| Robert Gates has no business being anywhere near a seat of power. |
| [I]f Obama does keep [George W. Bush's Defense Secretary Robert] Gates on, the new President will be employing someone who embodies many of the worst elements of U.S. national security policy over the past three decades, including responsibility for what Obama himself has fingered as a chief concern, "politicized intelligence."
In a recent book, Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA, former CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman identifies Gates as the chief action officer for the Reagan administration's drive to tailor intelligence reporting to White House political desires. A top "Kremlinologist," Goodman describes how Gates reversed a CIA tradition of delivering tough-minded intelligence reports with "the bark on." That ethos began to erode in 1973 with President Richard Nixon's appointment of James Schlesinger as CIA director and Gerald Ford's choice of George H.W. Bush in 1976, but the principle of objectivity wasn't swept away until 1981 when Ronald Reagan put in his campaign chief, William Casey, as CIA director. Casey then chose the young and ambitious Robert Gates to run the analytical division. Rather than respect the old mandate for "bark on" intelligence, "Bob Gates turned that approach on its head in the 1980s and tried hard to anticipate the views of policymakers in order to pander to their needs," Goodman wrote. "Bill Casey and Bob Gates guided the first institutionalized 'cooking of the books' at the CIA in the 1980s, with a particular emphasis on tailoring intelligence dealing with the Soviet Union, Central America, and Southwest Asia," Goodman wrote. "Casey's first NIE [National Intelligence Estimate] as CIA director, dealing with the Soviet Union and international terrorism, became an exercise in politicization. Casey and Gates pushed this line in order to justify more U.S. covert action in the Third World. One of the key distortions pushed by Casey and Gates was the notion that the Soviet Union was a military behemoth with a robust economy - rather than a decaying power with a shriveling GNP. The logic of the Casey-Gates position was that exaggerating the Soviet menace justified higher U.S. military spending and U.S. support for bloody brush-fire wars - central elements of Reagan's foreign policy. Since the mid-1970s, the CIA's analytical division had been noting cracks in the Soviet empire as well as signs of its economic-technological decline. But that analysis was unwelcome among Reagan's true-believers. So, in 1983 when CIA analysts sought to correct over-estimations of Soviet military spending - to 1 percent a year, down from 4 to 5 percent - Gates blocked the revision, according to Goodman. "While serving as deputy director for intelligence from 1982 to 1986, Gates wrote the manual for manipulating and centralizing the intelligence process to get the desired intelligence product," Goodman stated. "The Reagan administration would not accept any sign of Soviet weakness or constraint, and CIA director Casey and deputy director Gates made sure intelligence analysis presented the Russian Bear as threatening and warlike," Goodman wrote. These institutional blinders remained in place for the rest of the 1980s. "As a result, the CIA missed the radical change that Mikhail Gorbachev represented to Soviet politics and Soviet-American relations, and missed the challenges to his rule and his ultimate demise in 1991," Goodman wrote. When the Soviet Union - the CIA's principal intelligence target - collapsed without any timely warning to the U.S. government, the CIA analytical division was derided for "missing" this historic moment. But the CIA didn't as much "miss" the Soviet collapse as it was blinded by Gates and other ideological taskmasters to the reality playing out in plain sight. Plus, in 1991, Gates faced accusations that he had greased his rapid bureaucratic rise by participating in illicit or dubious clandestine operations, including helping Republicans sabotage President Jimmy Carter's Iran hostage negotiations in 1980 (the so-called October Surprise case) and collaborating on a secret plan to aid Iraq's dictator Saddam Hussein (the Iraqgate scandal). After getting confirmed in 1991, Gates remained CIA director until the end of George H.W. Bush's presidency. However, even after Bill Clinton removed him in 1993, Gates never wandered far from the Bush Family orbit, getting help from George H.W. Bush in landing a job as president of Texas A&M. the Russian government sent an extraordinary intelligence report to a House investigative task force in early 1993 stating that Gates had participated in secret contacts with Iranian officials in 1980 to delay release of 52 U.S. hostages then held in Iran, a move that undercut President Carter. "R[obert] Gates, at that time a staffer of the National Security Council in the administration of Jimmy Carter, and former CIA Director George Bush also took part‚" in a meeting in Paris in October 1980, the classified Russian report said. The Russian allegation about Gates and the Paris meeting in October 1980 also didn't stand alone. The House task force had other evidence from French and Israeli intelligence officials, as well as witnesses from the arms-trafficking field, corroborating reports of Reagan-Bush contacts with Iranian officials in Europe during Campaign 1980. Gates also was implicated in a secret operation to funnel military assistance to Iraq in the 1980s, as the Reagan administration played off Iran and Iraq battling each other in the eight-year-long Iran-Iraq War. The effort to arm the Iraqis was "spearheaded" by CIA Director William Casey and involved his deputy, Robert Gates, according to [Howard Teicher, one of Reagan's National Security Council officials] affidavit. Ironically, this same pro-Iraq initiative involved Donald Rumsfeld, then Reagan's special emissary to the Middle East. An infamous photograph from 1983 shows a smiling Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein. Teicher described Gates's role as far more substantive than Rumsfeld's. "Under CIA Director [William] Casey and Deputy Director Gates, the CIA authorized, approved and assisted [Chilean arms dealer Carlos] Cardoen in the manufacture and sale of cluster bombs and other munitions to Iraq," Teicher wrote. [In 2006], President George W. Bush found himself in need of a new Defense Secretary to replace Donald Rumsfeld, who had grown disillusioned with the Iraq War. Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee were so enthralled by the false narrative of Bush tossing over the ideologue (Rumsfeld) in favor of the realist (Gates) that they took no note of what the real sequence of events suggested, that Bush was determined to send more troops. Within a few weeks, however, it became clear that Bush - with Gates's help - had bamboozled the Democrats. For his part, Gates joined in pummeling the Democrats by suggesting that their legislation opposing the "surge" was aiding and abetting the enemy. "Any indication of flagging will in the United States gives encouragement to those folks," Gates told reporters at the Pentagon on Jan. 26, 2007. "I'm sure that that's not the intent behind the resolutions, but I think it may be the effect." During Campaign 2008, Gates also opposed Obama's plan to set a 16-month timetable for withdrawing U.S. combat forces from Iraq. Source: "The Danger of Keeping Robert Gates" by: Robert Parry, Consortium News - 13 November 2008 |
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