UPDATE: More evidence of Bolton's closeness to Niger BS from Raw Story--see below the flip.
I have CSPAN on while reviewing some software and patent licensing agreements I'm negotiating, and have just watched a couple of remarkable exchanges made earlier today between Rep. Henry Waxman and UN Ambassador John Bolton. In this exchange Bolton repeatedly stated that he had absolutely no knowledge of or input to the Fact Sheet the the State Dept. presented to the UN Security Council. One of the claims made in this Fact Sheet is the Niger uranium claim. This despite the fact that Bolton was the main administration guy on arms control at the time.
But is this true? A short google makes it clear that Mr. Bolton has perjured himself before Congress. More on the flip...
UPDATE: It seems that JB, who had nothing to do with Niger and the Fact Sheet, was asked by Scooter to find out who sent Wilson to Niger. From
this Raw Story piece:
John Bolton, the former Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs who is now the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, was contacted by I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby in late May 2003 to find out who sent Ambassador Joseph Wilson on a fact-finding mission to Niger, lawyers involved in the CIA outing investigation told RAW STORY over the weekend.
-snip-
But the attorneys said that two former Libby aides, John Hannah and David Wurmser, told the special prosecutor that Libby had actually first contacted Bolton to dig up the information. Wurmser, who worked as a Middle Eastern affairs aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, was on loan from Bolton's office.
Both Wurmser and Hannah have been cooperating with Fitzgerald's probe for some time, the lawyers said.
-snip-
It is unclear whether Bolton played any other role in the Plame outing, but his connection to the Iraq uranium claims certainly gave him a motive to discredit Wilson, who had called into question the veracity of the Niger documents. A probe by the State Department Inspector General revealed that Bolton's office was responsible for the placement of the Niger uranium claims in the State Department's December 2002 "fact sheet" on Iraq's WMD program.
For someone so close to the issue, it's pretty damn hard to believe he didn't have a part in presenting it to the UN. I can't wait to see what Fitzmas brings us next, and hopefully it will include Bolton, too. /END UPDATE
Rep. Waxman focused on any role that Bolton had, as Undersecretary Of State for Arms Control, in the drafting of the Fact Sheet.
I have rewound the Tivo several times to try to get the exact quotes, and this is what I came up with:
"I had no role in the [Niger] issue."
"I honestly don't recall this being an issue that I spent any time in."
"I didn't participate in the drafting the State Dept. fact sheet. I first saw it during my [UN Ambassador] confirmation hearings."
"I had no role in drafting Ambassador Negroponte's speech [presenting the Fact Sheet] to the Security Council."
Now this sounds very fishy upon first hearing, but it gets even more hard to believe with a little more research. First, from a Washington Note article titled "JOHN BOLTON PUSHED NIGER-URANIUM FIASCO AT STATE -- Then Tried to Hide his Tracks and Staff Lied to Congress" come these facts:
I just received this March 1, 2005 letter written by House Government Reform Committee Ranking Member Henry Waxman to Representative Christopher Shays who chairs the Government Reform Committee's Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats, and International Security.
<snip>
Concealment of a State Department Official's Role in the Niger Uranium Claim
In April 2004, the State Department used the designation "sensitive but unclassified" to conceal unclassified information about the role of John Bolton, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control, in the creation of a fact sheet distributed to the United Nations that falsely claimed Iraq had sought uranium from Niger.
On December 19, 2002, the State Department issued a fact sheet entitled "Illustrative Examples of Omissions from the Iraqi Declaration to the United Nations Security Council." (9) The fact sheet listed eight key areas in which the Bush Administration found fault with Iraq's weapons declaration to the United Nations on December 7, 2002. Under the heading "Nuclear Weapons," the fact sheet stated:
The Declaration ignores efforts to procure uranium from Niger.
Why is the Iraqi regime hiding their uranium procurement?
<snip>
Subsequently, however, I joined six other members of the Government Reform Committee in requesting from the State Department Inspector General a copy of an unclassified "chronology" on how the fact sheet was developed. (14) This chronology described a meeting on December 18, 2002, between Secretary Powell, Mr. Bolton, and Richard Boucher, the Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Public Affairs. According to this chronology, Mr. Boucher specifically asked Mr. Bolton "for help developing a response to Iraq's Dec 7 Declaration to the United Nations Security Council that could be used with the press. According to the chronology, which is phrased in the present tense, Mr. Bolton "agrees and tasks the Bureau of Nonproliferation," a subordinate office that reports directly to Mr. Bolton, to conduct the work.
This unclassified chronology also stated that on the next day, December 19, 2003, the Bureau of Nonproliferation "sends email with the fact sheet, 'Fact Sheet Iraq Declaration.doc.'" to Mr. Bolton's office (emphasis in original). A second e-mail was sent a few minutes later, and a third e-mail was sent about an hour after that. According to the chronology, each version "still includes Niger reference." Although Mr. Bolton may not have personally drafted the document, the chronology appears to indicate that he ordered its creation and received updates on its development.
The State Dept. IG report section with this timeline is can be read here.
Now this seems to me as a clear case of perjury, and judging from Rep. Waxman's incredulous tone, he thought it was as well. Which may be why he kept on hammering on that single point.
Today Bolton claimed, under oath, (1) he had no input into a report to the UN Security Council detailing US allegations about Iraq's WMD programs, even though he is in charge of the entire area for the US, and (2) even more incredibly, claims he never even saw said Fact Sheet on said WMDs until during his confirmation hearings. The Fact Sheet was delivered with Negroponte's speech on Dec. 19, 2002, while Bolton's confirmation hearing was in April, 2005.
This even though people that worked under him worked on this Fact Sheet. Even though he was the guy in charge of this subject for the State Department.
Waxman came back to this in his second round, this statement by him sums it up:
"When you're in charge of arms control and the biggest issue is was whether we were going to go to war against Iraq on the issue of nuclear weapons...don't you think you have some responsibility to know what's going on?"
C & L has to get this video up--it's astounding to see just how big of asshole John Bolton really is. At the end he stated that Waxman needed to learn how the State Department works. The guy is really a piece of work.
PS Kucinich hammered on whether their were US troops in Iran right now. A whole 'nother place to perjure oneself! But not as well documented, yet.