Armitage, War Opponent?

[Nbadan]

Not so fast, just cause Armitage worked for Colin Powell and had concessions about the Iraq War, rightfully so as it turns out, doesn't mean that Armitage was a war opponent as he has been portrayed by Libby excusers, more like a war interventionists, as I'll show...

January 26, 1998
The Honorable William J. Clinton
President of the United States
Washington, DC

Dear Mr. President:

The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy ..

Elliott Abrams Richard L. Armitage William J. Bennett
Jeffrey Bergner John Bolton Paula Dobriansky
Francis Fukuyama Robert Kagan Zalmay Khalilzad
William Kristol Richard Perle Peter W. Rodman
Donald Rumsfeld William Schneider, Jr. Vin Weber
Paul Wolfowitz R. James Woolsey Robert B. Zoellick

Also,

Richard Armitage - the connections behind his attack on Latham
By David Palmer
June 10, 2004

.. So who is Richard Armitage? None other than a former board member of CACI - the private contractor that employed four interrogators at Abu Ghraib prison - interrogators who worked with the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade there ..

Armitage’s past helps explain why he now is interfering directly in Australian politics. He was indirectly connected with the Iran-Contra scandal when he served in the Reagan administration as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. He had direct knowledge of the diversion of funds, from arms sold to Iran (illegally – but approved by Reagan), that were syphoned through the CIA to the Contras (illegally – but again, approved by Reagan) for CIA-directed use against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

Armitage, like some other officials in the Reagan administration, did not like the illegality of the whole operation – but they did not come forward with their knowledge – and Armitage, in his Defense position, would most likely have known most of the details.

SMH

Basically, Armitage is dirtier than a Hookem post in the PR forum and it may come that the Cons regret that they ever put a spot-light on this guy.

[Nbadan]

New Clues in the Plame Mystery
By Robert Parry
September 15, 2006

A well-placed conservative source has added an important clue to the mystery of the Bush administration’s “outing” of CIA officer Valerie Plame after her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, became one of the first Establishment figures to accuse George W. Bush of having “twisted” intelligence to justify the Iraq War.

The source, who knows both White House political adviser Karl Rove and former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, told me that the two men are much closer than many Washington insiders understand, that they developed a friendship and a working relationship when Bush was recruiting Colin Powell to be Secretary of State.

In those negotiations, Armitage stood in for Powell and Rove represented Bush – and after that, the two men provided a back channel for sensitive information to pass between the White House and the State Department, the source said.

The significance of this detail is that it undermines the current “conventional wisdom” among Washington pundits that Armitage acted alone – and innocently – in July 2003 when he disclosed Plame’s covert iden y to right-wing columnist Robert Novak, who then got Rove to serve as a secondary source confirming the information from Armitage.

Link

It has been well known that there were moles in the State Dept. but having a stealth mole like Armitage, who was widely seen as Powell's staunch ally is dirty sneakiness to the nth degree. Wasn't Armitage involved in spying and intel in the military? Hold your friends close, hold your enemies closer.