TOTAL INFORMATION ANALYSIS

Monday, April 25, 2005

From Wayne Madsen at Online Journal April 20, 2005:

In a case eerily reminiscent of the death of British Ministry of Defense bio-weapons expert, Dr. David Kelly, an official of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research Near East and South Asian division (INR/NESA), John J. Kokal, 58, was found dead in the late afternoon of November 7, 2003.

Police indicated he may have jumped from the roof of the State Department. Kokal's body was found at the bottom of a 20-foot window well, eight floors below the roof of the State Department headquarters...

Kokal's INR bureau was at the forefront of confronting claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Washington police have not ruled out homicide as the cause of his death. Kokal was not wearing either a jacket or shoes when his body was found. He lived with his wife in Arlington, Virginia.
[...]

Another INR official, weapons expert Greg Thielmann, said he and INR were largely ignored by Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton and his deputy, David Wurmser, a pro-Likud neoconservative who recently became Vice President Dick Cheney's Middle East adviser. Kokal's former boss, the recently retired chief of INR, Carl W. Ford, later said that Bolton often exaggerated information to steer people in the wrong directions.

Now that Bolton has been nominated for U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and we have learned through Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings that Bolton was verbally and physically abusive to his colleagues over the past several years, it is time to take a close look at some violent deaths of State Department and CIA officials who tangled with the Bush administration over Iraq policy.
[...]

Ford testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Bolton was a "quintessential kiss-up and kick-down sort of guy." A lingering question is whether Bolton is a "kick out" (as in window) sort of guy.
[...]

NR and other State Department officials reported that a "chill" set in at the State Department following Kokal's defenestration. A number of employees were afraid to talk about the suspicious death. It also is unusual that The Northern Virginia Journal, a local Arlington newspaper, has not published an obituary notice on Kokal.

| Posted at 00:04 | PERMA-LINK |

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