Showing posts with label Armitage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Armitage. Show all posts

Sunday, November 11, 2007

If you vote for Mike Huckabee

You will be sure to change the Eternal War on Terror into a War of Religions: (my bold)
"People look at my record and say that I’m as strong on immigration, strong on terror as anybody. In fact I think I’m stronger than most people because I truly understand the nature of the war that we are in with Islamo fascism. These are people that want to kill us. It’s a theocratic war. And I don’t know if anybody fully understands that. I’m the only guy on that stage with a theology degree. I think I understand it really well. And know the threat of it is absolutely overwhelming to us. As a president, nobody’s going to be stronger on building border security, not having amnesty, no sanctuary cities, having a process in place that forces a process that is legal. When it comes to national security, I understand that the threat that we face is not about our grandchildren having better homes and better cars, it’s about whether they’re going to have a breath and a pulse."
Good to know.

Compare that with this statement by Richard Armitage to Wolf Blitzer:
BLITZER: Are you suggesting that the “War on Terror” is not the central component of U.S. policy right now?

ARMITAGE: There’s two different things. I’m suggesting that it perhaps shouldn’t be. The fact that we make a war on “terror”–which I think is a bit of a misnomer—perhaps it should be a war on extremism, certainly Islamic extremism right now—is keeping us from focusing on other issues, both domestic and international. Look, these terrorists want to hurt us; they’re a real and growing threat. But absent the availability of WMDs to them, they don’t pose an existential threat to us. This is not like fascism during the second world war or communism. The threat they pose to us is whether we in response to their activities will actually do harm to ourselves by changing our way of life, by suspending writs of habeas corpus and by engaging in such activities as torture.
(both links found via Crooks and Liars).

Friday, February 02, 2007

The story that just won't go away

Try as the Bush administration may...
...with Bush's popularity at a record low, a Zogby poll shows that over 40 percent of Americans now think there has been a "coverup" around 9/11. A more recent poll conducted at the Scripps-Howard/University of Ohio found more than a third of those asked said it was likely that "people in the federal government either assisted in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to stop the attacks because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East."
Read the article for the staggering and buried facts:

Assistant Secretary of State Richard Armitage is a figure bloodied by his work in Iran/Contra. He and then-CIA Director George Tenet had extensive meetings in Pakistan with President Musharraf in the spring of 2001, according to the Asia Times.

Then, Pakistan's top spy, Mahmood Ahmad, visited Washington for a week, taking meetings with top State Department people like Tenet and Mark Grossman, under secretary of state for political affairs. The Pakistani press reported, "ISI Chief Lt-Gen Mahmood's weeklong presence in Washington has triggered speculation about the agenda of his mysterious meetings at the Pentagon and National Security Council." Did they know that Ahmad had wired over $100,000 to Mohamed Atta, through U.K. national Saeed Sheikh in the summer of 2001? (Facts all confirmed, quietly, by the FBI investigation in Pakistan, and, partially, in the Wall Street Journal.)

[snip]

When the critics focus on the wacky theories and not on careful, moderate, serious authors like Lance, it's a strategy to frame the debate. It steers the argument from going after the real meat of 9/11: the history of U.S. foreign policy in strategic alliances with radical Islam.

Specifically, there are a set of troubling connections between the 9/11 terrorists and the U.S. State Department, the Pakistani ISI (old friends of the CIA from working together creating Afghani Mujahadeen during the Russian occupation), the Saudi General Intelligence Directorate, the Pentagon, Maxwell Air Force Base and the Muslim Brotherhood.

[snip]

When George W. Bush, and his gang of bloodstained Iran/Contra suspects seized the White House, they ushered in a new era of intimacy between the federal government and international mega-capital. After all, "Dubya" Bush had wasted a good chunk of his life in a cocaine and whiskey stupor, but the other half was spent in bad business deals with people like Saudi heavyweight Khalid bin Mahfouz. Mahfouz, alongside Salem bin Laden (Osama's half-brother), was a 1977 investor in Arbusto Energy, Bush's first oil company. Mahfouz later became the majority shareholder of BCCI. Mahfouz helped broker the deal for Bush when he wanted to unload his Harken energy stock. This same Khalid bin Mahfouz was branded by a report to the UN Security Council as one of the seven top Saudi al Qaeda money men. Shortly after the Bush/Harken deal, Mahfouz donated a quarter of a million dollars to Osama bin Laden's Mujahadeen in the late 1980s. According to Forbes, he put $30 million into the Muwaffaq Foundation, which the Treasury Department labeled an al Qaeda front. (Mahfouz also legendary for suing anyone who says so, and has terrified and constrained independent publishers in Canada and the UK.) Is it any wonder then, that the heavily compromised, Bush-White House connected 9/11 Commission took a dive to the mat on the "financing of 9/11" question? They said the money behind 9/11 was "of little practical significance" when behind the curtain stood an old friend of Bush, controlling a bogeyman named "al Qaeda." Senator Bob Graham said he was "stunned that we have not done a better job of pursuing" the question of foreign financing, and that crucial information had been "overly classified.

9/11, the day that changed everything. Or so the neocons want you to think....