What Does Robert Gates Bring?
Nov 8th, 2006 | By Michel Marizco | Category: General News, Immigration, Organized Crime, Politics
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THE BORDER REPORT
Hearing President Bush's speech this morning announcing that his Secretary of Defense is out, I got to wondering about Robert Gates and whether we're getting more of the same. In 2002, Gates came forward with an op-ed in Time Magazine, basically calling the Sept. 11 FBI Phoenix memo writer a Monday morning quarterback (is that enough clauses in one sentence for ya'?). "While some pre-9/11 items of intelligence today seem like red flags, pulling together incomplete or ambiguous fragments of information into a credible and compelling analysis is more difficult than the Monday-morning quarterbacks would have you think. Especially doing so convincingly enough to prompt high-level, high-risk decisions." I would hope the man is beyond the poo-pooing dismissal of FBI agents who tried to warn their bosses of the impending attack. I mean my god, even the local travel agency up the street from my office in San Diego had a State Department travel warning faxed in, saying that al-Qaida may try to hijack a plane. That was Sept. 7. If the State Department found the threat credible enough to issue a warning four days before the attack was launched, what other "ambiguous fragments" were missing to connect the dots? I would hope that Gates remains under as close of scrutiny as he was under Bush Senior and during the Reagan Administration. In 1987, Reagan withdrew him for Director of the CIA because it became clear the Senate was going to reject him. He resurfaced in 1991, when Bush Senior put him out there; this time the Senate approved the nomination. In the Final Report for Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matters, it becomes clear that nobody could stick the Iran weapons-Nicaraguan narco scheme on Gates. That doesn't mean he was innocent. It's all nuanced history now, but at the time, the independent counsel couldn't determine if Gates knew the U.S. was using money from the Iranians to support the contras in the autumn, like he claimed, or months earlier when the scheme was still going on. He was eventually cleared. Nothing stuck and to be fair, maybe that was judicious after all. This is also a man who's dedicated himself to a lifetime of public service. Maybe he deserves the top position in Bush's last two years after all. I've been hearing a lot of cheering as Rumsfeld steps down and that's fine. The Republicans - like the public - badly needed a scapegoat today. But you know what they say about the devils you know versus those you don't ...
