Richard Armitage Bomb Threat

Richard Armitage was mainly unknown to most Americans until recently.  But now Armitage, the quintessential Washington insider can't; seem to stay out of the news.  First it was revealed that Richard Armitage was Bob Novak's source for his story on Valerie Plame and now a report comes in about a bomb threat made by him after 9/11.

Richard Armitage Bomb Threat

Pakistani leader General Pervez Musharraf said that former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage threatened to bomb Pakistan "back to the stone age" unless they cooperated with 9/11/2001-related intelligence gathering.

Of course denials followed.  Instead, Armitage says, he told Pakistan's top intelligence official on Sept. 12, 2001, that Pakistan would have to decide if it were "with us or against us" in the American effort to confront al-Qaida and the Taliban.

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The U.S. deputy secretary of state from 2001 until 2005, Armitage on Friday denied Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's claim he threatened to bomb Pakistan "back to the Stone Age" if it refused to cooperate in the war on terrorism, according to the Washington Post.
 
"I didn't say it," Armitage told CNN. "Never did I threaten to use military force. I was not authorized to."

The paper reports that while some current and former U.S. officials said the comment sounded like something Armitage might have said, they believed his denials and noted he typically expressed himself even more vividly.

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"It doesn't sound like Rich to me," said Aaron Miller, a former State Department Middle East specialist. "He would have come up with a much more graphic and original formulation."

--Jack Kramer writes from Florida

Additional Source: Washington Post