PART 9: KILLER PIMP
IN THE STATE DEPARTMENT
By Alex Constantine
"I have, for better or worse, a track record..."
- Richard Armitage, Senate Confirmation
Hearing, March 15, 2001.
Meanwhile, back at the Iran-contra ranch, on February 24, 1986, 4:44 pm, a
furious military intelligence agent contracted by the CIA, DIA and ISA
dialed (202) 695-4351, the desk of Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard
Armitage, to inquire about "his alleged involvement in a house of
prostitution for senior military officers, intelligence agents, and
informants in Southeast Asia." Scott Barnes, the interrogator, also wanted
to know "about his work with Vang Pao and drug money laundering."1
Barnes had discovered these connections while on assignment in South
Vietnam searching for POWs. He didn't find POWs, exactly. What he found
in Vietnam was American pilots with CIA connections imprisoned on
charges of attempting to smuggle opium out of the country AFTER the war.
Four days later, he was on the phone with Dave Hall, assistant special agent
in charge of the Inspector General's office, to discuss Armitage's
"connection with drugs and prostitution in Southeast Asia and his continued
involvement with Mr. [Patrick] O'Rourke running guns." The IG inspector
said
that he had heard of "a possible connection," and put up, "former
Ambassador
Phil Habib was also involved." An Army major general had written the IG
to
expose "Armitage's and Habib's alleged involvement in prostitution
in a Da
Nang house of prostitution and in [money] laundering out of Southeast Asia
to the Philippines and to Sidney, Australia, using Air America, Vang Pao
connections and secret airlines."1
Drugs? Hookers? Secret airlines? Karen Hughes wouldn't approve. The pimp
climbed the geopolitical step-ladder of power...
1978: Armitage joins the staff of Senator Robert Dole of Kansas.
1980-81: He joins the presidential campaign of Ronald Reagan, is appointed
as senior advisor to the new president's Interim Foreign Policy Advisory
Board.
1985: Ferdinand Marcos is making a mess of it in the Philippines. The
embattled dictator is toying with the notion of reinstating General Fabian
Ver as armed forces chief of staff. The General has been fingered by the
Agrava Commission for complicity in the 1983 murder of President Begnino S.
Aquino at an airstrip by gun-slinging terrorists. Nonetheless, Marcos
refuses stubbornly to appoint anyone but General Ver to the post, an
"interim" chief of staff is installed, Reagan wrings his hands and
sweats it
out.
There are plans to dismantle Marcos and his dictatorship. In January, a
well-dressed wing formation of American officials swoop into Manila. It is
Paul Wolfowitz, assistant secretary of state for East Asia, Richard
Childress of the NSC, Richard Armitage, assistant secretary of defense for
international affairs. They've come to whip Marcos into line, insisting
that
he "reform" his military forces to crush the scattered but rising
"Communist" backlash - that is, starving peasants pushing against
unemployment, death squad rule, crony capitalism and general squalor -
without provoking further scandals that could return to haunt the Reagan
administration...2
Since, Armitage has been a familiar face in government - as a spook, he
never really leaves it.
Amongst positions held by him since leaving public service in 1993,
according to an Internet profile, count "a member of the Board of Directors
of the General Dynamics Electric Systems, Inc.; a member of the Board of
Visitors of the United States Naval Academy; holder of the Brig.Gen. H. L.
Oppenheimer Chair of Warfighting Strategy at the Marine Corps University; a
member of the National Defense Panel; a member of the Board of Directors of
the Roy F. Weston, Inc., and of the U.S.-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce;
Chairman of the Board of Visitors of the National Defense University, a
member of the Secretary Navy Committee on Women in the Navy and Marine
Corps; a member of the Board of Visitors of the Naval War College and of the
Advisory Board of the ManTech International Corporation... He has received
numerous military decorations from the Governments of Thailand, Republic of
Korea, Bahrain, and Pakistan. He has been awarded the Department of Defense
Medal for Distinguished Public Service four times..."
He's been a puffy-chested diplomat, military strategist, drug runner,
money
launderer and "solicitor." The rewards can be enormous ... And a good
"counter-terrorist" who knows the ropes, with the right connections
...
He was one of the signatories of the notorious Project for the New American
Century (PNAC) letter to President Clinton in 1998. Armitage was a board
member for CACI, a private military contractor (with revenues of $1.5
billion in 2004), headquartered in Arlington Virginia. CICI employed four of
the salacious, murderous interrogators at Abu Ghraib prison.
In 1989, the year Marcos died of kidney failure in Hawaii, Bush was in the
White House and Armitage returned to the Philippines to "negotiate military
bases." He would "negotiate military bases" for the next three
years.
A voice whispers, "what was he really doing over there?" The Independence
web site offerws a peek at his secret life: "Richard Armitage became Deputy
Secretary of State in March 2001." A few months after George W. Bush was
selected president, Armitage moved over to "agent in place" status.
And a
well-qualified one: "He was a professional ASSASSIN in Vietnam, Laos and
Cambodia during the Vietnam war. He led ASSASSIN teams similar to the
PHOENIX program that killed and tortured tens of thousands of Asians."
That's right. "COUNTER-terrorist."
"After Vietnam he worked for the Defense Department on arms sales in Iran
and other countries.... He was an intimate insider in the Iran/Contra
illegalities. He has been accused of links to illicit gambling, drug
smuggling and expansion of organized crime in Russia, Central Asia and the
Far East..."3
This is the man who would play a leading role in Middle East "security"
policies under G.W. Bush.
Prior to his appointment to the State Department, Armitage was a board
member of Database Technologies (DBT)/ChoicePoint Inc. ChoicePoint is a
partner of the vast "data mining" company Science Applications International
Corp. The SAIC web site proclaims it has developed a strategic alliance
with ChoicePoint Incorporated to provide our clients with quick and
effortless information retrieval from public records data. ChoicePoint
Incorporated maintains thousands of gigabytes of public records data.'"
Picture, for a moment, a secret "strategic alliance" between Science
Applications International Corp., in San Diego, the penultimate, classified
military-industrial-intelligence contractor, and mass-murderer Armitage, in
control of all those gigabytes.
The emerging world as Armitage saw it during his Senate confirmation hearing
in March 2001: "American leadership will be the central reality of the
international system for as far as the eye can see..."
And he meant it.
[TO BE CONTINUED]
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NOTES
1) Scott Barnes with Melva Libb, "BOHICA," Scott Barnes, Bohica Corp.,
1987.
Phil Habit was known as "Mr. Foreign Service" to his subordinates.
Babib was
raised in Brooklyn and joined the service after WW II. Habib was at the
forefront in negotiations to end the Vietnam War, ambassador to East Asia
under President Gerald Ford. From 1981-83, he was Reagan's special envoy
to
the Middle East. Raymond Bonner of the New York Times writes, "Some of
the
missions he undertook in his career are still not known about publicly. Nor
will they be, at least not from Habib."
2) Raymond Bonner, Waltzing with a Dictator, New York Times Books, 1987.
3) http://www.independence.net/armitage/