THE GATES INHERITANCE,-----The tortured world of US intelligence

[rodeodance]

Well worth the read.


Jun 23, 2007

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IF23Ak03.html

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THE GATES INHERITANCE, Part 1
The tortured world of US intelligence
By Roger Morris

"I may be dangerous," he said, "but I am not wicked. No, I am not wicked."
- Henry James, The American

It was a failed administration's ritual scapegoating, the ousting last winter of its ruinous secretary of defense. But in the sauve qui peut confirmation of his replacement - "The only thing that

mattered," said a Senate aide, "was that he was not Don Rumsfeld" - there was inadvertent irony.

With President George W Bush's choice of ex-Central Intelligence Agency director Robert Gates to take over the Pentagon, this most uninformed of presidents unwittingly gave us back vital pages of our recent history. If Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the neo-conservative claque in the second echelon of the administration are all complicit in today's misrule, Gates personifies older, equally serious, if less recognized, less remembered abuses. His laden resume offers needed evidence that Washington's tortuous, torturing foreign policies did not begin with the Bush administration - and will not end with it.

While Rumsfeld's record bared some of Washington's uglier realities and revealed the depth of decay in the US military, Gates' long passage through the world of espionage and national security illuminates other dark corners - specters of the Cold War still haunting us, nether regions of flawed, corrupted intelligence, and the malignant legacy of foreign policy's evil twin, covert intervention.

Like the Senate, the media welcomed Gates, in the words of the Christian Science Monitor, as the "Un-Rumsfeld". In the wake of his flinty predecessor, he arrived as a smiling, silver-haired cherub of Midwestern earnestness. That image seemed borne out by his swift firings of ranking army officials in the Walter Reed scandal, his apparent questioning of the value of the Pentagon's notorious penal colony at Guantanamo Bay, his more moderate (or at least conventionally diplomatic) rhetoric in the international arena, and even his heresy in mentioning respectfully - and quaintly - the constitutional role of "the press" in a Naval Academy commencement address.