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First Test
With the nomination of Robert Gates as new Secretary of Defense, the Democrats and their fresh won majority are immediately put to a test.
Gates was involved in the Iran/Contra crimes, he nurtured the Taliban movement, Osama and the Pakistani ISI and he has a record of deceiving Congress.
So will the Democrats fold on this nomination like they were trained to do the last six years?
Or have they grown some spine and will demand a SecDef that understands military issues, has some knowledge about the Middle East instead of old Soviet affairs and is not a crook?
We’ll be spreading death in Nicaragua very soon.
Figureheads On The Chopping Block
Big oil interests have had enough of being bashed over Iraq, Rumsfeld sacrificed, ‘Democratic Revolution’ a good cop/bad cop smokescreen, Two factions emerge, Is Cheney next?
From FDL:
And why was Gates arming the Contra? Why, to overthrow Daniel Ortega! History repeating itself, with the exact same people, as Wonkette points out….
Lotsa questions for this Gates fellow, including exactly how Casey got his brain cancer anyway.
-So I guess the lameduck Senate will be tasked with confirming Mr. Gates? Will the Armed Services Committee get to see all the sealed BoooshOne papers? Will Lawrence Walsh, Larry Johnson, and Robert McGovern be called to testify?
Senator Warner, what’s your agenda look like?
More reasons to love Gates: he’s a uniter, not a divider. He’s (also) there to further unify and consolidate the power of the intelligence and military communities.
This is summarized nicely by one Fritz W. Ermarth, a National Security Brother of Gates, in an interview with The National Interest Online which informs us that Ermarth “worked closely with Robert Gates during his broad intelligence and policy career.” Here he gives us “his perspective of what Gates’s leadership at the Pentagon could mean in terms of Iraq, intelligence gathering, and more.”
Knowing Gates
TNI: What could Gates’s Pentagon leadership mean in terms of intelligence gathering at the Department of Defense and the DOD’s cooperation with the national intelligence director?
FWE: Well, Gates’s appointment is a huge plus in the intelligence department, because, to put it in one pithy sentence, it is really one of the key things that can make this National Intelligence Directorship and the reform of our community work. You could put God Almighty in charge of U.S. national intelligence, and he’s got to have a good relationship with a secretary of defense who understands and supports intelligence. And that is Mr. Gates, par excellence. It is going to be a real plus for intelligence because it’ll put to rest a lot of this nonsense about turf wars between the secretary of defense and the national intelligence director. There’s just no way you can cut that baby in half, and he is the man in the Pentagon that could make that work.
TNI: Is there anything you would like to add on your perspective of Gates?
FWE: Yes indeed. In addition to the intelligence role that he will play, and a definite muting if not elimination of the tensions between the Pentagon and the national intelligence director, he brings two big things to the party. One, he understands big agencies, big programs, lots of people and lots of money—from being the director of central intelligence, being in the national-security business all these years and running a big university. If you’ve ever been in a university faculty or administration, you’d know what I mean. That is really demanding, and he’s evidently done that very well.
But let me underscore a point I made earlier: This is an extremely thoughtful man. He’s got his values, he’s got his principles, you might even say he’s got his ideology. He checks everything. He does not get pushed into decisions on impulse.
(…)
TNI: You mentioned: “you might even say he’s got his ideology.” Is there something in his ideology or in his career experience that would now make him particularly suited to put into effect such a backup plan?
FWE: He’s very realistic, and he’s very committed to the exercise of American power in a thoughtful way, and I think for all those reasons he’s an excellent choice.
TNI: What would you say his ideology is?
FWE: He’s a national security professional. He comes from a camp with which I personally identify. He understands strategic realities such that he’ll know we can’t back out of the situation we have in Iraq, but we can’t stay in it either without behaving very deftly and getting as much support as we can.
Ortega as an CIA asset?? Why Not?
dirty blood money still spends..
I don’t belive any of these so called govt leaders have ever had an independent thought
Gates = dope …arms peddlin… disinfo
and a key player for GHW Bush..
whenever W Bush has problems Opium Poppy Bush brings in his mobsters to quite down the masses
rummy is out
dims are in
gates is back in
Finally,
Rumsfield replacement (Robert Gates) was director of voting company by Bev Harris
Gates was on the board of directors of VoteHere, a strange little company that was the biggest elections industry lobbyist for the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). VoteHere spent more money than ES&S, Diebold, and Sequoia combined to help ram HAVA through. And HAVA, of course, was a bill sponsored by by convicted Abramoff pal Bob Ney and K-street lobbyist buddy Steny Hoyer. HAVA put electronic voting on steroids.
Is that the same Rep Steny Hoyer (D-MA) battling it out with equally dodgy Murtha for House Majority Leader? Nice. Things also cozy there. Corp Mil-Intel complex wins again!
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Nov 9 2006 20:55 utc | 12
Defense Secretary Nominee Robert Gates Tied to Iran-Contra Scandal and the Secret Arming of Saddam Hussein
AMY GOODMAN: I remember well the Bob Gates hearings… that he had told the Senate Intelligence Committee that in November of 1986 he was preparing testimony for the CIA director, William Casey, about Iran-Contra, that he didn’t realize a presidential finding had been prepared a year before to authorize the CIA’s role in an earlier shipment in 1985, arms shipment to Iran, leading to Casey deceiving Congress. Can you explain what that was all about?
MELVIN GOODMAN: Well, there were a series of episodes in which Casey had to go to the Congress, because after two years of Bill Casey, the Senate Intelligence Committee really regretted that it had ever confirmed him in the first place. And he really angered the Republican leadership more than the Democratic leadership. And Barry Goldwater became an extremely important critic of Bill Casey.
Bill Casey relied, for all sorts of testimony and briefings and talks that he gave, on Bob Gates. Bob Gates wrote all of his major speeches. He wrote some of his Op-Ed articles, and he wrote all of his testimony. And, of course, there were backdated findings. There were denials of information that was widely known. Bob Gates was told by his deputy about sensitive intercepts involving how we were arming Iraq, how we were getting aid, some of it from the Israeli inventories, to Iran, how we were supplying the Contras with funds that were the profits of these arms sales to Iran. So, Bob Gates and Bill Casey worked extremely closely on all of these matters, and Casey really relied on Bob Gates.
And Bob Gates has always been really a political windsock in these matters in serving the interest of his masters. That’s the way he operated at the National Security Council, and that’s the way he operated at the CIA. And I remember in 1987, he was admonished severely by George Shultz, the Secretary of State at the time, and then in 1989 by James Baker, the Secretary of State at the time, because he was undercutting American policy in trying to serve the interest of the National Security at a time when American policy was changing.
So Bob Gates will serve a master, but I don’t think he’ll be a careful steward of the Pentagon and of the $460 billion defense budget. And the question is, has he now somehow obtained the maturity and integrity to run the Pentagon? I don’t think he has. And now, it’s up to the Senate Armed Forces Committee to make serious decisions about his ability to serve in this very sensitive position.
…
AMY GOODMAN: And, Bob, when you say “secret weapons to the Iraqis,” you’re talking about during the Iranian-Iraq war?
ROBERT PARRY: Yes, back in the — starting about 1982, President Reagan became concerned that the Iranians, who were secretly getting help from the United States via Israel, had gained the upper hand in the war. And so, there was this effort, as the period went on, to give some more help to Saddam Hussein to keep that war sort of at a more even keel. And one of the guys involved, according to the Teicher affidavit and other witnesses, was Bob Gates. But he’s always denied involvement there. So both the facts of the history are important, as well as his honesty. Did he lie to Congress when he denied being involved in these matters?
AMY GOODMAN: Just on this issue, because it’s so key, I mean, the allegation that Gates personally approved the sale of cluster bombs to Saddam in the 1980s, before the war crimes that he was just convicted of.
ROBERT PARRY: Right. And some of these allegations also go to chemicals, the precursor chemicals that Saddam Hussein allegedly used in his chemical weapons that were deployed against the Iranians and other targets in Iraq. So, Gates was allegedly involved in all those kinds of — that’s the very secretive side of US foreign policy that Casey was overseeing, but Gates was sort of his man handling some of the details.
…
MELVIN GOODMAN: Well, I think he needs someone like Bob Gates now, because the Bush administration is really circling the wagons. The policy in Iraq has failed miserably. This has been the most profligate decision that any American president has made with regard to national security and foreign policy. And Bob Gates is a very loyal and obedient servant to his master. In this case, his master will be George Bush. And I think what he needs Bob Gates for is to tone down some of the criticism in the Pentagon. I think Bob Gates is out there in the same way that General Hayden is out at the CIA, to calm down the critics, to calm down the contrarians, to stop some of the negative reporting that’s coming from Iraq from CIA station chiefs and CIA analysts. And I think what Bob Gates will do now is silence some of the military criticism of what’s going on in Iraq. I think you’ll see an end to a lot of the public remarks of our active duty general officers, our flag officers who have been clearly critical of what’s happening in Iraq.
And let me just add one thing to what Bob said, because there’s an intelligence aspect that Bob Gates was responsible for in the 1980s that I am aware of. In order to have arms sales to Iran and secret deliveries from Israel to Iran, you had to change the intelligence analysis on Iran, and Bob Gates was part of that. He worked very closely, again, with Howard Teicher over at the National Security Council and Graham Fuller, his National Intelligence officer for the Middle East, to rewrite the intelligence record to say that Iran was no longer interested in terrorism, Iran was now looking to open up dialogue with the United States, that the Soviet Union was about to move into Iran. And this became the intelligence justification for Iran-Contra and why this operational policy had to be put into play.
There was no truth to any of these three charges, but Graham Fuller managed to get them into a National Intelligence Estimate, and Graham Fuller and Bob Gates regularly briefed the National Security Council on the so-called changes in Iranian policy that were made up out of whole cloth. And there was a record of Bob Gates creating intelligence out of whole cloth and urging Bill Casey to take even more provocative measures than the CIA and the Reagan administration was proposing toward Central America, particularly toward Nicaragua. Remember, the CIA was involved in the mining of the harbors in Corinto, which was clearly an act of war. And Bill Casey had never briefed this to the Senate Intelligence Committee. That’s what led to the extreme anger on the part of Barry Goldwater and why Casey had to be brought back to the Senate Intelligence Committee. And, of course, Gates prepared all of Casey’s testimony at this time.
…
AMY GOODMAN: And let me just correct that: of course, he’s been nominated to be head of the Pentagon, to be Defense Secretary. But one other thing I wanted to get to now, because you both have mentioned Lee Hamilton… Well, now you have the Iraq Study Group that is headed by James Baker and, yes, Lee Hamilton, together with Bob Gates.
MELVIN GOODMAN: Well, I think the Iraq Study Group is also a political stratagem on the part of the Bush administration to try to give some chance at damage limitation to this Iraq policy. Lee Hamilton wasn’t very impressive in his 9/11 work as a co-commissioner…
So I think there is an attempt now to soften the debate on Iraq. Getting Rumsfeld out of the Pentagon helps in this direction. Bringing Gates in, and it’s sort of tabula rasa now at the Pentagon with regard to Iraq. And I think the Iraq Study Group — and if you look at the Iraq Study Group — five Democrats, five Republicans — not a one has any experience whatsoever on the Middle East. There are no Arab experts, no Islamic experts on this group. And I think what Baker is trying to do is trying to limit the damage that Iraq has done to George Bush, the legacy of the Bush family, both Bush the elder and Bush the younger, and try to soften the debate in the American public and divert attention. And clearly, by removing Rumsfeld, Bush has already diverted a great deal of attention from the election loss and from this disaster that Iraq policy is.
Posted by: John Francis Lee | Nov 10 2006 2:42 utc | 21
When Pope John Paul II was wounded in St. Peter’s Square in a 1981 assassination attempt by a right-wing Turkish Muslim, the anti-communists in Italy, the United States and elsewhere saw a golden opportunity to blame it on the Soviet Union and/or its Bulgarian ally. The American side was led by professional disinformationists Paul Henze, longtime CIA officer, Michael Leeden and others at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and Claire Sterling, who wrote an article on the shooting for Reader’s Digest in 1982. In 1985 William Casey, CIA director under Ronald Reagan, urged senior Agency official Robert Gates to make a greater effort to lay the assassination attempt at the door of the Soviet KGB. Gates tried his best, even disregarding several contrary opinions by Agency analysts, and the fact, as evidenced by the result of a trial in Rome in 1986, that there was not a communist connection. Gates later become the CIA’s director.
— william blum, freeing the world to death
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Signs of any new thinking about drug issues in Congress are hard to find. The U.S. Senate confirmed the nomination of Robert Gates as CIA director by a vote of 64 to 31 on November 5, 1991, despite voluminous testimony suggesting that he lied as to his ignorance of key matters in the Iran-Contra affair and that he distorted the production of intelligence estimates to serve the political ends of his boss, former Reagan campaign director William Casey. In this respect, one critic testified that Gates pushed the administration line on “narcoterrorism,” which blamed drug trafficking on leftwing states and insurgent movements. Accusing Gates of shopping for analysts to make that case, Mel Goodman testified that “a senior analyst was called in by Bob Gates and told that Bill Casey wanted a memo that would link drug dealers to international terrorists. This senior analyst looked at the evidence and couldn’t make those conclusions. The evidence wasn’t there. He was told to go back and look again. He did that. Said the evidence wasn’t there. Gates took the project away from him and gave it to another analyst. I believe there is an ethical issue here.” Gates admitted asking analysts to look into accusations of a linkage between traffickers and terrorists but said in his defense that three separate agency analyses concluded any such linkage was weak.
— peter dale scott and jonathan marshall, cocaine politics
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When George Bush became president in 1989, he did not fulfill Ted Shackley’s dream of being named DCI. Shackley’s connections to Ed Wilson and his involvement in the Iran-Contra disaster meant that the veteran spook had no chance of being confirmed as DCI. Instead, Bush reached back to one of the loyalists who had been on Jimmy Carter’s National Security Council staff at the time of the October Surprise; he named Robert Gates to replace William Webster, who had gone from the FBI to the CIA in the wake of Bill Casey’s death (May 6, 1987) and the Iran-Contra scandal. Gates, a career CIA man, was much more timid than Bill Casey and much closer to George Bush in temperament. Like Bush, Gates was very much an Agency cheerleader.
While the CIA had successfully placed numerous friendly staffers on the Congressional oversight committees, the fact that Congress was Democratically controlled still made the idea of withholding intelligence operations from Capitol Hill very appealing. For Gates, however, there was little information to withhold from Congress, since most major operations were being conducted through other intelligence services, which were paid for their work by the Agency. That meant that the CIA had no real control over these operations, and CIA money could be diverted for unauthorized activities with ease. The Afghan model was now the model being used worldwide. The intelligence community was providing almost no useful intelligence to the president, with the exception of eavesdropping and photography.
— joe trento, prelude to terror: the rogue cia and the legacy of america’s private intelligence network
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By 1998, the CIA had no more than ten or fifteen clandestine espionage operations active at any one time around the world, and the Directorate of Operations (DO), home of the spies, had shrunk to well below 1,000 officers.
Reuel Marc Gerecht, an officer in CIA’s clandestine service from 1985 to 1994, called into serious question not only the quality but even the veracity of much of the reporting by DO officers in sensitive parts of the world. Writing in the February 1998 Atlantic Monthly, under the pseudonym Edward G. Shirley, Gerecht called the DO “a sorry blend of Monty Python and Big Brother.” “The sad truth about the CIA,” he said, “is that the DO has for years been running an espionage charade in most countries, deceiving itself and others about the value of its recruited agents and intelligence production.” By the mid-1980s, he noted, “the vast majority of the CIA’s foreign agents were mediocre assets at best, put on the payroll because case officers needed high recruitment numbers to get promoted. Long before the Soviet Union collapsed, recruitment and intelligence fraud — the natural product of an insular spy world — had stripped the DO of its integrity and its competence.”
Gerecht complained that even in the critical field positions, the agency paid little attention to matching skills to countries. “Not a single Iran-desk chief during the eight years that I worked on Iran could speak or read Persian,” he said. “Not a single Near East Division chief knew Arabic, Persian, or Turkish, and only one could get along even in French.” Another former agency officer pointed out that the CIA teams dispatched to northern Iraq to assist the political opposition in the mid-1990s “had few competent Arabic-speaking officers.
…
So far had the CIA’s human capabilities dwindled by 1998 that it led House Intelligence Committee chairman Porter Goss — himself a former CIA case officer — to declare, “It is fair to say that the cupboard is nearly bare in the area of human intelligence.”
…
“Sometimes I think we just collect intelligence for the thrill of collecting it, to show how good we are at it,” said former CIA director Robert Gates. “We have the capacity to collect mountains of data that we can never analyze. We just stack it up. Our electronic collection systems appear to produce far more raw intelligence data than our analysts can synthesize and our policymakers can use.”
— james bamford, body of secrets
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well, there’s at least one more thing he was correct on
In a December 1984 memo to Bill Casey, his deputy, Robert Gates, began by writing, “It is time to talk absolutely straight about Nicaragua. … Based on all the assessments we have done, the contras, even with American support, cannot overthrow the Sandinista regime.”
— william m. leogrande, our own backyard: the united states in central america, 1977-1992
Posted by: b real | Nov 10 2006 5:40 utc | 26
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