Bush 'gutted' State Dept. nuke efforts

WASHINGTON, Jan. 18 (UPI) -- A former State Department official says the Bush administration "gutted" counter-proliferation initiatives by pushing ideology over experience.

Investigative magazine Mother Jones claims in a new article that "the offices charged with keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of North Korea and Iran became, in the words of a former State Department expert, 'mere shadows of their former selves,'" as career diplomats were pushed out and replaced with political appointees by Bush appointee John Bolton.

"A pall was cast over the office" when Bolton arrived in 2001, former State Department official Linda Gallini told the magazine.

By the time Gallini left five years later, Mother Jones reported, more than a dozen of the nation's most experienced non-proliferation experts had resigned or retired, fed up with a leadership that -- as 35-year arms-control veteran Dean Rust put it -- assumed "seasoned (weapons of mass destruction) experts are only capable of 'old think.'"

"The advice of career professionals was suddenly taken as disloyalty," added Gallini.

The magazine claims that certain individuals were targeted -- "career diplomats and other experts suspected of disagreeing with the administration on Saddam Hussein's weapons programs or not supporting its vendetta against Mohamed ElBaradei -- the (International Atomic Energy Agency) chief who had refused to rubber-stamp the White House's claims about Iraqi (weapons programs)."

Bolton, for his part, has written in a memoir of his time at the State Department that its institutions were "broken," requiring a "cultural revolution."

"State (Department) careerists are schooled in accommodation and compromise with foreigners, rather than aggressive advocacy of U.S. interests," he wrote in "Surrender Is Not An Option," published last year.