meese's top aides.

In that capacity, he resisted all efforts by Congress to investigate the Justice Department role in the Iran-Contra affair, as well as efforts by Sen. John Kerry to investigate drug and gun-running by the Nicaraguan contras in the mid-1980s.

His effectiveness gained him a promotion under President H.W. Bush to the position of assistant secretary of state for international organizations, a post he held until 1993 when he joined first the right-wing Manhattan Institute and then the neoconservative-dominated American Enterprise Institute (AEI)...

In the summer of 2001, he shocked foreign delegations and non-governmental organizations at the UN Conference on the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons when he announced that Washington would oppose any attempt to regulate the trade in firearms or non-military rifles or any other effort that would "abrogat (e) the constitutional right to bear arms."

He played a similar role several months later when, amid the public shock that followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the anthrax scare, Bolton single-handedly sabotaged a UN meeting to forge an international verification protocol designed to put teeth into a treaty on bioweapons...

Bolton was also engaged in a lengthy argument with U.S. intelligence agencies over his public charge that Cuba had an offensive biological warfare program. His assertion became an embarrassment after anonymous intelligence officials and retired senior military officers—including the former head of the U.S. Southern Command—told the media that no such evidence existed and charged that Bolton was politicizing intelligence.

In July 2003, Bolton was poised to testify to Congress that Syria's alleged programmes to develop weapons of mass destruction had developed to such an extent that they threatened regional stability, an assertion that reportedly provoked a ''revolt'' by U.S. intelligence analysts, who insisted that the evidence did not warrant such a conclusion...


What a career.

And an on-the-record liar to the Senate about the presence of WMD in Syria.

Fortunately, at the time there were still enough honest people in the CIA to stop this disinformation train before it got out of the station.

There still are; unfortunately their careers- if not their lives- are now at risk if they don't play the game: praise democracy while killing it..

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