Remaking Robert Gates

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The Bush administration’s push for a Gates confirmation in the lame-duck Congress this year betrays a hint of unease over what might happen to the nominee for Secretary of Defense if he were to face a Democratic-controlled Congress.

While all of Washington is busily recasting this hard man of the Casey era into a cuddly, “pragmatic,” experienced, and realistic diplomat, the past could still trip him up. Gates escaped indictment in Iran-Contra amidst indications he was lying to cover up his own role in the affair. The independent counsel who investigated the scandal, Lawrence Walsh, says in his own memoir he did not believe Gates’ professed innocence. There is the suggestion of perjury in his testimony, which was replete with numerous lapses of memory and profuse apologies for not having more carefully considered the policy implications of this secret, unconstitutional war.

And while he escaped prosecution, the affair temporarily slowed the rise of Casey’s protégé, slowed it enough to force withdrawal of his nomination to be head of the CIA in 1987. By 1991 the details of the scandal were all but forgotten, and Gates easily gained approval as Bush Senior’s CIA director. However, during the confirmation hearings several CIA employees with lengthy tenures at the agency came forward to testify against Gates, describing at length how Casey’s director of intelligence manipulated research so as to jibe with Reagan policy goals. “Gates knows how to develop his credentials and ingratiate himself,” one colleague said of the nominee. He “ignored or scorned” views that didn’t conform to his own preconceptions Melvin Goodman, a senior official with a lengthy tenure noted. Gates’ role was “to corrupt the process and the ethics of intelligence.”

Jennifer Lynn Glaudemans, a CIA employee testified, “I think he misrepresented what was in the record of finished intelligence…. Not only could we feel Mr. Gates’s contempt, we could sense his party line….We were told, ‘do not come to a conclusion, it may offend the 7th floor.'”

All this is doubtless buried in a history no one in Washington wants to dredge up. Anyway, Gates is enjoying a makeover, with such people as Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, who served as head of the NSA and was deputy director of the CIA, comparing Gates to Clark Clifford, the well-regarded Washington lawyer who served as an intimate advisor to several presidents. A story in the Washington Post this morning pushes along the remake: “Bob Gates comes from the realist school of how to operate internationally,” Dennis Ross, a Mideast envoy for Bush Senior, told the Post. “As such…it is pretty clear the neoconservative agenda on regime change and democracy promotion will take a back seat to stability and less pressure on regimes to open up their political systems.”

This is the new refurbished Gates. Gone is the old Gates—the man who manipulated intelligence, plotted the overthrow of the Marxist-Leninist foothold country of Nicaragua, drew up plans for invading Libya, and twisted intelligence to show the Soviets were masterminds of international terrorism.

But one never knows in Washington what might happen amidst the shift in political alignments. If the new Democratic-controlled Congress were in session, someone might come forward at the Gates confirmation hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee. In the new Congress that committee will be chaired not by John Warner, who had participated in Gates earlier confirmation to the CIA, but the Democrat, Carl Levin of Michigan. Could Bush depend on the liberal Levin, who has been in Congress since 1978 and is a vocal critic of the Iraq war, to get down for Gates? Maybe not. So best to get this over with quickly in the lame-duck session where the old dependable John Warner will see it through.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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