Can You Hide Surveillance Equipment in that Wig?

Sidney Blumenthal has an eye-opening column about Colin Powell's recent efforts to regain his credibility. It's a fascinating look at the way that he's undermining the John Bolton for U.N. effort. But I'm mostly drawn to these two paragraphs:

The Bolton confirmation hearings have revealed his constant efforts to undermine Powell on Iran and Iraq, Syria, and North Korea. They have also exposed a most curious incident that has triggered the administration's stonewall reflex. The Foreign Relations Committee discovered that Bolton made a highly unusual request and gained access to 10 intercepts by the National Security Agency, which monitors worldwide communications, of conversations involving past and present government officials. Whose conversations did Bolton secretly secure and why?

Staff members on the committee believe that Bolton was likely spying on Powell, his senior advisors, and other officials reporting to the secretary of state on diplomatic initiatives that Bolton opposed. If so, it is also possible that Bolton was sharing this top-secret information with his neoconservative allies in the Pentagon and the vice president's office, with whom he was in daily contact and well known to be working in league against Powell. If the intercepts are ever released, they may disclose whether Bolton was a key figure in a counterintelligence operation run inside the Bush administration against the secretary of state, resembling the hunted character played by Will Smith in "Enemy of the State." Both Republican and Democratic senators have demanded that the State Department, which holds the NSA intercepts, turn them over to the committee. But Rice so far has refused. What is she hiding by her coverup?

What the fuck? Maybe we can't figure out our asses from a hole in the ground in the middle east because these hoopleheads are too busy trying to clutch and grab at power and sabotage their domestic rivals at every turn. I mean, it was pretty bad how Tom DeLay abused the Department of Homeland Security to track down runaway Democrats, but for John Bolton to use the NSA (the NSA!) to spy on the U.S. State Department? These men truly know no limits.