QOTD: James Woolsey
by digby
Via Arstechnica, re: Snowden
I think giving him amnesty is idiotic,” said [James] Woolsey, who ran the CIA from 1993 to 1995. “He should be prosecuted for treason. If convicted by a jury of his peers, he should be hanged by his neck until he is dead.”
Spoken like a true Royalist.
You all remember James Woolsey, right?
In the address to a group of college students, Woolsey described the Cold War as the third world war and said “This fourth world war, I think, will last considerably longer than either World Wars I or II did for us. Hopefully not the full four-plus decades of the Cold War.”
Woolsey has been named in news reports as a possible candidate for a key position in the reconstruction of a postwar Iraq.
He said the new war is actually against three enemies: the religious rulers of Iran, the “fascists” of Iraq and Syria, and Islamic extremists like al Qaeda.
Woolsey told the audience of about 300, most of whom are students at the University of California at Los Angeles, that all three enemies have waged war against the United States for several years but the United States has just “finally noticed.”
“As we move toward a new Middle East,” Woolsey said, “over the years and, I think, over the decades to come … we will make a lot of people very nervous.”
What do you suppose Mr Woolsey is up to today? He’s running a private equity group called Palladin Capital. What does Palladin Capital do?
Founded in 2001, Washington DC based Paladin Capital Group is a multi-stage private equity fund that focuses on investments that toughen the country’s critical infrastructure. Current deal values range from US$5 to US$25 million and the firm has more than US$980 million under management across multiple funds including the Paladin Capital Partners fund (launched in 2001 with US$208 million), the Paladin Homeland Security Fund (launched in 2004 with the US$235 million), and the Paladin III fund launched in 2007. Sectors of focus for its latest fund cover critical infrastructure and homeland security elements such as mesh networks, IT services, data storage, business process software, network management software, detection, biometrics, search software, electronic/network hardware, alternative energy & clean energy technologies, network security, communications interoperability & reconstruction, biological/chemical/radiological remediation, protective equipment, and asset tracking & container security.
So you have a former CIA chief who’s making god-knows-how-much money from the surveillance state — a man whose worldview is just this side of paranoid psychosis — gleefully using vivid imagery of an execution to describe what he hopes happens to Edward Snowden. And presumably he’s still a member of the Washington establishment.
It’s probably important to also remind folks that Woolsey was ostensibly a Democrat.
It’s annual holiday fundraiser time …
