The Senate Foreign Relations Committee's hearings on President Bush's controversial nominee to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations have been delayed to accommodate those senators traveling to Rome to attend the funeral of John Paul II. Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that a former State Department official will testify that John Bolton sought to intimidate intelligence officials who disagreed with his views on such matters as the WMD program that the Bush Administration presented as a casus belli with Iraq. The hearings could become very interesting if senators begin asking questions journalists have avoided about how politics might have shaped pre-war intelligence.
For more on this see The Washington Note.