Reply #5: Robert Gates is an especially greasy turd of the BFEE. [View All]

[Octafish]

So he slipped up, eh? I look forward to seeing the footage of the Texas A&M president. Back when he was a nobody, Gates helped Poppy in the 1980 October Surprise. After Pruneface's swearing-in, he became DCI Casey's sidestooge, learning the ropes for cooking the intel books from the one-time enabler of the neo-NAZIs. A fine bit of scum, Gates is. I think he looks like a cat rapist. Must be the smirk. His fellow CIA agents hated him for bringing in the "Gates Clones" of like-minded book cookers who knew the world from behind a desk.

The CIA's DI Disgrace

By Robert Parry
July 13, 2004

To understand why the Central Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of Intelligence – or DI – failed so miserably to analyze the evidence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, one has to look back almost a quarter century to when ideological conservatives decided to deconstruct the DI’s tradition of objective analysis.

In the heady days after Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980, conservatives took dead aim at the CIA’s analytical division for not agreeing with the Right’s preferred assessment that the Soviet Union was a rising superpower with both the capability and intent to overwhelm the United States militarily. The incoming Reagan administration wanted an alarmist assessment of the Soviet Union to justify a major arms buildup.

But the CIA analysts didn’t buy into the Right’s theory of Moscow as a 10-foot tall ogre directing world terrorism, planning a first-strike nuclear attack and provoking conflict in Central America and the Third World to isolate and ultimately defeat the United States. The CIA’s view of the Soviet Union was of a difficult enemy, but one with weaknesses, vulnerabilities and limited ambitions – a nuanced view that would not fit with the new era’s “Evil Empire” rhetoric.

Softened Up

So the DI – at least as it had existed since the CIA’s founding in 1947 – had to be taken apart. The task of softening up the DI fell to a Reagan-Bush transition team of conservatives and neoconservatives.

“That the Reaganites saw their arrival as a hostile takeover was apparent in the most extraordinary transition period of my career,” recalled CIA officer Robert Gates, himself an anti-Soviet hardliner who would become a key assistant to Reagan’s CIA Director William Casey.

CONTINUED ...

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/071304.html