(Updated: Originally published November 19, 2006)
I already knew who he was.
"Pentagon Pick Returns to City He Gladly Left" by SCOTT SHANE
WASHINGTON, Nov. 18 — Robert M. Gates’s life has embodied some paradoxes. He is a courteous 63-year-old native of Kansas who put himself through college as a grain inspector and school bus driver, an Eagle Scout who still serves in national scouting posts and likes to say that “every boy that joins the Scouts is a boy on the right track.” He is revered at Texas A&M, where he won over faculty skeptics and plunged into student life, leading the midnight-Friday pre-football-game “yell practices” and rising before dawn to jog with the Corps of Cadets.
Mr. Gates’s government service survived two episodes in which his professional ethics were challenged.
First his truthfulness came under question in the Iran-contra affair, derailing his 1987 nomination to head the C.I.A.
A special prosecutor, Lawrence E. Walsh, found Mr. Gates’s statements “less than candid” and wrote in his final report that he did not bring criminal charges only because “a jury could find the evidence left a reasonable doubt that Gates either obstructed official inquiries or that his two demonstrably incorrect statements were deliberate lies.”
Thomas Polgar, a career C.I.A. officer who became a Senate investigator on Iran-contra, said in an interview that Mr. Gates’s testimony was unconvincing:
“For a guy with such a good memory, it was astonishing how much he forgot.”
In the second episode, Mr. Gates was accused by several former C.I.A. subordinates in 1991 of a cardinal sin for an intelligence analyst.
Mr. Gates rejected reports on subjects that included the Soviet role in terrorism and Soviet influence on Iran that did not fit his preconceptions. Sometimes he sent back reports he did not like “stapled to the burn bag,” implying they should be destroyed.
In 1989, Gates requested a C.I.A. memorandum on Soviet prospects if Mikhail S. Gorbachev did not last. An initial version, allowing for the possibility that reform would continue under Boris N. Yeltsin or another leader, was rejected because Mr. Gates wanted the paper to predict a return to neo-Stalinism.
Gates was a brutal manager to people who stood up to him.
When [CIA Director] Casey died, President Reagan named the 44-year-old Mr. Gates to succeed him. But when some Democratic senators doubted Mr. Gates’s insistence that he knew nothing about secret arms sales to Iran and diversion of the proceeds to help the Nicaraguan contra rebels to Iran, he withdrew his nomination.
Loath to lose his services, President George Bush named him as Mr. Scowcroft’s deputy in 1989 and for a second time as C.I.A. director in 1991.
Condoleezza Rice, the current secretary of state who had worked closely with Mr. Gates on the N.S.C. staff, went on television during the contentious hearings to defend him:
“I can only go by my experiences with Bob Gates, and this is a man of tremendous integrity.”
Additionally, there are these gems about Gates' role during the Iran-Iraq war:
"In the 1980s, when Gates was the second-ranking CIA official, he oversaw the delivery of satellite imagery and other military intelligence to the Iraqi government... sometimes only hours after it was gathered by American satellites.
Gates was never found to have broken any laws and told a Senate committee in 1991 that sharing intelligence was 'allowed within the context of the law.'
Evidence has since surfaced that US assisstance played a crucial role in helping the Iraqi Army launch poison gas attacks at Iranian troops, a violation of international law.
There are also allegations at the time that the United States provided arms to Iraq as part of a covert operation that was kept from Congress."
There you go! Meet the New Boss, same as the Old Boss!
It's "ALL in the Family" -- the BUSH CRIME FAMILY, that is!!!!
And this is the guy who is supposedly holding back the attack on Iran?
He's JUST as much a CRIMINAL as Rumsfeld!
Look at the dirty shit he was involved with 80s and 90s!
