Bolton's real problem

Those waiting for someone -- anyone at all -- in the Bush administration to be held accountable for twisting intelligence likely will have to keep waiting. Unless, that is, the Senate stops the nomination of John Bolton, one of the worst offenders.

President Bush nominated Mr. Bolton, the under secretary of state for arms control, to be ambassador to the United Nations even though Mr. Bolton is on record as having disdain for the U.N. The greater issue, however, is his disdain for honest intelligence assessments.

In 2002, Mr. Bolton wanted to tell the conservative Heritage Foundation that Cuba had a bioweapons program and might threaten the United States. One problem: Intelligence analysts had determined no such thing. But at the time, the Bush administration was intent on embarrassing former President Jimmy Carter for making a trip to Cuba, a visit that enraged Republican-voting Cuban exiles in Miami-Dade County. Two analysts -- one for the State Department and one for the CIA -- told Mr. Bolton that there was no clear intelligence to back up his claims and that he should leave them out of his speech. Mr. Bolton denies that he then tried to have the men fired. Others say he did. In any case, Mr. Bolton himself admits that he tried to have the analysts moved to different jobs.

At that time, the supervisors backed their analysts. One of them, Carl W. Ford, described Mr. Bolton in Senate testimony on Tuesday as "a kiss-up, kick-down sort of guy" who routinely harassed underlings for failing to skew intelligence to match ideological conclusions. It's worth asking whether browbeating by the likes of Mr. Bolton over time helped create the timid intelligence community whose passivity helped send U.S. troops after nonexistent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

Mr. Bolton's penchant for exaggeration extended to his claim, in 1994, that "there's no such thing as the United Nations." He says now that he was just trying to get his audience's attention. Was he trying to do the same thing in 2003, when his "audience" was Congress and intelligence officials had to stop him from giving a misleading version of the threat posed by Syria? Or this week, when he overstated the State Department's official assessment of Iran's nuclear goals?

As the oil-for-food scandal shows, the U.N. could stand some tough, constructive criticism. But such criticism has to come from someone known for telling the truth, not for twisting it.