Senior State Department official resigns (Robert Joseph)

[sabra]

http://www.mlive.com/newsflash/washington/index.ssf?/base/politics-11/116975575632050.xml&storylist=washington

Senior State Department official resigns

WASHINGTON (AP) — Robert Joseph, the State Department's senior arms control and security official, has submitted his resignation to President Bush.

Joseph resigned amid uncertainty about the future of negotiations to curb nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea. Talks on both fronts have moved slowly, with U.N. sanctions against both countries showing limited results.

His departure follows that of several other top diplomatic officials, including Philip Zelikow, who was a close adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Deputy Secretary Robert Zoellick, and John Bolton, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations;

Joseph joined the State Department in 2005 after working on Bush's national security council staff.

He has taken a strong view on needs to eliminate North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs and warned last month against terrorist groups and other nations acting against U.S. and commercial satellites.

[CottonBear]

1. Yet another rat abandons ship. n/t

[stillcool]

2. Indictment coming?...

or maybe just a subpoena...

[sofa king]

5. That could be interesting, couldn't it....

Part of the national security team when Valerie Wilson and the WMD team got whacked, then a guy in charge of WMDs after there was nobody minding the store.

Hmmm.

[williesgirl]

3. K&R

[Judi Lynn]

4. AFP: Top US arms control official quits

Top US arms control official quits
January 26, 2007 09:11am
Article from: Agence France-Presse

THE top US Government official in charge of arms control has resigned at a time when Washington is stepping up efforts to end North Korea's nuclear weapons drive and rallying global action over Iran's sensitive atomic program.

Robert Joseph, the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, sent a letter to President George W. Bush on Wednesday informing of his decision after six years on the job, the State Department said today.

Considered a hardliner in the Bush administration, Joseph was a key architect of the controversial Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) designed by the United States to combat the smuggling of weapons of mass destruction.

He is among at least half a dozen of senior officials from the State Department who had quit in recent months and nearly all of the jobs had not been filled.
(snip/...)

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,21121322-38198,00.html?from=public_rss

[lovuian]

10. Getting out of dodge while the gettin is good

tough times ahead

[tanyev]

6. Spend more time with his family?

[stevedeshazer]

7. They're going down together

[Ian David]

8. He's resigned to spend more time allowing his family to sell nuclear weapons to Iran.

But you know, on the plus side:

1) He didn't drug his wife and anally rape her while she slept.
2) He didn't shoplift from Target.
3) He didn't expose himself to children at the mall.
4) He didn't masturbate in a public urinal at the airport.
5) He didn't exchange sexually explicit emails with congressional pages.


At least, as far as we know.

So, as far as Bush appointees go, this guy wasn't so bad, was he?

[Ian David]

9. I bet it has something to do with THIS: Iran gets military gear in Pentagon surplus sale

Iran gets military gear in Pentagon surplus sale
Sensitive weapon, F-14 parts surprisingly easy to acquire at auctions

Updated: 12:36 p.m. ET Jan 16, 2007

WASHINGTON - The U.S. military has sold forbidden equipment at least a half-dozen times to middlemen for countries — including Iran and China — who exploited security flaws in the Defense Department’s surplus auctions. The sales include fighter jet parts and missile components.

In one case, federal investigators said, the contraband made it to Iran, a country President Bush branded part of an “axis of evil.”

In that instance, a Pakistani arms broker convicted of exporting U.S. missile parts to Iran resumed business after his release from prison. He purchased Chinook helicopter engine parts for Iran from a U.S. company that had bought them in a Pentagon surplus sale. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, speaking on condition of anonymity, say those parts made it to Iran.

<snip>

'Evidence of a significant breakdown'
Federal investigators are increasingly anxious that Iran is within easy reach of a top priority on its shopping list: parts for the precious fleet of F-14 “Tomcat” fighter jets the United States let Iran buy in the 1970s when it was an ally.

In one case, convicted middlemen for Iran bought Tomcat parts from the Defense Department’s surplus division. Customs agents confiscated them and returned them to the Pentagon, which sold them again — customs evidence tags still attached — to another buyer, a suspected broker for Iran.

More:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16648850/


Edited to add:
See related threads:

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[gratuitous]

11. Kremlinologists, your calling is back

During the bad old days of the Soviet Union, there were folks called "Kremlinologists," who studied the public pronouncements and public appearances by Soviet officials to try to figure out what the Soviets were really up to. It was an article of faith that their "official" announcements in Pravda and Isvestia were never the entire truth, so by gleaning over other things, it was thought that a more complete picture might be divined from such minutiae as who was standing where and next to whom on the reviewing stand at a Red Square parade.

Nowadays, our modern Kremlin is Washington DC and the ultra-secretive Bush administration. It has been shown time and again that their official releases of information are usually just so much bullshit, so Friday news dump announcements like the sudden resignation of a senior official at the State Department has to be picked over very carefully to see if there's more here than meets the eye (and usually there is). Is Joseph leaving because he lost a power struggle? Is there an indictment in the air? Should the authorities confiscate his passport, just because?

[Marie26]

12. Isn't he a head neocon?

I wonder if this has something to do w/the Libby trial. Joseph was the one who insisted that Bush put the false Niger/uranium claim into the SOTU address. When Wilson debunked it, he was an unhappy neocon. I bet he's involved in the Plame scandal.

[yellowcanine]

13. When rats flee a sinking ship are there some rats just too stupid to leave? Or does a rat who

doesn't leave have as much chance of surviving as one who does? I think about these things.