Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Robert Gates

Rumsfeld's Replacement: The Robert Gates File
Iran-Contra figure, regime-change enthusiast, alleged intelligence
manipulator -- meet Robert Gates, the man who’s poised to be the next
Secretary of Defense.
James Ridgeway
November 09 , 2006
WASHINGTON—While Donald Rumsfeld was Ronald Reagan’s errand boy to
Saddam Hussein in the mid-1980s, Robert Gates, the man named yesterday
to succeed him as Secretary of Defense, was at the very heart of the
American intelligence apparatus, actively planning and carrying out
covert operations in Central America and the Middle East.
Gates, a 26-year CIA veteran and the agency’s director between 1991
and 1993, has long been accused of undermining competent, unbiased
intelligence analysis at the agency during his tenure, opening the way
for its role in partisan politics, a reality brought to the fore again
as the Bush administration made its flawed and phony case for war with
Iraq. Gates was a high official at the CIA at a time when the U.S.
intelligence community experienced one of its most humiliating
debacles: the failure to predict the disintegration of the Soviet
Union. Instead, under CIA director William Casey the U.S. concocted
evidence showing the expansion of Reagan’s “evil empire.”
Casey and his protégé Gates were fervent Cold Warriors. On December
14, 1984, in a five page memorandum for then Director of Intelligence
Casey, Gates, then serving as deputy director of intelligence, set
forth his views: “It is time to talk absolutely straight about
Nicaragua,” the memo begins. “The Nicaraguan regime is steadily moving
toward consolidation of a Marxist-Leninist government, and the
establishment of a permanent and well-armed ally of the Soviet Union
and Cuba on the mainland of the western hemisphere. Its avowed aim is
to spread further revolution in the Americas.”
Gates goes on to say this is an “unacceptable” course, arguing that
the U.S. should do everything “in its power short of invasion to put
that regime out.” Hopes of causing that regime to reform itself for a
more pluralistic government are “essentially silly and hopeless,” he
wrote. (The ironic upshot of this sort of thinking can be found in the
recent election of the former Sandanista leader Daniel Ortega as
president of Nicaragua.)
Nicaragua wasn’t the only place Gates wanted to take action. In 1985,
sounding very much like one of today’s neoconservative hawks, the then
head of intelligence analysis at the CIA drafted a plan for a joint
U.S.-Egyptian military operation to invade Libya, overthrow Col.
Muamar Ghaddafi, and “redraw the map of North Africa.” On the basis of
this idea, CIA Director Casey, sometimes said to be the man who
invented Gates, ordered up a list of Libyan targets and the National
Security Council developed a plan to have Egypt attack Libya with U.S.
air support and seize half the country. The Joint Chiefs drew up plans
for a military operation involving 90,000 troops. Alarmed, the State
Department subsequently succeeded in downsizing Gates proposal to
“contingency” status.
According to Robert Parry, a reporter who has closely tracked this
period in the CIA’s history, during this time the Reagan
administration was “pressing the CIA to adopt an analysis that
accepted right-wing media reports pinning European terrorism on the
Soviets. The CIA analysts knew that these charges were false, in part
because they were based on ‘black’ or false propaganda that the CIA
itself had been planting in the European media. But the
‘politicization’ tide was strong.” And Gates, he writes, led an effort
to implicate the Soviets in the assassination attempt on Pope John
Paul II. “In 1985, Gates closeted a special team to push through
another pre-cooked paper arguing that the KGB was behind the 1981
wounding of Pope John Paul II. CIA analysts again knew that the charge
was bogus, but could not block the paper from leaving CIA.”
Critics have long thought Gates was heavily involved from the very
beginning in putting together and implementing the secret Iran-Contra
war. In his book, “Firewall: The Iran/Contra conspiracy and Cover-Up,”
Lawrence E. Walsh, the independent counsel in the Iran-Contra
investigation, wrote that he was skeptical of Gates’ repeated denials
of having been aware or involved with the details of the Iran-Contra
operations with Oliver North. According to the National Security
Archive’s chronology of the day-by-day happenings in Iran-Contra, on
October 1, 1985 the CIA’s National Intelligence Officer, Charles
Allen, informed then deputy director Gates of his suspicion that funds
were being diverted to the Contras. Gates, for his part, has insisted
he first learned of the diversion one year later. “Whenever
questioned, Gates had always claimed that he had first learned of
Allen's concern about the diversion on the day after Eugene Hasenfus
was shot down over Nicaragua on October 5, 1986,” writes Walsh,
referring to the lone survivor on board a CIA cargo plane that was
shot down over Nicaragua while on a mission to supply the Contras.
“Gates said that he and Allen had then reported this to Casey, who
told them that he had just received much the same information from
another source.’’
In blunt terms, Walsh thought Gates was a liar. It was only for a lack
of evidence that he eventually gave up trying to indict him.
In November 1991, years after Iran-Contra messily unraveled, the
Senate deliberated on the nomination of Gates to succeed William H.
Webster as the next director of Central Intelligence. Democrats,
including former Senator Tom Daschle, Jay Rockefeller, and the late
Paul Wellstone spoke forcefully, vowing to vote against the nominee.
“Robert Gates became the Deputy Director of the CIA in April, 1986,
after a meteoric rise in the Agency,” Wellstone said. “His
confirmation hearings provided ample and credible evidence that, as
the Deputy Director, he repeatedly skewed intelligence to promote the
world view of his mentor and his boss, William Casey. Analysts
specializing in the Soviet Union, Latin America, Africa, and
scientific affairs, came forward--some at risk to their careers in the
agency--to provide examples. The record further strongly suggests that
Robert Gates supported--passively or actively--terribly misguided or
illegal covert operations, including the diversion of funds to the
Nicaraguan Contras obtained through the sale of arms to Iran. He also
had a hand in hiding some of the details of these covert operations
from Congress. Lastly, the record showed that Robert Gates crossed the
line from independent intelligence-gathering into high-profile
policymaking when he gave speeches advocating an unyielding line
toward the Soviet Union and deployment of a star wars missile defense
system.”
“My questions regarding whether or not Robert Gates participated in
the politicization of intelligence culminate in my deep concern about
what we can expect from Robert Gates if he is confirmed as the next
Director of Central Intelligence,” Daschle said. “Again, I ask my
colleagues, if Robert Gates cooked the books to advocate the
ideological position of the administration while serving as Deputy
Director for Intelligence and Deputy Director of Central Intelligence,
is it possible that U.S. intelligence under his guidance will continue
to politicize intelligence? My answer is, ‘We cannot afford to take
that chance.’”
Gates, who is a member of the Iraq Study Group, which is preparing an
assessment of the situation on Iraq that may well inform the nation’s
policy going forward, has been hailed as the man who may bring order
to a disastrously waged war. His nomination, some say, indicates a
policy shift that is already in motion. Many of the nation’s problems
now stem from the fact that politics and ideology have seeped into
nearly every crevice of the federal bureaucracy. And Congress must now
decide whether it can afford to take another chance on Robert Gates.
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This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National
Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from
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© 2006 The Foundation for National Progress
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 Rumsfeld's 
Gia' postato.
Palmiro Pangloss
-- 
Draft beer, not people

Palmiro Pangloss
Spiacente. ma da chi? Sotto che titolo?