Zeev's Turnips Talk Politics (ZTTP)

[niteowl]

It's wonderful that so many Republicans want to discuss the scandals from the 80's.

I watched most of the Murtha tape last night and even though he did not accept any money it was clear that he was leaving the door open as he promoted himself.


There is another person who is being considered for a more important job...Robert Gates.

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1111-25.htm

"...As Lawrence Walsh, the independent counsel investigating Iran-Contra and deputy attorney general in the Eisenhower Administration, points out in “Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-Up,” Gates was in on the whole Ollie North illegal operation from the start.

“Two questions had not been answered satisfactorily: Had Gates falsely denied knowledge of North’s Contra-support activities?” Walsh writes. “Had Gates falsely postdated his first knowledge of North’s diversion of the arms sales proceeds to the Contras?”

“We did not believe Gates,” Walsh adds. “It simply was not credible that the second-highest officer of the CIA would forget a warning of an illegal activity linking President Reagan’s two favorite programs. We decided against prosecuting Gates for making a false statement, however, because there had been only one witness to each of the conversations he claimed to have forgotten.”

To borrow a phrase from Bush senior, Gates was in “deep doo-doo” during Iran-Contra and was able to get confirmed as the CIA director only because by 1991, the country and Congress had O.D.’d on Iran-Contra and thought it best to move on.

Gates was also deputy CIA chief at a time when the CIA was funding and training death squads in El Salvador that were engaged in mass slaughter.

Robert Parry, a former reporter for AP and Newsweek who has done some excellent work on the Reagan cabal, has tracked Gates’s career closely.

“At Gates’s confirmation hearings in 1991, former CIA analysts, including renowned Kremlinologist Mel Goodman, took the extraordinary step of coming out of the shadows to accuse Gates of politicizing the intelligence while he was chief of the analytical division and then deputy director,” Parry writes. “The former intelligence officers said the ambitious Gates pressured the CIA’s analytical division to exaggerate the Soviet menace to fit the ideological perspective of the Reagan administration. Analysts who took a more nuanced view of Soviet power and Moscow’s behavior in the world faced pressure and career reprisals.”..."