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I spent all afternoon yesterday studying up on Gates, Here's the wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Gates
Here is an interesting story about dropping the wording of the Global War on Terror (GWOT) and changing it to Overseas Contingency Operations:
http://ww4report.com/node/7074
And here is one official report about Gates' involvement with Iran-Contra:
http://fas.org/irp/offdocs/walsh/chap_16.htm
Here are some key quotes:
``3 Allen believed, however, that he sent a memorandum to Gates discussing, among other things, how much money North needed to pay Manucher Ghorbanifar from the Iran initiative. (Memorandum from Allen to the DCI, Subject: American Hostages, 11/10/86, ER 19739; Allen, Grand Jury, 1/4/88, pp. 19-21.) Independent Counsel was unable to corroborate Allen's testimony....''
``...the evidence was clear that Gates's statements concerning his initial awareness of the diversion were wrong: Kerr brought him the information from Allen over a month earlier than Gates admitted. This would have been material because it suggested that the CIA continued to support North's activities without informing North's superiors or investigating. By October, when Gates claimed he first remembered hearing of the diversion, Casey ordered an inquiry and later made a report to Poindexter; but, by then, the Hasenfus aircraft had been shot down and Casey and Gates were beginning to cover.''
This means Gates escaped indictment and prosecution. A very close call with the narrative truth, Bob. Gates has been up to his neck in covert wars, mass deception, mass surveillance, state sponsored terrorism, assassination plots, money laundering, dodging FBI, DoJ, and any hostile investigations by interestd congressional committees for decades.
There are several things that are important to remember about Gates. He has been involved with `asymmetric' warfare since at least Central America and the Contras. The whole GWOT is essentially an extension of these kinds of asymmetric wars that try to coordinate together NSC, CIA, DoD, US military intelligence sections, along with combat units and the State Department diplomatic system. It's all straight out of the Vietnam era playbook going back to Kennedy.
Also the GWOT has gotten into so much outrageous and illegal covert systems that its corrupted the whole foriegn policy apparatus. In turn the wGWOT has corrupted most of the executive branch.
I read one of his CIA papers on the politicalization of intelligence, from 1992 when Gates was the Director of CIA. It addresses analysts and managers. The point was that developing a truthful narrative is critical for accurate intelligence. That goal is impossible if political considerations control the narrative. This was quite a read. Gates is an ideologue, so he has become a spin master on his own view of the world. This makes it impossible for him to make a cold empirical view. He thinks GWOT is a patriotic duty. What that means is he can't give a narrative truth when he sees one and can't accept a narrative truth if he is told one.
I think the GWOT has been seriously dissembled itself as its policies and actions are nothing more that State terrorism on entirely innocent people. They are innocent in the sense they had nothing to do with 9/11, and in the sense that resisting a foriegn occupation is not a crime and ultimately not terrorism at all---it's a patriotic duty for any nationalist minded group. The simple narrative truth about 9/11 is some expate Arab guys put together a crazy plan and got lucky.
What we are looking at GWOT is a mass scale system of search and destory missions, coupled with a colonial style military occupation with puppet regimes. Gate's `new framework' is simply to intensify the same search and destory system and push deeper into areas where it wasn't active before. This isn't going to work.
This kind of dissembling process happened in Vietnam and that's why I think I can see it happening now.
The investigations into GWOT programs will either reveal it is a criminal policy with no political or economic content, or the investigations will try to cover-up this conclusion, and spin doctor up some other set of justifications.
I am praying that guys like Seymore Hersh, James Risen and others can put together enough material to expose the GWOT as one giant corrupted and vicious fraud that will hopefully crush any hope of continuing even the semblence of such a bullshit system. It's about time for a Pentagon Papers re-run.
CG