Posts Tagged ‘CIA’
“On Sept. 19, 2001, J. Cofer Black, the director of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, summoned two agents to his office,” writes Michael Levenson in a Boston Globe story titled, strangely, Romney advisor at home in the spy world fray
“I want bin Laden’s head shipped back in a box filled with dry ice,” Black told them, one of the agents later reported. “I want to be able to show bin Laden’s head to the president.”
Black – who is now Mitt Romney’s chief adviser on counterterrorism and national security – is a brash and tough-talking veteran spy. He is also controversial. Black is widely credited with trying to warn then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice about Al Qaeda in the summer of 2001, but an internal CIA report last summer criticized his counterterrorist center, saying it lacked an effective strategy before Sept. 11.
Now Black is facing more scrutiny for his current role as a top executive of Blackwater Worldwide, the international security firm whose alleged killing of 17 Iraqis prompted a congressional investigation and a demand from the Iraqi government that the firm withdraw from the country.
Yuh-huh. Please see:
- Romney’s security advisor, vice chairman of mercenary firm Blackwater USA
- scandal-prone Romney throws other problematic “friends” “under buses”; yet he clings like grim death to Cofer Black of Blackwater—we ask: why?
- yet another morally, even logically inconsistent Romney advisor: introducing General “Spider” Marks
yours &c.
dr. g.d.
“Most Americans probably are not intimately familiar with Huawei (pronounced “Wa-way,” as if Gilda Radner of Saturday Night Live fame were asked to pronounce the name). The company’s founder, Ren Zhengfei is a former officer of the People’s Liberation Army,” writes the estimable Charles Cooper for CNET’s Tech news blog in a post titled Mitt Romney’s communist connection
Tough to know what to make of that. When it comes to speaking with the press, Ren is a regular Greta Garbo. A mini-profile Forbes ran three years ago noted that many of Huawei’s major customers are state-run businesses in China. And while Ren owns 1 percent of the company, the rest belongs to an unidentified “union.”
Go figure.
Meanwhile, Ren has gone about building Huawei into a success story disregarding the usual corporate niceties. In 2000–three years before the WMD craze got us all nutso about taking out Saddam–the CIA accused Huawei of secretly selling a communications system to Iraq. In the final report of the Iraq Survey Group, Huawei and two other Chinese companies were singled out for carrying out “extensive work in and around Baghdad”–mainly telecommunication switches and the installation of fiber-optic cable.
Then in 2003, Cisco socked Huawei with a patent infringement lawsuit. Cisco claimed Huawei ripped off its intellectual property to make a lineup of routers and switches. Huawei denied the allegations though in the end caved.
But if at all possible, business doesn’t let politics intrude. So it is that Friday we learned that Bain Capital is paying $2.2 billion to acquire 3Com. Part of the deal involves China’s Huawei Technologies, which will acquire a minority stake in 3Com.
And, oh, by the way, Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor running for the Republican presidential nomination–he headed Bain Capital for 14 years … more
More on Romney’s web of corruption:
Was it really hard work and clean living that issued in Romney’s vast personal fortune?—we mean, really?
yours &c.
dr. g.d.