What was Bolton's job at State in Feb 2002?

[BurtWorm]

Does anyone know offhand? He didn't work for the INR did he?

The reason I ask...I wonder if he passed the document by an INR person to Rove that Rove passed around to suggest that Valerie Plame "convened the panel" that sent Wilson to Niger. Is that just a little too perfect and clean? Or what?

[SteppingRazor]

1. In Feb 2002, Bolton's job title was...

Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, a position he had held since May 2001

http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/biog/2976.htm

[htuttle]

2. Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and Int'l Security Affairs

WMD issues, basically. He probably would have been a 'consumer' of the intelligence gathered by Plame's network.

[BurtWorm]

3. Bingo!

The bostid!

[seafan]

4. This ties to the mysterious death of John Kokal at the State Dept. in 03.

This story has continued to haunt me as a major piece to a much larger puzzle, and when Bolton's shenanigans started getting around in the news late last year, this story again came to mind. It was originally posted on the FOX NEWS website and nowhere else, as far as I found.

This synopsis is from FTW:


November 20, 2003 (FTW), WASHINGTON --

.....John J. Kokal, 58, (State Dept. employee) was found dead in the late afternoon of November 7. ...snip
Kokal's body was found at the bottom of a 20 foot window well, 8 floors below the roof of the State Department headquarters near the 23rd and D Street location. Kokal's death was briefly mentioned in a FOX News website story on November 8 but has been virtually overlooked by the major media.

---snip

Kokal's INR bureau was at the forefront of confronting claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Washington police have not ruled out homicide as the cause of his death.

---snip

State Department officials dispute official State Department communiqués that said Kokal was not an analyst at INR. People who know Kokal told the French publication Geopolitique that Kokal was involved in the analysis of intelligence about Iraq prior to and during the war against Saddam Hussein.

Another INR official, weapons expert Greg Thielmann, said he and INR were largely ignored by Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton and his deputy, David Wurmser, a pro-Likud neo-conservative who recently became Vice President Dick Cheney's Middle East adviser. Kokal's former boss, the recently retired chief of INR, Carl W. Ford, recently said that Bolton often exaggerated information to steer people in the wrong directions.

http://www.fromthewilderness.com/cgi-bin/MasterPFP.cgi?doc=http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/112003_kokal.html


It makes plausible sense that John Bolton was mucking around in this WMD intelligence work on Iraq and cooking/manipulating the analysts' results. He would have unfettered access to this intelligence and could intimidate analysts at will. Another logical supposition is that he realized that Plame (and/or other analysts) were getting too close to finding out about the bogus nature of WMD's existence in Iraq, as their negative findings would have been a major roadblock to the Bush administration's public propaganda campaign in their race to war.

Hence, outing Plame would be one way to stop the Iraq WMD investigation in its tracks.

Bottom line is that Bolton may be directly involved with outing Plame in that he may turn out to be the other "high ranking administration official" to have access to this classified info and subsequently divulged it to reporters. This would also explain why the Bush administration is stonewalling the release of State Dept. documents requested by the Democrats in their deliberations on Bolton's nomination for UN Ambassador. These documents may clearly implicate Bolton in the Plame outing.


Using their official position for raw, partisan political retribution is what the Rove/Plame/Bolton story is about. It all fits a much larger pattern.

I hope Patrick Fitzgerald has deposed Bolton in this matter.