More of the same?

Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball writing in Newsweek say that Bob Gates, BushCo's nominee for Secretary of Defense, is a figure under the cloud of the Iran - Contra scandal* and not someone likely to change much as Rumsfeld's replacement. In fact, as the article tells, he has a reputation for "stove-piping" and is not likely to be telling "truth to power".

When he heard today about Gates's nomination, “I nearly choked on my sandwich,” said Mel Goodman, a former Soviet analyst at the CIA who testified against Gates’s nomination to be CIA director in 1991. “This is not a guy who’s ever been accused of speaking truth to power. If you’re looking for somebody who’s going to change Iraq policy, he’s hardly the guy to do it. The only policy he’s going to consider is what is acceptable to the White House.”

[...]

One of the most controversial intelligence issues concerning Gates, as CIA No. 2, involved an investigation into contentious allegations that the Soviet Union played a role in the 1981 shooting, by a Turkish extremist, of Pope John Paul II. According to Senate transcripts, the CIA prepared a memo outlining the case for Soviet complicity in the attack on the pope and in a cover letter forwarding the document to Reagan. Gates allegedly stated that the intelligence review upon which the memo was based was comprehensive. However, a CIA internal review later denounced the memo as being skewed, and Gates himself later admitted the document had been based on thin evidence.

As Digby adds:

Sound familiar? Bush Junior's administration didn't invent this stuff. They just took it further than anybody else.

The reason Gates took the job is simply loyalty to the Bush family in their time of need. I doubt they could get anyone else to do it. He's a seat warmer until Bush can fly out of town in the dead of night in January 2009 and leave this mess in the hands of his successor. Expect no changes.

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* A report produced by Lawrence Walsh, the independent counsel appointed to conduct a criminal investigation of the Iran-contra affair, criticized Gates for possible lack of candor related to what he knew about the Reagan-era scandal. According to the report, Gates consistently testified that he first learned in October 1986 that money from the sales of arms to Iran may have been diverted to anticommunist contra forces in Central America. Other evidence, however, suggested that Gates got a report on the affair from a senior CIA official several months earlier. Walsh eventually decided that there was not enough evidence to warrant the filing of any criminal case against Gates. "In the end, although Gates's actions suggested an officer who was more interested in shielding his institution from criticism and in shifting the blame to the NSC [National Security Council] than in finding out the truth, there was insufficient evidence to charge Gates with a criminal endeavor to obstruct congressional investigations," Walsh wrote in his report.