corrente

From the Archives, in honor of the stealth appointment---what we should not forget:

More Salt In The Wound

Via Buzzflash, an interesting development in the Bolton force-feed: in 2002 he engineered the removal of a UN family agency head whose actions threatened to expose Bush's allegations of Iraqi weapons for the sham they were, and whose proposed plan to send chemical weapons inspectors to Iraq could have ruined the intelligence fakery on which the eventual invasion depended:

"John R. Bolton flew to Europe in 2002 to confront the head of a global arms-control agency and demand he resign, then orchestrated the firing of the unwilling diplomat in a move a U.N. tribunal has since judged unlawful, according to officials involved.
A former Bolton deputy says the U.S. undersecretary of state felt Jose Bustani "had to go," particularly because the Brazilian was trying to send chemical weapons inspectors to Baghdad. That might have helped defuse the crisis over alleged Iraqi weapons and undermined a U.S. rationale for war.
Bustani, who says he got a "menacing" phone call from Bolton at one point, was removed by a vote of just one-third of member nations at an unusual special session of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), at which the United States cited alleged mismanagement in calling for his ouster."

Bustani himself revealed some interesting, and by now familiar, Bolton tactics:

"In June 2001, Bolton "telephoned me to try to interfere, in a menacing tone, in decisions that are the exclusive responsibility of the director-general," Bustani wrote in 2002 in a Brazilian academic journal.
He elaborated in an interview with the French newspaper Le Monde in mid-2002, saying Bolton "tried to order me around," and sought to have some U.S. inspection results overlooked and certain Americans hired to OPCW positions. The agency head said he refused. "
In March 2002 the US went public to get rid of Bustani, and succeeded in April by threatening the OPCW with the withholding of operating funds. All this, mind you, at a time when Bush repeatedly assured the American public that he was doing everything possible to get Iraq to comply with weapons inspections and to avoid having to go to war. And only 3 months later, the Downing Street memo stated that the US saw "war as inevitable".

Later, when Bustani appealed the termination to the Administrative Tribunal of the International Labor Organization in Geneva, where UN agencies go with personnel issues, the tribunal ruled in Bustani's favor, stating his removal was unlawful and awarding him damages.
So Bolton was complicit in the warping and cover-up of information related to the invasion of Iraq in order to facilitate the Bush administration's plans to wage an illegal war, and he used his by now well-known bullying tactics to accomplish that, against a head of an agency that is a family member of the UN, where Bush now wants to appoint him as the representative of our nation.

Do I have it right?