Free Republic

WASHINGTON - With the United States and Pakistan united in a war against terrorism, the suggestion Friday that the United States once threatened to bomb the Pakistanis "back to the Stone Age" landed like a diplomatic bombshell. Acting swiftly to defuse concern over any such threat, the White House dismissed it as a misunderstanding, the former deputy secretary of state who allegedly issued the threat denied ever using such incendiary words, and President Bush attempted to smooth it over with a joke. Yet Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, who made the alleged U.S. threat public in a television interview airing this...

Now that former State Dept. Undersecretary Richard Armitage has been revealed as the leaker of Valerie Plame’s classified status as a CIA analyst to reporters Robert Novak and Bob Woodward, while White House officials Scooter Libby and Karl Rove were wrongfully targeted as the sources of the Plame leak, what kind of treatment does Armitage deserve in the future? Infamy. Richard Armitage is a low coward who let others take the heat for what he did, at great personal and professional cost. He had it in his power all along to exonerate Libby and Rove, but chose instead to hide...