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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
If Bolton is confirmed, it will be because senators believe that the evidence making him unfit for the U.N. job, unearthed at their own hearings, is false.
Apr 14, 2005 | Once again, President Bush is conducting a grand experiment in cognitive dissonance, testing whether his asserted "truths" can prevail over new and obvious facts. This psychological phenomenon was first defined by sociologist Leon Festinger and a team of social scientists in 1957 who studied the behavior of members of a UFO cult under duress when aliens failed to land on Earth as predicted. Some in the cult dropped out when the announced deadline came and went; others redoubled their conviction in the face of disconfirming evidence.
Bush's latest experiment involves his appointment of John Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations. The cognitive dissonance being tested goes beyond the nominee's oft-stated contempt for the United Nations, and extends to his blatant efforts to twist intelligence. Bush's guinea pigs are the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and, as always, the American people.
On Tuesday, John Negroponte, nominated as the first director of national intelligence, pledged in his confirmation hearings before the Senate intelligence committee that he would attempt to ensure reliable information, unlike that provided in the run-up to the Iraq war. "Our intelligence effort has to generate better results," said Negroponte. "That is my mandate, plain and simple ... The things that need to be done differently will be done differently."
At the same time, Carl Ford Jr., the former assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research, was testifying in the Bolton confirmation hearings before the Foreign Relations Committee that Bolton was "a serial abuser" of intelligence and intelligence officers. Ford described Bolton as "an ill-suited nominee to become ambassador to the United Nations ... a quintessential kiss-up, kick-down kind of guy who "stands out" as he "abuses his authority with little people" in his efforts to subvert the intelligence process for his own political purposes.
With the Bolton hearings we are at last getting a glimpse of how the Bush administration's political leadership has been systematically browbeating and threatening the intelligence community to drive ideological conclusions. We are also learning that the national security team of the first term was sharply and bitterly divided, with Secretary of State Colin Powell unable to impose his views even on his own undersecretary. Bolton waged his war against the intelligence professionals within the State Department as a Fifth Column, constantly and flagrantly undermining his own chain of command. His efforts to coerce the State Department's Intelligence and Research Bureau (INR) to rubberstamp his political imperatives "prompted the secretary of state to intervene," according to Ford's testimony. Powell felt compelled to speak to INR analysts in order to "assure employees that they should continue to 'speak truth to power.'" But his extraordinary step did not stop Bolton's relentless campaign of intimidation. In case after case -- Iraq, Cuba and North Korea -- Bolton personally bullied INR analysts, berated them, screamed at them and sought to destroy their careers if they did not do his bidding, even when it flew in the face of the facts, disregarded professional procedures and was contrary to the stated policy of the secretary of state.
The discrepancy between the reckless record of John Bolton and the anodyne promises of John Negroponte is not the only factor that points to the use of cognitive dissonance. Two reports on Bush-era failures of intelligence -- one by the Senate intelligence committee, the other by the President's Commission on Intelligence Capabilities Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction -- carefully avoided studying the political manipulation of information. Instead, both blamed the intelligence community alone, as though it acts in a vacuum. Despite orchestrated criticism before the Iraq war by conservatives that the intelligence agencies were not alarmist enough about Iraq's WMD, both reports have excoriated the agencies for being too alarmist. But the Senate intelligence committee report of last year attributed the failure to the intelligence community's "groupthink." In fact, INR was not part of any such "groupthink" and proved in retrospect to have been consistently correct on WMD in Iraq and elsewhere, while being subjected to the pressures of Bolton the "serial abuser."
The cognitive dissonance has been further elevated by Sen. Lincoln Chafee, R-R.I., the swing vote on the Foreign Relations Committee. At first, he indicated skepticism about voting to confirm Bolton, and asked questions that elicited information highlighting Bolton's abusive conduct. But then he denied the hearings had produced anything that would lead him to vote against Bolton. If Chafee votes against Bolton the committee will be deadlocked in a nine-to-nine tie and the nomination will not be able to move to the Senate floor.
"It was strong testimony from Mr. Ford. He used strong language," Chafee conceded. But, he added, "it's all focused on this one incident. We're not really seeing a pattern." Then the Senate's Hamlet swung the other way. "From the evidence we've heard, he's a difficult man to work for," Chafee said on Wednesday. Bolton, he continued, was "absolutely not" the best man for the job. "It's not my style," he said. Here, with infinite jest, Chafee was playing Yorick, but he swiveled back into character as Hamlet. "I don't endorse it, but that doesn't mean it can't be successful for some people." Thus Chafee wrestled with cognitive dissonance: Should he acknowledge the reality that contradicts the false picture before him? To be or not to be?
On Wednesday, Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., asked Bolton to explain why he had requested intercepts from the National Security Agency of other U.S. officials' communications, a highly irregular act. And the committee's vote on Bolton was postponed until next week. Will new information surface between now and then about this or another matter?
The pattern that has emerged so far in the hearings is inescapable. Ever the realist, Brent Scowcroft, the elder Bush's national security advisor, lately fired by President Bush from the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, remarked last week at a Washington think tank: "How [Bolton] performs will depend on two things -- the instructions he gets -- and whether he will carry them out."
Consider, first, the case of Iraq's WMD:
The Senate intelligence committee report states that in early October 2002 the deputy director of the CIA informed the Senate that the intelligence community did not believe British intelligence reports of enriched uranium sales from Niger to Iraq. Then CIA Director George Tenet told the deputy national security advisor the same thing. The president, Tenet urged, should not be a "fact witness" to a claim for which evidence was lacking.
