WASHINGTON, Nov. 30, 2008
Rice Heads To India After Attacks
Secretary Of State's Visit To Demonstrate "Solidarity" With India, White House Says
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Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will be in India later this week in the wake of the Mumbai terror attacks. (AP PHOTO)
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Rice and Bush wanted an opportunity "to express the condolences of the American government directly to the Indian government and the Indian people," Rice spokesman Sean McCormack said.
Rice was scheduled to leave Sunday night for a meeting in London and then travel to Brussels for a NATO gathering. On Wednesday, following the NATO meeting, she will travel to New Delhi, according to her new itinerary.
"Secretary Rice's visit to India is a further demonstration of the United States' commitment to stand in solidarity with the people of India as we all work together to hold these extremists accountable," White House press secretary Dana Perino said in a statement.
Rice had planned to attend the meeting of NATO foreign ministers Tuesday and Wednesday, with talks focusing on a broad international agenda, including Afghanistan, Georgia and the Ukraine. From there she was to visit Rome, Helsinki and Copenhagen, but it was unclear whether the trip to India would cancel or only postpone those visits.
Rice spoke with President-elect Barack Obama about India earlier on Sunday, McCormack said. It was the third phone conversation between the two since the attacks. Rice has also been in daily phone contact with Indian and Pakistani officials.
The announcement of Rice's trip came hours after Bush assured India's leader that the U.S. government will put its full weight behind the investigation into the attacks in Mumbai.
Earlier Sunday, a Republican senator endorsed a campaign suggestion from President-elect Barack Obama - appointment of a special envoy, perhaps former President Bill Clinton, to the disputed region of Kashmir - as the U.S. seeks to ease tensions between India and its nuclear-armed neighbor Pakistan.
The lone gunman captured by police after the attacks told authorities he belonged to a Pakistani militant group with links to Kashmir, a senior Indian police officer said. India has blamed "elements" from Pakistan for the 60-hour siege during which suspected Muslim militants hit 10 sites across India's financial capital, leaving at least 174 dead.
Bush told India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh, in a telephone call that "out of this tragedy can come an opportunity to hold these extremists accountable and demonstrate the world's shared commitment to combat terrorism," White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe said in a statement.
In addition to the Americans killed in the coordinated shooting rampage in India's financial capital, the foreigners among the dead included Germans, Canadians, Israelis and nationals from Britain, Italy, Japan, China, Thailand, Australia and Singapore.
Bush told the prime minister that "he has directed the state and defense departments along with other federal agencies to devote the necessary resources and personnel to this situation," Johndroe said.
Despite India's claim, Pakistan's ambassador to the United States, Husain Haqqani, said: "I don't think that this is the time for India or anybody in India to accuse Pakistan. It's time to work with Pakistan. Pakistan is now a democracy. India is a democracy. And as two democracies, we need to strengthen each other, rather than fall into the trap of the terrorists, who want us to fight with each other so that they can get greater strength."
India repeatedly has accused Pakistan of complicity in terrorist attacks on its soil, many of which it traces to militant groups fighting Indian rule in the divided Himalayan territory of Kashmir. The U.S. has tried to persuade Pakistan to shift its security focus from India, with which it has fought three wars, to Islamic militants along the Afghan border.
Obama told Time magazine in an interview in October that "Kashmir in particular is an interesting situation ... that is obviously a potential tar pit diplomatically." He spoke of devoting "serious diplomatic resources to get a special envoy in there to figure out a plausible approach." When asked if that sounded like a job for Clinton, Obama replied, "Might not be bad" and that they had spoken about the issue when they had lunch in September in Clinton's New York office.
The suggestion of sending an envoy won support from a leading Republican senator.
"I would think that might be a good idea because, it appears to me, that we have an interlocking situation of Afghanistan, Pakistan and India," said Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Asked specifically about Clinton as a possible mediator, Lugar said: "I think he could do a great job there."
Lugar and Haqqani appeared on ABC's "This Week."
© MMVIII The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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Best-selling author Mitch Albom on his first nonfiction work since "Tuesdays with Morrie."
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See all 41 CommentsPosted by mr22587 at 10:30 AM
Paranoid much?
Some of us read all the news! BTW
"Expect fallout, expect foreclosures, expect horror stories," California mortgage lender Paris Welch wrote to U.S. regulators in January 2006, about one year before the housing implosion cost her a job.
Bowing to aggressive lobbying - along with assurances from banks that the troubled mortgages were OK - regulators delayed action for nearly one year. By the time new rules were released late in 2006, the toughest of the proposed provisions were gone and the meltdown was under way.
"These mortgages have been considered more safe and sound for portfolio lenders than many fixed rate mortgages," David Schneider, home loan president of Washington Mutual, told federal regulators in early 2006. Two years later, WaMu became the largest bank failure in U.S. history.
Many of the banks that fought to undermine the proposals by some regulators are now either out of business or accepting billions in federal aid to recover from a mortgage crisis they insisted would never come.
Does this answer your questions?, And now Please- back to the subject at hand.
Regulators told bankers exotic mortgages were often inappropriate for buyers with bad credit.
Banks would have been required to increase efforts to verify that buyers actually had jobs and could afford houses.
Regulators proposed a cap on risky mortgages so a string of defaults wouldn''t be crippling.
Banks that bundled and sold mortgages were told to be sure investors knew exactly what they were buying.
Regulators urged banks to help buyers make responsible decisions and clearly advise them that interest rates might skyrocket and huge payments might be due sooner than expected.
Those proposals all were stripped from the final rules. None required congressional approval or the president''s signature.
"In hindsight, it was spot on," said Jeffrey Brown, a former top official at the Office of Comptroller of the Currency, one of the first agencies to raise concerns about risky lending.
The targets for the attacks, many of them symbols of Mumbai''s growing power and wealth, were not randomly selected and were intended to send a direct message to India, Israel and the West.
Indeed, the Mumbai attacks had all the hallmarks of a powerful transnational terrorist group inspired by the ideology of al Qaeda.
As I said, all that has to be done now is finding a link of this attack to Iran and the Future of the middle east is sealed
One of the operational assets being used by the Defense Department is a right-wing terrorist organization known as Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), which is being %u201Crun%u201D in two southern regional areas of Iran. They are Baluchistan, a Sunni stronghold, and Khuzestan, a Shia region where a series of recent attacks has left many dead and hundreds injured in the last three months.
One former counterintelligence official, who wished to remain anonymous due to the sensitivity of the information, describes the Pentagon as pushing MEK shortly after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The drive to use the insurgent group was said to have been advanced by the Pentagon under the influence of the Vice President%u2019s office and opposed by the State Department, National Security Council and then-National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice.
jamesm12341
You never aswered who was responsible for this building blowing up! -
You are!
According to all three intelligence sources, military and intelligence officials alike were alarmed that instead of securing a known terrorist organization, which has been responsible for acts of terror against Iranian targets and individuals all over the world %u2013 Rumsfeld under instructions from Cheney, began using the group on special ops missions into Iran to pave the way for a potential Iran strike.
%u201CThey are doing whatever they want, no oversight at all,%u201D one intelligence source said.
The below is one example of a policy to support terrorists for use as proxy groups:
"Bomb blasts struck Iranian government buildings in the capital of an oil-rich border province, followed within hours by two other bombs in central Tehran, killing nine people, days before presidential elections."
It%u2019s believed that the attacks by MEK had been halted in March of last year. If this attack is shown to be tied to MEK terrorists or any other "group" we are funding, arming, and training in the region, then the US will be implicated - even if we had nothing to do with the bombing directly.
Let it be clarified, that the victims of long-term, warped, depraved, treacherous, deceitful Islamofascism continue to be Indians and Israelis...
... and Buddhists, and Christians, as well as many other non-Moslem peoples.
Pre-emptive military action on a MAJOR SCALE against Islamofascist murderers and the nations who support them - namely IRAN -
MUST BE initiated, and soon.
War and military action is neither easy nor pleasant, but the longer the Western, Free World delays facing these sad but sobering facts, the worse it will become.
If we act sooner rather than later, our chances increase to successfully defend against mankind''s total destruction!
The alternative of doing nothing, thereby empowering and emboldening Islamofascism, is far, far worse!
"Bomb blasts struck Iranian government buildings in the capital of an oil-rich border province, followed within hours by two other bombs in central Tehran, killing nine people, days before presidential elections."
"The Pentagon is bypassing official US intelligence channels and turning to a dangerous and unruly cast of characters in order to create strife in Iran in preparation for any possible attack, former and current intelligence officials say.
One of the operational assets being used by the Defense Department is a right-wing terrorist organization known as Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), which is being %u201Crun%u201D in two southern regional areas of Iran. They are Baluchistan, a Sunni stronghold, and Khuzestan, a Shia region where a series of recent attacks has left many dead and hundreds injured in the last three months.
One former counterintelligence official, who wished to remain anonymous due to the sensitivity of the information, describes the Pentagon as pushing MEK shortly after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The drive to use the insurgent group was said to have been advanced by the Pentagon under the influence of the Vice President%u2019s office and opposed by the State Department, National Security Council and then-National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice.
Posted by mr22587 at 10:22 AM : Dec 01, 2008
Tell me how it tastes - it should still be fresh in your mouth from November 4th, and it''s going to linger on your taste buds for at least 8 years.
Bon appetite!
Posted by IwasHungry68 at 10:25 AM
LOL!!! Good one!
TO MERCILESSLY PURSUE ISLAMOFASCIST MURDERERS AT THEIR SOURCE
The major ''consequential'' resultant benefit from this recent, ghoulish, Islamofascist action in India, is the natural cooperation and alliance between both national/ethnic VICTIMS, namely INDIANS AND ISRAELIS.
It''s also time The Western Free World went after the Islamofascist roots, nests, cells and their other places of origin on a PRE-EMPTIVE basis.
The non-violent, PREVENTATIVE approach of deporting TRAITOROUS ISLAMOFASCISTS AND THEIR SUPPORTERS who are ENEMIES from within, and who are working in the interests of Islamic world domination, is a MUST!
CONCLUSION:
We in the Western Free World, who cherish our freedoms and liberties MUST urge our representatives for PROTECTIVE legislation against more, expected Islamofascist acts of violence, destruction and mass murder, without further delay!
Posted by mr22587 at 10:15 AM
McCain/Palin ''08
Posted by mr22587
Posted by mr22587 at 10:07 AM
Seems all the beauty queen journalist majors were predisposed and unavailable to join his cabinet.
Posted by mr22587 at 10:01 AM
And McCain will win by a landslide.....right?
good luck....
Posted by jamesm12341 at 09:11 AM
you should probably apologize to your parents for growing up such a loser
Posted by jamesm12341 at 07:00 PM
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