New allegations that the Bush administration is putting ideology before professional competence. U.S. State Department officials appointed by President Bush are replacing key career weapons experts with less experienced political operatives, Knight Ridder reported. Many of these experts had clashed with U.N. Ambassador John Bolton (in photo) when he worked at the State Department, and their exodus means a loss of decades of experience in nuclear arms and chemical weapons. The official overseeing the shake-up defended it by saying “reorganizations are never easy.” But a group of State Department employees protested that “the process has been gravely flawed from the outset, and smacks plainly of a political vendetta against career foreign service and civil service (personnel) by political appointees.”
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
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27 Comments
Sad… That is all I can think of to say. Just ignore the smoke and flames people, your house is not on fire! Nor are we losting our Government. Sad….
Wow, I’m sure surprised. An administration that has politicised everything since they too office doing something like that? I am totally surprised!
I also want to remind people that John Bolton was nominated for the Noble Peace Prize this year. I believe, well I heard it on the radio a couple of days ago.
Nominated? By whom? Getting nominated doesn’t necesarily mean all that much.
Just like Tookie Williams right?
He was nominated I believe by the Swiss Ambassador. I will have to check.
This just in from the Washington Post–Bush politicians ignored the real intellegence of professionals to go to war.
It’s what we logical thinkers have known all along, but it was good to get verification of it:
“Official intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs was flawed, but even with its flaws, it was not what led to the war,” Pillar wrote in the upcoming issue of the journal Foreign Affairs. Instead, he asserted, the administration “went to war without requesting — and evidently without being influenced by — any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq.”
“It has become clear that official intelligence was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between (Bush) policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community’s own work was politicized,” Pillar wrote.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/20...
OT: this Friday’s news dump has the Administration informed of the breaching of the New Orleans Levees, and twiddling while the Big Easy drowned.
So, Wingnuts and Repukes (not necessarily the same thing), the next time I point out the obvious, which is that the White House is completely full of shit about virtually everything, and that it spends all of its time doing the wrong thing, covering its tracks, and attacking anyone who dares to question it, before you go after me, remember: the White House knew at midnight of the first day that the levees had broken, did nothing, and have lied about it ever since.
With the bunch currently in the White House, I feel very insecure in my homeland about virtually everything. They can’t be trusted.
Jesus. Look at the pictures that were sent to the White House that night. Oh my God.
http://nytimes.com/2006/02/10/politics/10katrina.html?hp&ex=1139634000&en=914abcf6c2b5fc5a&ei=5094&partner=homepage
I think we have our Smoking Gun.
Was tookie nominated? That REALLY shows how little just being nominated means. Puts Bolton in good company.
If I remember right, Bolton has never been confirmed by congress.He was slipped in thru the back door by Bushytail.
Bolton has never been nominated for a Nobel prize of any type as far as I can discern.
If you believe that he has, I have an arena in Wichita you might be interested in.
Nobel nominations are supposed to be kept secret for a period of 50 yrs. There is a very large list of people who can nominate for the award. Many political nominations are given, who are never seriously considered for the award. Publicizing a nobel nomination like it is a big honor is a joke. Winning a nobel prize is a big deal, being nominated with no real credentials for it is not.
Nice hijack, folks.
Here’s the scoop on the Nobel Prize “nominees:”
From the LA TIMEShttp://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-op-tookienobel4dec04,1,1344488.story
“Who doesn’t have a Nobel Prize nomination?”
By Eugene Volokh, Eugene Volokh is a professor of law at UCLA Law School.
. . .
“Naturally, many nominees have real merit. But being nominated by one or a few of the hundreds of thousands of eligible nominators is little evidence of such merit. This is especially so when the nominee is a source of controversy . . . .
“It would surely be helpful to readers if news stories mentioning Williams’ nominations — or, for that matter, any Nobel peace or literature prize nominations — stressed how unselective the nomination process is.”
And from WIKIPEDIA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Peace_Prize#Nominations
“Over time many individuals have become known as “Nobel Peace Prize Nominees”, but this designation has no official standing [2]. Nominations from 1901 to 1951 have been released in a database. When the past nominations were released it was discovered that Adolf Hitler was once nominated in 1939 . . . . Other infamous nominees included Joseph Stalin and Benito Mussolini.”
So anyone of thousands can “nominate” a Nobel Prize winner. It don’t mean shit.
Now, let’s go back to Bolton and why he’s an idiot.
Thank you.
CF–
It was after Bush got that picture that he went on TV and said “we dodged a bullet.”
Unfortantely, they didn’t dodge the stake through the heart administered by an uncaring and incompetent Executive Branch.
You know what’s funny about this?
“U.S. State Department officials appointed by President Bush are replacing key career weapons experts with less experienced political operatives.”
This is exactly what the old-time Communist states (USSR, Red China) used to do: replace knowledgable experts with political toadies who parrotted the party line.
I lived in China for awhile and they were always trumpeting “red and expert,” in other words, party toadies who were also competent in their field.
Didn’t work there–not working here.
I don’t like him!
ProudLib
I’ve never heard of anything like this. Oh, except for when Clinton took office and immediately replaced every federal prosecutor in the U.S Justice department.
They needed replacing
You Kool-aid drinkers have really short memories. The Clinton’s were the King and Queen of “Cleaning House”. Of course the press never made a big deal of it so you probably don’t remember hearing about it.
Get a life.
Uh, Heckler–
1. Clinton is no longer president.
2. He didn’t replace experts with hacks.
3. Linda Tripp was an appointment left over from Bush I, and look where being nice got him?
LibYou didn’t finish the list.
4. We wern’t at war5. We paid down the debt6. We wern’t illegally wire tapped7. We had better then normal emplayment8. Jobs wern’t shipped overseas9. We didn’t have the nation killing trade deficit we have today10. We didn’t have Halliburton(sp)getting nobid contracts11. the list goes on and onPS12 We didn’t have Bushytail and his goffy sidekick to deal with.
Philip,”Is Bolton taking revenge?”YOU’RE DAMN RIGHT HE IS!
Sail on, captain. There’s just empty anger here.
Hehe, so true, North Guy, so true . . .
HEY EVERYBODY! I FOUND OUT JOHN MALKOVICH AND TRUTHREGARDLESS IS REALLY IAN HIMSELF! HAHAHAHA!!
Competent folks are fleeing goveremnt work in droves. The real story is that conscientious folk….on both sides of the political fence are running away from this “pResident” in droves.
I mean these are the folks who forced an anti-environment, pro business head of EPA from office because they undermined her ability to do anything resembling her mandated job!
By the way CF. Excelllent post with pics. I wonder why the so called “liberal media” isn’t showing them?
Bolton is just one more example of this administrations predelection to place toadies or figureheads agreeable to the nut right base in positions that they are far from qulaified for.
Bushies? All 3 or4 of you still so blind you will not see? Now falls a hard rain! Abramoff, Libby, no WMDS, morass in Iraq, gung ho to go to Iraq, Katrina, domestic spying, Osama still at large, Anthrax attacker still at large, highest debt in history, worst economy in history, greatest invasion by illegals in history, and on and on! Hell it’s only the end of year 1 of term 2! What fresh hell lies ahead?
Yes a hard rain is falling on all of America due to and incompetent, corrupt, failed pResident and the power mad UN- American folks that made him in the first place.
Ahh but a hard rein! That is next to fall.
Lovin’ every minute of it!
It seems men/woman of honor have no place in the Bush White House. An for those who support Bush, you are really a sorry lot. Just think if all you Bush Supporters (is that like a jock strap?) lived 53 years ago you could have supported Bush’s Grandfather. Hitler.
The Sunday Times February 12, 2006
CIA chief sacked for opposing tortureSarah Baxter and Michael Smith, WashingtonThe CIA’s top counter-terrorism official was fired last week because he opposed detaining Al-Qaeda suspects in secret prisons abroad, sending them to other countries for interrogation and using forms of torture such as “water boarding”, intelligence sources have claimed.Robert Grenier, head of the CIA counter-terrorism centre, was relieved of his post after a year in the job. One intelligence official said he was “not quite as aggressive as he might have been” in pursuing Al-Qaeda leaders and networks.
Vincent Cannistraro, a former head of counter-terrorism at the agency, said: “It is not that Grenier wasn’t aggressive enough, it is that he wasn’t ‘with the programme’. He expressed misgivings about the secret prisons in Europe and the rendition of terrorists.”
Grenier also opposed “excessive” interrogation, such as strapping suspects to boards and dunking them in water, according to Cannistraro.
Porter Goss, who was appointed head of the CIA in August 2004 with a mission to “clean house”, has been angered by a series of leaks from CIA insiders, including revelations about “black sites” in Europe where top Al-Qaeda detainees were said to have been held.
In last Friday’s New York Times, Goss wrote that leakers within the CIA were damaging the agency’s ability to fight terrorism and causing foreign intelligence organisations to lose confidence. “Too many of my counterparts from other countries have told me, ‘You Americans can’t keep a secret’.”
Goss is believed to have blamed Grenier for allowing leaks to occur on his watch.
Since the appointment of Goss, the CIA has lost almost all its high-level directors amid considerable turmoil.
AB “Buzzy” Krongard, a former executive director of the CIA who resigned shortly after Goss’s arrival, said the leaks were unlikely to stop soon, despite proposals to subject officers to more lie detector tests.
Krongard said it was up to President George Bush to stop the rot. “The agency has only one client: the president of the United States,” he said. “The reorganisation is the way this president wanted it. If he is unwilling to reform it, the agency will go on as it is.”
“History will judge how good an idea it was to destroy the teams and the programmes that were in place.”