On Fri, 1 Aug 2003, Bill Stewart wrote:
Of course, much of this may be a play by the "Senior US Defense Officials" to make sure he gets the point and does resign, rather than commentary by the news media, and/or an attempt to distance themselves from a couple of unpopular programs by sticking it on the designated fall guy, but it still couldn't happen to a nicer guy.
I think there's a lot in the game to that. He *will* resign, he won't be fired :-)
The real question is whether the administration and officials that rehired Poindexter and hired Ashcroft and Homeland Security will continue the same kinds of attacks on US civil liberties now that he's gone, and unfortunately, the answer is presumably yes.
That has nothing to do with it. The pentagon had a choice, fire Poindexter or lose all of DARPA. DARPA has a lot of cool programs that are too important to lose, and Poindexter was giving them bad publicity.
From congres's perspective, choping off $2.5 billion to get rid of Poindexter was no big deal. For the pentagon it is a big deal. So they rid themselves of Poindexter and save everything else. Even Rumsfeld can understand that :-)
Patience, persistence, truth, Dr. mike