Ex-Officials Say Bolton Inflated Syrian Danger (NYT)

[jefferson_dem]

Ex-Officials Say Bolton Inflated Syrian Danger
By DOUGLAS JEHL

WASHINGTON, April 25 - John R. Bolton clashed repeatedly with American intelligence officials in 2002 and 2003 as he sought to deliver warnings about Syrian efforts to acquire unconventional weapons that the Central Intelligence Agency and other experts rejected as exaggerated, according to former intelligence officials.

Ultimately, the former intelligence officials said, most of what Mr. Bolton, then an under secretary of state, said publicly about Syria hewed to the limits on which the C.I.A. and other agencies had insisted. But they said that the prolonged and heated disputes over Mr. Bolton's proposed remarks were unusual within government, and that they reflected what one former senior official called a pattern in which Mr. Bolton sought to push his public assertions beyond the views endorsed by intelligence agencies.

The episodes involving Syria are being reviewed by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as part of its inquiries related to Mr. Bolton's nomination to become ambassador to the United Nations. Some of the former intelligence officials said they had discussed the issue with the committee, while declassified e-mail messages from 2002 provided to the committee by the State Department allude to one previously unknown episode.

One newly declassified message, dated April 30, 2002, and sent by a senior State Department intelligence official, dismissed as "a stretch" language about a possible Syrian nuclear program that had been spelled out in a draft speech circulated by Mr. Bolton's aides for approval. In the speech itself, delivered five days later, Mr. Bolton made no reference to a Syrian nuclear program.

Until now, Senate Democrats leading the opposition to Mr. Bolton's nomination have focused mostly on a 2002 dispute related to Cuba, in which Mr. Bolton has acknowledged seeking the transfer of two intelligence officials with whom he had differed. But a top Democratic staff member on Monday described the clashes over Syria as "an example, perhaps the most serious one, not of Mr. Bolton's abusing people, but of trying to exaggerate the intelligence to fit his policy views."

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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/26/politics/26bolton.html?

[truthisfreedom]

1. ruh-rohh. rove will be displeased. bolton is rove's boy to the UN, and

without bolton's exaggeration tactics rove won't be able to force lies down their throats.

[IndianaGreen]

2. Bolton also claimed that Cuba was developing bio weapons

which was a total fabrication on the part of Bolton.

This man deserves a job with Disney, not the US government!

[indepat]

3. Inflated Syrian danger? Inflated Iraqi danger with no WMD? Houston,

we have a problem, a problem involving a pattern of inflated dangers.