Gates’ CIA Past Could Haunt Him in Confirmation Hearings/Good Read!

[KoKo]

(Article says Dems are "cautious" about him....which is probably a good thing)

Gates’ CIA Past Could Haunt Him in Confirmation Hearings
By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor

President Bush’s pick to replace Donald H. Rumsfeld with former CIA Director Robert Gates is an odd one, considering it’s almost certain to revive festering questions about the Bush administration’s handling of pre-war intelligence on Iraq.

Gates is one of those longtime Washington insiders whose name is not likely to ring bells outside of the Beltway.

But he’s long been a major player in Republican national security circles, first as a Russian specialist on President Gerald Ford’s White House National Security Council in 1974, then eventually at the CIA, where he held a handful of senior positions before being tapped to be its chief by the first President Bush, in 1991.

And it wasn’t the first time he’d been nominated for the post — or his first dose of trouble in the spotlight.

In early 1987, his role in the so-called Iran-Contra affair, a secret White House operation to sell weapons to radical Islamic Iran in exchange for the release of U.S. hostages — and cash for CIA-backed rebels in Nicaragua — came under scrutiny.

Then, in during his 1991 nomination hearings to run the CIA, Gates ran into a buzz saw of testimony from a former agency analyst who said that during the 1980s Gates had skewered intelligence to fit the convictions of senior Reagan administration officials that Soviet agents had concocted a plot to assassinate the pope and were arming and encouraging Marxist revolutionary groups to carry out terrorist attacks.

Gates withdrew his nomination in the face of sure rejection.

http://www.cq.com/public/20061108_homeland.html

[aquart]

1. Gates was picked to select the next Saddam.

And every presidential contender is going to be praying it works. Because not one of them wants to have "coward" or "loser" or "cut and run" attached to his resume by opposition attack ads.

[astonamous]

2. Does anyone here think that his nomination as SOS

have anything to do with the Ortega's presidential win in Nicaragua? Is it just a coincidence? Do we still have troops in South America along the border of Venezuela?

Sorry for all the questions, but I haven't had time to do a lot of keeping up and research due to working on elections.

Trudy
www.pryorsplanet.com

[Whoa_Nelly]

3. Gates is on Baker's Iraq Study Group

Read here...a very good read;
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2006/0609.dreyfuss.html

A Higher Power
James Baker puts Bush's Iraq policy into rehab.

By Robert Dreyfuss

<snip>
The president may have had another political motive for giving his blessing to the endeavor. If--and it's a very big if--Baker can forge a consensus plan on what to do about Iraq among the bigwigs on his commission, many of them leading foreign-policy figures in the Democratic Party, then the 2008 Democratic presidential nominee--whoever he (or she) is--will have a hard time dismissing the plan. And if the GOP nominee also embraces the plan, then the Iraq war would largely be off the table as a defining issue of the 2008 race--a potentially huge advantage for Republicans.

Besides Baker, the bipartisan task force is co-chaired by former congressman Lee H. Hamilton, the Indiana Democrat and foreign-policy wise man. Working with a quartet of think tanks--the U.S. Institute of Peace, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Center for the Study of the Presidency, and the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy--Baker and Hamilton recruited a star-studded task force, evenly split between Republicans and Democrats. The Republicans include Robert M. Gates, the former CIA director; Sandra Day O'Connor, the retired Justice; Alan Simpson, the former Wyoming senator; and Edwin Meese III, attorney general under President Reagan. The Democrats are William Perry, President Clinton's secretary of defense; Charles Robb, the former Virginia senator; Leon Panetta, Clinton's chief of staff; and Vernon Jordan, the lawyer and Friend of Bill.

<snip>
Baker's commission--officially called the Iraq Study Group--was created in March by Congress at the instigation of Rep. Frank Wolf, a Virginia Republican. After his third trip to Iraq last year, Wolf started contacting members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, urging the creation of a high-powered, private task force to take a fresh look at the mess in Iraq. "If you had a very serious illness...and you weren't completely comfortable that everything was going the way you hoped, you'd certainly want to get a second opinion," Wolf told me. At least 30 members of Congress supported the idea, including Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) and Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.). According to participants in the task force, a key silent partner with Wolf in putting it together was his Virginia Republican colleague, Sen. John Warner, the chairman of the powerful Senate Armed Services committee.

Wolf's motivation in creating the Iraq Study Group seems to be genuine concern that the war isn't going well and that public support for it is evaporating. During his visit to Iraq, where he spent hours with U.S. military officers in the field, Wolf says that his eyes were opened. "Some of the things that were told to me, I had never seen before: the destabilization of the region," Wolf told me. "Some of the scenarios that were given to me the overthrow of the Saudi government, the Jordanian government and the Egyptian government.... So I just felt, let's take another look. And no one should be afraid of doing it."

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2006/0609.dreyfuss.html