Cooking the books, your tax dollars at work.

Adding more fuel to the fire already burning:

John R. Bolton flew to Europe in 2002 to confront the head of a global arms-control agency and demand he resign, then orchestrated the firing of the unwilling diplomat in a move a U.N. tribunal has since judged unlawful, according to officials involved.

A former Bolton deputy says the U.S. undersecretary of state felt Jose Bustani "had to go," particularly because the Brazilian was trying to send chemical weapons inspectors to Baghdad. That might have helped defuse the crisis over alleged Iraqi weapons and undermined a U.S. rationale for war.

Hmmmm. And some still try to say the administration was not cooking the books?

An official British document, disclosed last month, said Prime Minister Tony Blair agreed in April 2002 to join in an eventual U.S. attack on Iraq. Two weeks later, Bustani was ousted, with British help.

More hmmmmmmmm.

After U.N. arms inspectors had withdrawn from Iraq in 1998 in a dispute with the Baghdad government, Bustani stepped up his initiative, seeking to bring Iraq —— and other Arab states —— into the chemical weapons treaty.

Bustani's inspectors would have found nothing, because Iraq's chemical weapons were destroyed in the early 1990s. That would have undercut the U.S. rationale for war because the Bush administration by early 2002 was claiming, without hard evidence, that Baghdad still had such an arms program.

The plot thickens. Read on.

Former Bustani aide Bob Rigg, a New Zealander, sees a clear U.S. motivation: "Why did they not want OPCW involved in Iraq? They felt they couldn't rely on OPCW to come up with the findings the U.S. wanted."

In June 2001, Bolton "telephoned me to try to interfere, in a menacing tone, in decisions that are the exclusive
responsibility of the director-general," Bustani wrote in 2002 in a Brazilian academic journal.

The United States went public with the campaign in March 2002, moving to terminate Bustani's tenure. On the eve of an OPCW Executive Council meeting to consider the U.S. no-confidence motion, Bolton met Bustani in The Hague to seek his resignation, U.S. and OPCW officials said. When Bustani refused, "Bolton said something like, `Now we'll do it the other way,' and walked out," Rigg recounted.

In the Executive Council, the Americans failed to win majority support among the 41 nations. A month later, on April 21, at U.S. insistence, an unprecedented special session of the full treaty conference was called. Only 113 nations were represented, 15 without voting rights because their dues were far in arrears. The U.S. delegation had suggested it would withhold U.S. dues — 22 percent of the budget —— if Bustani stayed in office, stirring fears of an OPCW collapse.

This time the Americans, with British help, got the required two-thirds vote of those present and voting. But that amounted to only 48 in favor of removing Bustani —— and seven opposed and 43 abstaining ——in an organization then with 145 member states.

Fancy that! The US got its vote. This government always threatens to withhold money to get international governments to vote its way.

Cooking the books, your tax dollars at work.