Meet the New Sec of Defense Same As the Old Sec of Defense

Taz pulled this article off of Nexis.

There is general awareness around the country that Sept. 11 was an intelligence disaster - worse than Pearl Harbor, where fewer died. What is not generally known is that over the past two decades the leaders of the CIA have allowed the agency's credibility and capability to erode to such an extent that a president now has nowhere to go to be sure of getting professional intelligence judgments insulated from pressure from policy departments such as Defense.

Twenty years ago, William Casey and his protege Robert Gates quietly launched the corrosive process of politicizing intelligence. In an unguarded moment with a reporter in March 1995, Gates admitted that he had watched Casey on "issue after issue sit in meetings and present intelligence framed in terms of the policy he wanted pursued." Gates learned well at Casey's knee and, upon becoming director, took care to promote only those analysts who could be depended upon to hew to the party line - as in "Gorbachev can never change the Soviet regime."

The last thing America needs right now is another Sec of Defense who plays politics with intelligence. Donald Rumsfeld planted the Office of Special Plans. That's how the United States was suckered by the alcoholic informant Curve Ball.

Senior U.S. officials said it was not the CIA but the Defense Intelligence Agency, the top U.S. military intelligence organization, which was responsible for analyzing and corroborating the defectors' information.

The DIA received the defectors' claims through its Information Collection Program, a multi-million dollar effort to gather intelligence inside Iraq run by the Iraqi National Congress and funded by U.S. taxpayers.

It is imperative that intelligence is not the target of political agendas. The national security of the United States depends on it. Which is why the Senate should not confirm Bob Gates.