Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, architect of an unpopular war in Iraq, is resigning after six stormy years at the Pentagon.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/110806X.shtml
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Gates Has History of Manipulating Intelligence
Robert Gates, the former director of the CIA during the presidency of George H.W. Bush, and who was tapped Tuesday by the president to replace Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense, is part of Texas's good ol' boy network. He may be best known for playing a role in arming Iraq's former dictator Saddam Hussein with American made weapons in the country's war against Iran in the 1980s.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/110806R.shtml
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Iraq exit the No 1 priority for Rumsfeld successor
Robert Gates, the 63-year-old career intelligence officer chosen to replace Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon, takes over with the clearest of missions: get American troops out of Iraq as quickly and cleanly as possible.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7374-2444140,00.html
Robert Gates: A New Perspective on Iran?:
Whatever else he may bring to his new job at the Pentagon, Robert Gates apparently holds a view on the highly sensitive subject of relations with Iran that hasn’t been embraced by all his new colleagues in the Bush administration.
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2006/11/08/a-new-perspective-on-iran/
From Information Clearing House
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Robert Gates, the successor of Rumsfeld
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Gates
Bob Gates not better than Rumsfeld
http://tinyurl.com/yym4h3
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Gates Has History of Manipulating Intelligence
Robert Gates, the former director of the CIA during the presidency of George H.W. Bush, and who was tapped Tuesday by the president to replace Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense, is part of Texas's good ol' boy network. He may be best known for playing a role in arming Iraq's former dictator Saddam Hussein with American made weapons in the country's war against Iran in the 1980s.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/110806R.shtml
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Permission to excerpt or reprint granted, with link to
http://www.blackboxvoting.org
Rumsfield replacement (Robert Gates) was director of voting company
by Bev Harris
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfield will resign, reportedly to be replaced by former CIA director Robert Gates.
Gates was on the board of directors of VoteHere, a strange little company that was the biggest elections industry lobbyist for the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). VoteHere spent more money than ES&S, Diebold, and Sequoia combined to help ram HAVA through. And HAVA, of course, was a bill sponsored by by convicted Abramoff pal Bob Ney and K-street lobbyist buddy Steny Hoyer. HAVA put electronic voting on steroids.
You can find copies of the VoteHere lobbying forms here:
http://sopr.senate.gov/cgi-win/m_opr_viewer.exe?DoFn=0
I can't get them to save to pdf, perhaps you can. Enter search terms in both "registrant" and "client" fields and put in terms "Rhoads" "Livingston" and "Votehere" (one at a time.). Then look at the gravy train while it was in the process of derailing American democracy.
I first became acquainted with VoteHere when I met a source, Dan Spillane, who is the wonderful guy that identified the Diebold source code modules for me after I found the Diebold files. He is the person who introduced me, and subsequently everyone else, to the odd role of The Election Center and R. Doug Lewis in the elections industry.
Spillane also filled me in on The Livingston Group, VoteHere lobbyists, run by Bob Livingston -- the fellow that Hustler publisher Larry Flynt outed during the Bill Clinton blow job days. Larry Flynt offered a million dollars to anyone who could locate a Republican congressman committing adultery, and out popped peccadilloes by Livingston.
Livingston couldn't live that one down, so he resigned his post as House Speaker-Elect and became a lobbyist -- but that's not all! He also launched a group called "Center for Democracy" which was going to "monitor elections." This group also featured several good old boys from the tobacco industry and some mining companies.
Former VoteHere test engineer Dan Spillane was looking into all this because he had been fired after he questioned the certification process on a touch-screen system in which he had identified 250 flaws. It was way back in November 2002 that Spillane told me, "The voting machine industry is a house of cards. And the certification and testing process is the bottom card in the house of cards."
BUT DON'T RUN OUT OF THE ROOM TO TAKE A SHOWER YET. There's more.
VoteHere was a company shilling cryptographic solutions and filled with NSA types (another director was Admiral Bill Owens, another crony of Rummy, Perle and Wolfowitz). For some reason this company claims it was unable to prevent itself from being hacked. In this alleged hack, VoteHere claims that someone stole their source code. Said source code was offered to me in October 2003, an obvious attempt at entrapment which I refused.
Nevertheless, VoteHere claimed to the media that its master security experts had supposedly "tracked" the hacker and had identified the hacker as an activist in the election reform community.
For some reason, it was decided that I should be investigated in connection with this "hack" of VoteHere -- nevermind that I can't remember how to change the password on my own laptop. Therefore I was interviewed by the Secret Service several times about this. Curiously, they never seemed to ask any questions about VoteHere, only my role in finding the Diebold files and publishing the Diebold memos.
This nonsense eventually culminated in a gag order and a letter from the U.S. Attorney to appear in front of a federal grand jury with information on all the visitors to the Black Box Voting Web site. (As if they couldn't get that in less dramatic ways in post-Patriot Act America). Attorney Lowell Finley (now with
http://www.VoterAction.org ) went to bat for me on this. A reporter named George Howland from the Seattle Weekly also got wind of it. When it hit the press, and with Lowell Finley's help, their harassment of me stopped.
VoteHere never sold any voting machines that I can find, but apparently did set up some deals to embed its cryptography into some voting systems. We found memos in the Diebold trash about VoteHere's crypto-crap, and Maryland Director of Elections Linda Lamone shows up in VoteHere-related letters. Sequoia Voting Systems signed an agreement with VoteHere, but its not clear to me whether they ever did anything about it.
Robert Gates stepped away from VoteHere shortly before he showed up in Chapter 8 of my book, Black Box Voting, in a short bit about the VoteHere company history. You can read that here:
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/bbv_chapter-8.pdf
I don't know about you, but I'd rather use a paper, pencil, and count by hand at the polling place than have former CIA director Robert Gates fooling around with my vote.
But that's just me.
-- Bev Harris Founder, Black Box Voting
P.S. Since the HBO special, I have plenty of moral support, but even after the Secret Service interviews and all the rest of the nonsense my husband and I have had to put up with, there are others who have had it rougher.
Informant: David Diggins
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The Cheney-Gates Cabal
by Ray McGovern, TomPaine.com
If his career is any clue, Rumsfeld's replacement places loyalty above principle.
http://ga3.org/ct/bp20pgF16XyU/
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The Secret World of Robert Gates
Robert Parry writes, "Robert Gates, George W. Bush’s choice to replace Donald Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary, is a trusted figure within the Bush family’s inner circle, but there are lingering questions about whether Gates is a trustworthy public official."
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/110906A.shtml
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What Rumsfeld’s dismissal means
http://www.ufppc.org/content/view/5272/
Informant: jensenmk
From ufpj-news
Contra Gates
The American Prospect
by Eric Alterman
11/08/06
The president announced his pick to replace Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense today: former CIA director Robert Gates. Bound to surface in the coming national scrutiny of Gates is his role in the Iran-Contra affair. One of the great misconceptions of the Iran-Contra scandal is the widely-held belief that when then-Attorney General Meese called a press conference on November 25, 1986, to announce his discovery of the famous 'diversion' of funds from the weapons sales to Iran to pay for weapons for the Nicaraguan contras, he was finally revealing the truth of what took place. As Oliver North pointed out in his memoir, the administration had much to gain by focusing on the diversion...
http://www.prospect.org/web/view-web.ww?id=12195
Rumsfeld's replacement: The Robert Gates file
Mother Jones
by James Ridgeway
While Donald Rumsfeld was Ronald Reagan’s errand boy to Saddam Hussein in the mid-1980s, Robert Gates, the man named yesterday to succeed him as Secretary of Defense, was at the very heart of the American intelligence apparatus, actively planning and carrying out covert operations in Central America and the Middle East. Gates, a 26-year CIA veteran and the agency's director between 1991 and 1993, has long been accused of undermining competent, unbiased intelligence analysis at the agency during his tenure, opening the way for its role in partisan politics, a reality brought to the fore again as the Bush administration made its flawed and phony case for war with Iraq...
http://tinyurl.com/ykn8yr
Informant: Thomas L. Knapp
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Gates: Another Bush Constitution Betrayer In The Pentagon
http://www.rense.com/general74/gates.htm
Informant: ranger116
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Rumsfeld