Colleague rips into Bolton

WASHINGTON – A former senior State Department official on Tuesday called President Bush’s nominee for U.N. ambassador a “serial abuser” of subordinates who wanted an intelligence analyst sacked for challenging his view of Cuba’s biological warfare capabilities.

“I came away with the distinct impression that I had just been asked to fire an intelligence analyst for doing his job,” said Carl W. Ford Jr., the former head of the State Department’s Intelligence and Research Bureau, or INR, recalling a February 2002 confrontation with the nominee, Undersecretary of State John Bolton.

Ford told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that he considered Bolton “a quintessential kiss-up, kick-down sort of guy” whose treatment of INR analyst Christian Westermann and himself raised questions about his “suitability for high office.”

Ford’s blunt testimony under oath didn’t appear to jolt any of the panel’s 10 Republicans into joining the eight Democrats in opposing Bolton, a tough-talking advocate of U.S. global superiority who has strongly criticized the United Nations.

The committee was expected to vote on sending the nomination to the full Senate later in the week. Bolton has been the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security since 2001.

Democrats had hoped Ford would reinforce their charges that Bolton was unfit for the U.N. post in large part because he wanted to punish intelligence experts for disputing his views, thereby creating a chilling effect on objective analysis of critical national security issues.

Democrats argued that with U.S. credibility severely damaged by the erroneous intelligence on Iraq, it was critical that the American representative to the United Nations be free of intelligence-rigging allegations.