Latest Scandal: John Bolton Questioned CIA Intelligence

     Intelligence reporter Douglas Jehl gets front-page placement Tuesday for his latest on John Bolton, Bush's choice to be ambassador to the United Nations ("Ex-Officials Say Bolton Inflated Syrian Danger"). The latest anti-Bolton angle: He didn't trust CIA intelligence enough.

     Jehl begins: "John R. Bolton clashed repeatedly with American intelligence officials in 2002 and 2003 as he sought to deliver warnings about Syrian efforts to acquire unconventional weapons that the Central Intelligence Agency and other experts rejected as exaggerated, according to former intelligence officials. Ultimately, the former intelligence officials said, most of what Mr. Bolton, then an under secretary of state, said publicly about Syria hewed to the limits on which the C.I.A. and other agencies had insisted. But they said that the prolonged and heated disputes over Mr. Bolton's proposed remarks were unusual within government, and that they reflected what one former senior official called a pattern in which Mr. Bolton sought to push his public assertions beyond the views endorsed by intelligence agencies….Mr. Bolton's supporters have said the exchanges were part of the customary back-and-forth in government in advance of such speeches, but his critics say they were unusual in scope and intensity, and reflected the degree to which Mr. Bolton sought in his remarks to go beyond previous intelligence assessments."

     Of course, the Times and others have directed much criticism at the CIA for its faulty intelligence regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. But when Bolton is found to have questioned the organization's intelligence on another front, it's suddenly a controversy worthy of Page One.

     National Review editor Rich Lowry calls it "another Bolton non-scandal."

For the rest of Jehl on Bolton, click here:

Surprised by Personal Warmth of Conservative Pope

     A long profile of Pope Benedict XVI purports to show how the new pontiff's views "hardened" during the campus chaos of the 60s, in Sunday's "Turbulence on Campus in 60's Hardened Views of Future Pope" written by Richard Bernstein, Daniel Wakin, and Mark Landler.

     "But while his deep reading and thinking in theology, philosophy, and history were fundamental to development as a theologian, it was the protests of student radicals at Tübingen University -- in which he saw an echo of the Nazi totalitarianism he loathed -- that seem to have pushed him definitively toward deep conservatism and insistence on unquestioned obedience to the authority of Rome….His rulings came flowing out of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, carefully footnoted and, to critics, repressive and intolerant. Liberation theology of the 1980's, in which leftist clerics in Latin America argued for radical change in society to help the poor, was quashed. Bishops were chastised for straying, like Archbishop Raymond G. Hunthausen of Seattle over his tolerant views on homosexuals. More than a dozen theologians, priests and bishops were punished for doctrinal error, and presumably, many other cases have not come to light. In 2000, he published a condemnation of the concept that other religions might be as valid as Catholicism."

     A more personal profile Sunday by Ian Fisher ("Meet Benedict XVI: Shy, Orderly, Funny") is more favorable but seems surprised the pope's personality doesn't match up with liberal cliché: "But, with his gold glasses slightly askew, he seemed serene and at ease in his new role as the 265th pope. He did not chide or lay down harsh truths as he did on Monday when the conclave began, warning direly of a 'dictatorship of relativism.' It was his first public audience, the day before he will be formally installed as pope on St. Peter's Square, and it posed again the issue the very same reporters in the audience have been trying to resolve: How a man, the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, 78, with so fierce a reputation and so long a record of unstinting orthodoxy can also be, by nearly all accounts, courteous, humble, warm if not effusive, and even shy?....But he was smiling, congenial -- and orderly. Colleagues and friends say a sense of order may also be a hallmark of this new pontificate, though detractors worry, too, that it might too much resemble rigid traditionalism."

For more of Fisher, click here:

For more from Bernstein, Wakin and Landler, click here:

Tony Blair, "America's Poodle"?

     Alan Cowell files from London for Tuesday's edition on the upcoming elections in Britain ("With 10 Days To British Vote, War Emerges As Top Issue") and pushes the idea that the vote will hinge on what the British think of Blair's decision to fight alongside the U.S. in Iraq.

     Covering a Blair news conference yesterday, Cowell spins the prime minister's decision not to rehash his decision to back the U.S. with the scandal-tinged word "stonewall": "[British PM Tony] Blair did not refer specifically to American participation in the decision to go to war. In the past, he has been called America's poodle in Iraq by his political foes. But it also seems part of his strategy to stonewall in the face of demands that he apologize or otherwise retreat from his commitment to the war. 'For goodness sake, let's stop having this argument about whether it's my character or integrity that's at issue here and understand that the decision had to be taken, and I took it,' he said. The war itself had not figured prominently in the campaign so far. But many Britons have said their vote will be swayed by the fact that, while Mr. Blair spoke so forcefully of a threat from Iraqi unconventional weapons, none were ever found. On Sunday, the debate began to revive when the newspaper The Daily Mail reported that Britain's attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, had advised Mr. Blair privately of six reasons why an invasion of Iraq might breach international law."

For more from Cowell, click here:

Sen. Kent Conrad, "Deficit Hawk"

     A front-page story by Robin Toner and David Rosenbaum on the slow progress of Bush's Social Security reform plan in Congress includes a chart by Toner describing the members of the Senate Finance Committee. It refers to Sen. Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota, as a "deficit hawk" who "says he cannot tolerate the borrowing it takes to set up private accounts."

     But is he? While not an arch-liberal, Conrad is safely ensconced on the leftward end of the Senate spectrum, and this "deficit hawk" seems tolerant of borrowing for quite a lot of programs, including preserving military bases in his home state. Conrad also opposed the Farm Bill because it contained "cuts in funding for the crucial economic safety net for farmers."

     Last year the Republican National Committee claimed Conrad was among the Democrats who favored "additional spending requests…above and beyond the approved budget," to the tune of  $506 billion.