Bolton: A question of credibility

Taken from www.progresoweekly.com
March, 17/2005

John R. Bolton, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, was appointed by the Bush administration to be the United States' chief delegate to the United Nations on March 7. One week later, we're still waiting for The Miami Herald to comment on his nomination.

Why the delay? We don't know. Why our curiosity? Because Bolton is the notorious official who has been doing such a hatchet job on the United Nations and accusing Cuba -- without providing any proof -- of manufacturing bacteriological weapons for an attack on the United States.

The Herald's conservative editorial board is either delighted by the appointment and waiting for Bolton's confirmation before issuing its blessing, or embarrassed by the appointment and waiting for the criticism to go away.

Political and editorial reaction to Bolton's appointment -- in the U.S. and abroad -- has been extraordinarily negative and its scope is too broad for treatment here. However, his participation in the debate over Cuba has been so controversial (some might say toxic) that we thought we'd remind you of some of the statements he made.

No supportive evidence

Three years ago, in an address to the conservative Heritage Foundation, Bolton fired the first broadside. "The United States believes that Cuba has at least a limited offensive biological warfare research-and-development effort," he said on May 6, 2002. "Cuba has provided dual-use biotechnology to other rogue states. We are concerned that such technology could support BW [biological weapons] programs in those states. We call on Cuba to cease all BW-applicable cooperation with rogue states and to fully comply with all of its obligations under the Biological Weapons Convention."

In an address to Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, Dec. 2, 2003, he referred to "rogue states such as Iran, North Korea, Syria, Libya and Cuba, whose pursuit of weapons of mass destruction makes them hostile to U.S. interests."

Bolton, who provided no evidence for his assertions, repeated them on Sept. 21, 2004, in a letter to the House Committee on International Relations. And he added: "Furthermore, the biotechnology industry is a top national priority and is characterized by dual-use, sophisticated equipment, modern facilities, generous funding, and highly trained personnel."

Again, Bolton presented no proof for his allegations.

Afraid of perjury charges?

As the respected Council on Hemispheric Affairs said last week in a scathing commentary on Bolton's appointment ("An unforgivable choice as U.N. ambassador", March 10, 2005):

"When challenged by Senator Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., to produce his evidence before a hearing of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, [Bolton] declined to appear. His charges were so bereft of any substance or even a tincture of verisimilitude that even his Bush administration colleagues rushed to disavow any association with them."

[Congressional testimony is given under oath. If Bolton's allegations were challenged and proved to be false, he could have been charged with perjury -- which may have been the reason for Bolton's refusal to appear.]

The Council's commentary pointed out that "In addition to refutations by then-Secretary of State Colin Powell (who said ‘we didn’t actually say [Cuba] had some weapons’) and former commander-in-chief of the U.S. Southern Command Gen. Charles Wilhelm (who claimed that he never had received any evidence to support Bolton’s claim), [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld indicated to reporters that he was unaware of any links connecting Cuba’s biomedical industry to bio-weapons research."

[Wilhelm told National Public Radio: "During my three-year tenure, from September 1997 until September 2000 at Southern Command, I didn't receive a single report or a single piece of evidence that would have led me to the conclusion that Cuba was in fact developing, producing or weaponizing biological or chemical agents."]

"Despite being called upon to do so by several senators, Bolton refused to attend a Senate hearing where he could present any evidence of Cuba’s alleged bioweapons program, a rather telltale admission that he would be unable to substantiate his charge under sworn testimony," the Council on Hemispheric Affairs statement continued. "The dearth of any compelling evidence linking Cuba’s highly lauded pharmaceutical industry to terrorism was eventually confirmed by a 2004 wide-ranging Congressional investigation, which peeled away at the last vestiges of credibility behind Bolton’s assertions."

Bush reverses opinion

Indeed, The New York Times reported on Sept. 18, 2004 that "The Bush administration, using stringent standards adopted after the failure to find banned weapons in Iraq, has conducted a new assessment of Cuba's biological weapons capabilities and concluded that it is no longer clear that Cuba has an active, offensive bio-weapons program, according to administration officials.

"The latest assessment contradicts a 1999 National Intelligence Estimate and past statements by top administration officials, some of whom have warned that Cuba may be sharing its weapons capability with ‘rogue states’ or terrorists," The Times said.

Even The Miami Herald admitted, in an article Sept. 21, 2004, that "The U.S. intelligence community has ‘lost some confidence’ in a 1999 assessment that Cuba had a limited biological weapons development effort."

And an editorial in The South Florida Sun-Sentinel April 2, 2004, decried "Bolton's inability to provide hard evidence to prove his case. He didn't produce data in 2002, and he didn't detail his charges before the House this week. The State Department hasn't backed up Bolton with specifics. [...] Major speeches by Secretary of State Colin Powell at hemispheric gatherings have been mum on the Cuban bio-terrorist threat.

"Retired and current military officials who served in the Southern Command headquarters in Miami haven't so much as raised an eyebrow. You'd think the military would know if such a program existed just 90 miles from our shores and be concerned. [...] And if the Bush administration believes Bolton, why isn't it assembling a ‘coalition of the willing’ to confront Cuba?"

The purpose is research

Perhaps the only accurate words in Bolton's original accusation of May 2002 were these:

"For four decades Cuba has maintained a well-developed and sophisticated biomedical industry," he said. "This industry is one of the most advanced in Latin America, and leads in the production of pharmaceuticals and vaccines that are sold worldwide."

True enough. But to jump from there to the assumption that the researchers who create vaccines for diseases are creating diseases for warfare is a major -- and unsubstantiated -- leap. Research laboratories all over the world cultivate bacteria and viruses so they can test the effectiveness of the vaccines they manufacture. That is done in Washington, New York and Maryland, as well as in Havana. But no one, so far, has accused companies like Pfizer, Merck or GlaxoSmithKline of threatening the safety of the world.

David Isenberg, a weapons of mass destruction expert at the British-American Security Information Council, said as much to United Press International. Cuba, he explained, did have the know-how to create deadly agents, "but you can say that about any biotech factory in the world, including in the United States."

John Steinbruner, director of the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland, told UPI that Bolton's allegations were "irresponsible." Given the Bush administration's record on Iraq, "I don't know why anyone would believe anything they say about weapons of mass destruction" in Cuba, he said. "Of all their claims, this one has the least credibility."

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Bush to world: “In your face!”

By Max J. Castro
Taken from www.progresoweekly.com
March, 17/2005

“The time for diplomacy is now”. That was Condoleeza Rice at her Senate confirmation hearing in January.

Less than two months later, the Bush administration’s actions have made it clear just what it means by diplomacy, in the process dashing any hope that the second term would be less marked by Orwellian Doublespeak and contempt for the rest of the world than was the first.

Exhibit A is Bush’s nomination of John Bolton as the United States Permanent Representative to the United Nations. A hard-core neoconservative and virulent UN-basher, the appointment of Bolton to the international body is an affront almost as brazen as naming a notorious immigrant basher ambassador to Mexico or a Holocaust denier to a diplomatic post in Israel.

The manner in which Bolton once expressed his hatred for the UN, namely by saying that if the U.N. building in New York lost its top 10 stories (where the Secretary General and other high-ranking officials have their offices), "it wouldn't make a bit of difference," has a particularly ominous ring in the post 9-11 world. The nominee also has argued that the United States has no legal obligation to pay its U.N. dues, and suggested it would be good if they weren't paid.

Considering Bolton’s stated views on the UN, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice once again had to display her talent for Doublespeak when she announced the administration’s choice for the UN post. Rice portrayed Bolton as a virtual champion of multilateralism. But, in 1994, Bolton told the world just what he means by multilateralism: "There is no such thing as the United Nations. There is an international community that occasionally can be led by the only real power left in the world and that is the United States, when it suits our interest and we can get others to go along."

The message the nomination sent to the UN and the international community was unmistakable and almost nearly unprintable in its obscenity. The Bush administration seems to be saying to the world: “Shove it, in your face, up yours!”

International reaction to the Bolton nomination was overwhelmingly negative, and there was extensive criticism even in the U.S. press. The Sacramento Bee noted: “Bolton's general undiplomatic demeanor is a profound mismatch with the attributes usually associated with an American ambassador to the United Nations. It requires someone who plays well with others. Bolton instead tries to commandeer the sandbox.”

The California paper cited as an example discussions regarding North Korea during which “Bolton made a public statement in Seoul, South Korea, in which he described North Korea's Kim Jong Il as a ‘tyrannical dictator’ who ruled over a place where life is ‘a hellish nightmare.’ Both statements were accurate, but they were powerfully unhelpful in deterring North Korea from continuing its nuclear weapons programs. Comedians can get away with such talk; diplomats can't. It doesn't fit the job description.”

Bolton’s statements on Cuba have been even more inflammatory and potentially more dangerous, especially seen in the context of how the Bush administration manipulated the specter of weapons of mass destruction to rally public support for the invasion of Iraq. The South Florida Sun-Sentinel recalled that last year “Bolton told the House Committee on International Relations that Cuba's government harbored biological weapons research and development programs with terrorist intentions. That assertion followed a similar statement in 2002, when Bolton was reported saying Cuba had ‘a limited offensive biological warfare’ capability, one that it had shared with ‘rogue’ nations.” The paper concluded: “Bolton failed to offer evidence, let alone convincing proof, to back up the serious allegations in both instances.”

If the Bolton nomination sent a clear signal of what the Bush attitude to relations with the rest of the world will be during the second term, other developments last week underscored the kind of diplomacy the United States intends to practice. According to an Associated Press (AP) story, the United States was “portrayed as a bully” at the UN conference on women’s rights held in New York earlier this month. The bullying came in the form of multiple attempts by the Bush administration’s delegation to the conference of the Commission on the Status of Women to undermine the basic framework for human rights for women developed by 160 nations a decade ago, the “platform for action” adopted at the 1995 U.N. women's conference in Beijing. Carrying water for Christian fundamentalists, the U.S. delegation tried but failed to amend a document reaffirming the Beijing platform in order to say it did not create any new human rights, including a global right to abortion. The platform does not create such a right, and the U.S. was forced to withdraw its resolution because of massive opposition. But the Administration’s actions once again made clear the influence of Christian fundamentalists on U.S. global policy on women and the isolation that brings the United States. AP reported that at a later point in the conference several delegates “became angry as the United States tried to eliminate references in several resolutions to the platform for action adopted at the 1995 U.N. women's conference in Beijing.”

While many of the delegates were irate at the U.S. attempt to undermine global human rights for women, the head of the U.S. delegation praised the flexibility of its own diplomacy. Said U.S. Ambassador Ellen Sauerbrey: ''Our negotiators had been working in good faith believing that they were bending over backward trying to accommodate the issues of other countries. We were flexible beyond the point that almost seemed reasonable.''

The bullying did not work this time, and the resolutions opposed by the United States eventually passed by consensus. But the gap in perception between a U.S. that saw itself as flexible and the rest who saw arrogance led to some embarrassing defeats for the American delegation. After the U.S. introduced a resolution on economic advancement for women, Cuba and South Africa offered amendments, which were approved. The United States then tried to withdraw its own resolution but could not do so under the rules because amendments had been approved. In the end the United States was forced to oppose its own resolution, which was passed by consensus anyway.

The Bolton nomination and the fiasco at the UN women’s conference would seem enough thumbing of one’s nose at the world for one week. But not for this administration; last week Condoleeza Rice announced the United States was withdrawing from the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, an agreement the United States itself had championed in 1963. The reason for the withdrawal: Recently the Vienna Convention has been invoked—successfully--to challenge death sentences imposed on foreigners who had not been appropriately informed of their right to seek the assistance of their consulates.

The United States is unique among Western countries in its wholesale application of the death penalty, and for this country is regularly singled out as a human rights violator by international human rights organizations. Now, in order to keep the death machinery operating unimpeded by diplomatic niceties, the United States is withdrawing from an agreement designed to protect the rights of U.S. citizens in countries thought to be less respectful of the rule of law.

The final twist in last week’s cram course on what the administration means by diplomacy and its utter disregard for what the Declaration of Independence refers to as “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind” came over the weekend with the news that President Bush would name Karen P. Hughes to lead an effort at the State Department to repair the image of the United States overseas, particularly in the Arab world.

Hughes, slated to become under secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, has almost no experience in international affairs. Her main credentials appear to be that she is a close confidante of the president, an able and highly partisan political operative, and a loyal shill for administration policies and perspectives.

With Condoleeza Rice and John Bolton leading the way, U.S. diplomacy in the next four years figures to be a mixture of Doublespeak, bullying, and public relations. If the experience of last week’s UN meeting on women’s rights is a harbinger, this formula will produce more than its share of setbacks and embarrassments.

Postscript—If there were any doubt that the Bolton nomination and the other outrages described above are part of a pattern of spitting in the world’s face, President Bush removed it Wednesday when he nominated Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, an even more prominent and ferocious neocon hawk than Bolton and widely despised internationally for his role as chief advocate of the Iraq war within the Bush administration, to be president of the World Bank.

 

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