Kurt Nimmo: Rumsfeld Dumped, Bush Suggests a Spook

Friday, 10 November 2006, 11:22 am
Opinion: Scoop Blogwatch

It is all smoke and mirrors, as usual.

“Robert Gates, the 63-year-old career intelligence officer chosen to replace Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon, takes over with the clearest of missions: get American troops out of Iraq as quickly and cleanly as possible,” reports the Times Online.

In fact, this is not the “clearest of missions,” as Congress, increasingly under the control of the Democrat side of the Property Party equation, has not explicitly declared it plans to leave Iraq in the near future, fearing the connotation it has “cut and run” once again, this time allowing “al-Qaeda,” as Bush said during his press conference earlier today, to inundate Iraq and use it as a base of operations, never mind the Iraqi resistance is likely to resist “al-Qaeda” jihadists as a foreign contagion, and also never mind “al-Qaeda” is essentially a creation of American, Pakistani, and British intelligence.

Appointing Robert Gates to run the Pentagon is a natural, as Gates spent 26 years in the CIA and the National Security Council and was the director of the agency under Bush Senior, who is, of course, a former duke of the spooks in the Ford administration.

Gates’ curriculum vitae is a near perfect match, as he was neck deep in Iran-Contra and is nothing short of a Bush crime family sycophant. Gates was, according to Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe, involved in the “October Surprise,” the secret agreement between Iran and conniving Republicans, led by Bush Senior, to release the hostages after the November, 4, 1980 elections, thus providing Reagan with election time boasting points.

Ari Ben-Menashe revealed that pressure “on [Menachem] Begin led the Likud leader to throw in his lot with the Reagan-Bush campaign in 1980 by helping to arrange meetings between Iranian leaders and senior Republicans. Ben-Menashe has asserted that George H.W. Bush personally participated in a key meeting in October 1980 in Paris, a claim that Bush denied at two press conferences in 1992 but was never questioned about in a formal government investigation,” according to Robert Parry.

Although Gates denied firsthand knowledge of Iran arms sales profits illegally diverted to the Contras, evidence demonstrates that he received a report on the diversion during the summer of 1986 from DDI Richard Kerr. “The issue was whether Independent Counsel could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Gates was deliberately not telling the truth when he later claimed not to have remembered any reference to the diversion before meeting with [national intelligence officer Charles E. Allen, neck deep in the muck of the Iran-Contra crimes]” on October 1, 1986, notes Wikipedia.

In 1991, even the CIA’s favorite newspaper, the Washington Post, ran an op-ed cautioning against appointing Gates as DCI. “My objections to Gates center on his performance during the Iran-contra affair…. Throughout it, Gates acted as if he was in a complete fog or was interested primarily in keeping the truth from being aired in public or from reaching Congress,” wrote Tom Polgar, a onetime colleague at the CIA and a veteran of the OSS (Gates: The Wrong Choice to Head the CIA, Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 1-7 Jul. 1991, 24). But then, as George Lardner, Jr. and Walter Pincus wrote a couple weeks later in the same publication, Gates is “A Company Man” (or maybe that should be he is a Bush crime family intimate), so his appointment was a shoo-in.

Naturally, all of this about merging CIA and DIA operations at the expense of the former. “It’s no mistake Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden was breezily selected [as director of the CIA, former Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence], as predicted, by a large number of senators (78-15 in his favor) earlier today,” I wrote on May 26th. “Hayden will merge CIA and Pentagon covert and snoop operations and scant little of the work will concentrate on Osama’s cartoonish cave dwellers and the spurious boogieman known as ‘al-Qaeda,’” as we know the lion’s share of snoop work is directed against the American people, as the NSA’s massive surveillance program reveals. It should be fairly obvious that appointing a former CIA director and career spook as the Secretary of Defense rounds out the overall plan.

Finally, although Rumsfeld will go into the good night, the corporate relationships he nurtured will stay in place.

“As for Mr. Rumsfeld’s top civilian aides, officials said it was likely that Mr. Gates would seek to retain Gordon England as the deputy defense secretary; Mr. England previously was Navy secretary, and has received high marks managing the day-to-day business of the Pentagon,” notes the New York Times.

England is a proponent of “military transformation,” that is to say transforming, or rather transferring, military duties to the private sector. He is a former top executive of the death merchant General Dynamics (another Pentagon appointee, James Roche, a Center for Security Policy neocon, worked for Northrop Grumman, and former Secretary of the Army, Thomas E. White, a JINSA walking tour convert, worked as a vice chairman and senior executive for Enron).

So impressed are the Likudites with England, JINSA presented him with a distinguished service award.

In other words, as much as things change, or appear to change, the more they ultimately stay the same, especially with the neocon gang running the show.

ENDS

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