Attempted Sucker Punch

In grilling the nascent war criminal wanna-be John Bolton, Attaturk has spotted an attempted set-up of John Kerry in the AP. Kos's joejoejoe has also picked up on this.

I assume this had its origins with Rove, it certainly stinks like his offal.

An AP reporter asserts:

"Committee Chairman Richard Lugar, R-Ind., and Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., both mentioned a name, Fulton Armstrong, that had not previously come up in public accounts of the intelligence flap.

It is not clear whether Armstrong is the undercover officer, but an exchange between Kerry and Bolton suggests that he may be.

In questioning Bolton, Kerry read from a transcript of closed-door interviews that committee staffers conducted with State Department officials prior to Monday's hearing.

"Did Otto Reich share his belief that Fulton Armstrong should be removed from his position? The answer is yes," Kerry said, characterizing one interview. "Did John Bolton share that view?" Kerry said, and then said the answer again was yes..."

But BuShCo has been after Fulton Armstrong for quite awhile, since he's on record dissing the missadministration about Cuba in 2003:

But why does the intelligence community appear increasingly to be in open revolt against the White House? If the political pressures are nothing new, why the unprecedented degree of protest?

Put it this way, with this White House, I see an outright pattern of bullying: Gen. Eric Shinseki, the former Army chief of staff, warned that the U.S. was going to need several hundred thousand troops in Iraq, and he's attacked for that, and basically told that he doesn't know what he's talking about -- and he's fired essentially a year before he's out of that job. When it's time for him to retire, not a single senior representative of the Department of Defense or White House leadership is there for his retirement. Then there was Thomas White, the secretary of the Army who was forced out. There was a senior CIA analyst by the name of Fulton Armstrong who was attacked, using leaks to the press, which alleged that he was disloyal and somehow under the influence of the Cuban government. There was a prosecutor [ousted from] the Department of Justice who had warned that John Walker Lindh's father had hired a lawyer and that [the DOJ] needed to consider the Miranda rights.

So what we've seen is a repeated pattern across different agencies, all with the apparent sanction of the White House, of going after anybody who's a critic, or who's seen as not being in tune with the administration's message. When people raise legitimate issues that may not be consistent with existing policy, instead of conducting a fair intellectual assessment of those issues, those people are attacked and their character is impugned.

In fact Armstrong basically got Plamed about Cuba in 2003 when he contradicted the White House's assesment Cuba was harboring Weapons of Mass Destruction to use against America.

Since then, Fulton Armstrong's job as a CIA Analyst has been in the public domain.

Both 2003 posts in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal are nicely presented here.

A dirty trick indeed, Mr. Bolton and Mr. Rove.

Somewhere in Hell, Richard Nixon is smiling. He loved a dirty trick and later hated Bu$hCo version 1.0 as preppy-pants rivals even though they served the same masters.