Gordon Mitchell argues that John Bolton’s handling of intelligence in the Niger Uranium intelligence should preclude his confirmation as Ambassador to the United Nations:

Impeccably accurate IC reporting won’t matter a whit if political operatives ignore official intelligence reports and use Bolton-style B-teaming to back favored policies. Bolton’s confirmation would give political operatives throughout the administration the green light to B-team, to skirt the established procedures for vetting and validating the intelligence data underwriting U.S. foreign policy. Raymond McGovern, who spent 27 years as a CIA analyst, during which he chaired National Intelligence Estimates and prepared and briefed to senior White House officials the President’s Daily Brief, spells out the upshot: “For integrity in intelligence is now on life support. Approving the nomination of quintessential politicizer Bolton would pull the plug and ensure amateurish, cooked-to-taste intelligence analysis for decades to come.”

Gordon’s arguments are part of a public debate with Daveed Gartenstein-Ross.

Daveed—in a very odd move—has chosen to base his defense of Bolton on the claim that Iraq did attempt to procure uranium from Niger—or, at least, the claim that this was a reasonable belief when Bolton put it in a December 2002 State Department fact sheet.

You may remember that the claim was eventually revealed to be based on forgeries, prompting Condi Rice to admit that “it was a mistake for this [claim] to go in” the State of Union.

Daveed argues that the forged documents don’t undermine the claim because they “were not the only data points” in the Niger reporting. Daveed doesn’t, however, mention what the other data points were—because they don’t exist.

The WMD Commission reports “the CIA concluded that the original reporting was based on the forged documents and was thus itself unreliable.” The original Niger claim was reported by a foreign intelligence service, which presumably also passed the source documents to an Italian journalist at Panorama. The Foreign Intelligence Service was probably the Italians, although they blame the French.

Moreover, Daveed asserts Britain’s spies “continue to stand by the claim.” This is awesome: he links to Cliff May at the National Review—but not the Butler Report, presumably the source of May’s claim. The Butler Report conditions Britain’s stand on the fact that “The forged documents were not available to the British Government at the time its assessment was made, and so the fact of the forgery does not undermine it.”

[I’ve added a longer digression in the comments regarding the varying proximities “by the claim” to which Britain’s spies have stood.]

That protection is, of course, not available to Mr. Bolton who had the documents. Put simpy, Bolton knew the claim was bogus, but used it anyway.

This may explain why the State Department covered-up Bolton’s role in creating the fact sheet.