Bush men

Well, I've pretty much given up any hope that the Republican-controlled Senate will deliver a rebuke to the Bush administration and leave two of the more egregious (and that's saying a lot) Bush appointees dead on their respective committees' floor. This Senate has shrugged off its responsibility as a check and balance to the imperial presidency we now have, a passive acceptance of candidates for jobs they are mind-bogglingly unsuited for.

Passivitiy is, indeed, the word of the day. Fred Kaplan is amazed at the passive answers John Bolton was permitted to get away with during his Senate testimony.

John Bolton, George W. Bush's astonishingly brazen choice to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, came off badly at his confirmation hearings today—bloodless, evasive, and mendacious—in ways that should give senators cause to reject him, regardless of whether they agree with the president's policies or even with the substance of Bolton's views.

[...]

The second reason—Bolton's non-position on whether genocide should prompt U.N. action—was taken up by only one senator today, but, in an age of great debate over "humanitarian interventions," it should be a major issue. Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., asked Bolton what he thought about the United Nations' inaction during the Rwandan genocide. Bolton evaded, saying it wasn't a "U.N. failure" but a failure of the member nations. OK, Feingold came back, what would you have done had you been the ambassador back then—and had you known everything that we know now? Bolton replied, "We don't know if, logistically, it would have been possible to do anything differently at the time." Feingold seemed dumbfounded by the answer. He said only, "Your answer is amazingly passive," then went on to another issue. But the answer was much more than that; it was a shocking evasion. Feingold was asking a pointed hypothetical question—whether we should have done something, if we had known exactly what was going on. It was meant to get at whether Bolton sees the United Nations as an organization that should intervene in such crises. Bolton reduced it to a question of logistics and refused to answer. Someone should ask him again and insist on a full answer. (In general, while a few senators asked Bolton about his views on U.N. structural reform, they showed an appalling lack of curiosity about his views of the world and the United Nations' place in it.) [emphasis added]

Strange, for a man so previously critical of the UN, to give the organization a pass on something for which the organization itself has agreed was a failure.

Meanwhile, we have a nominee for "intelligence czar" -- a job created to ensure that the president receives intelligence that hasn't been politicized, something that tends to lead to assorted 9-11s and Iraqi WMD miscalculations -- who has a history of tailoring intelligence to suit the agenda of the president he serves.

WASHINGTON, April 12 - Hundreds of newly released cables that John D. Negroponte sent to Washington while serving as ambassador to Honduras in the 1980's show that he played a more central and assertive role than previously known in managing the United States' covert war against Nicaragua's leftist government, which he called "our special project."

The cables show that Mr. Negroponte worked closely with William J. Casey, then director of central intelligence, on the Reagan administration's anti-Communist offensive in Central America. He helped word a secret 1983 presidential "finding" authorizing support for the contras, as the Nicaraguan rebels were known, and met regularly with Honduran military officials to win and retain their backing for the covert action, the documents show.

The cables add details to the public picture of Mr. Negroponte, President Bush's nominee to be the first director of national intelligence, as a tough cold warrior who enthusiastically carried out President Ronald Reagan's strategy. They show he sent admiring reports to Washington about the Honduran military chief, who was blamed for human rights violations, warned that peace talks with the Nicaraguan regime might be a dangerous "Trojan horse" and pleaded with officials in Washington to impose greater secrecy on the Honduran role in aiding the contras.

[...]

The documents appear to lend some support to the contention of Mr. Negroponte's critics that he did little to protest human rights abuses by Honduran military units blamed for abductions, torture and murder. Mr. Negroponte and some of his fellow diplomats have maintained that he worked behind the scenes against such abuses, but the cables make few references to the issue.

In fact, after a meeting in October 1983 with the head of the Honduran military, Gen. Gustavo Álvarez Martínez, who was widely held responsible for human rights abuses at the time, Mr. Negroponte reported to Washington that General Álvarez was misunderstood.

Remarks General Álvarez made to him during a plane ride were "reflective of his commitment to constitutional government," Mr. Negroponte reported. The general's critics, he wrote, were misled by "a stereotype" or "sheer ignorance." About six months later General Álvarez was forcibly removed from power by other military officers who accused him of dictatorial tendencies, a move that took American officials by surprise.

Splendid. At a time when United States' credibility is at an all-time low, we have an "intelligence czar"-appointee who ignored reality in his quest to carry out Ronald Reagan's Latin American agenda and turned a blind eye to rights abuses, and a UN ambassador-appointee -- the man who will have to convince other UN members of the validity of our intelligence on Iran and North Korea -- who is well known to bully staff who don't deliver the answer he wants.

But for Senate Republicans, who cares? After all, "management-style" shouldn't be a disqualifier for the job of UN ambassador. And those Negroponte cables? That was 25 years ago, for godsake. Get over it.

As they say at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, sheesh.

The appointments say a great deal about the seriousness to which the Bush administration takes these two jobs as well as the Senate's seriousness in balancing the administration's cynicism towards reliable intelligence gathering and the role of the United Nations.