Gates Nomination Hearing

It's quite amusing to see Gates squirming, about to face the mess he was indirectly responsible for creating.

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The Senate requested provide Congress the required DoD readiness reports which the former Secretary of Defense appears to have neglected.

Gates may be more open to Europeans, likely reassuring Turkey, sitting on the Iraqi border and seeking EU membership.

Gates speaks about Iraq as were an entity wholly under US Government jurisdiction as if a state, not a sovereign country with interests that may conflict with America's.

Gates shared the experience of jogging with Texas A&M students, seeing them commissioned then killed in Iraq; it's hardly an impressive résumé to claim a special prosecutor was troubled or couldn't find enough evidence to convict.

Gates amusingly planted the seeds of flawed intelligence, then feigned shock for the fruits of his handiwork. Gates indirectly supported the destruction of the CIA analysis. The intelligence community gutted of credibly analysis, deferred judgments to the NeoCon ideologues.

It's somewhat absurd to reward Gates for having inflated the Russian threat, gutting the CIA intelligence of reliable analysts with the responsibility to clean up the mess created in the wake of trumped up WMD intelligence.

Gates, a former Russian Analysts with the CIA, was very direct in the answer to questions related to the loss of Russian Prestige after their empire fell apart. We can only speculate if the Russian high, from which the supposedly fell and justify their eternal morose, would not have been lessened had the Russians knew where they stood, not where the Americans wanted them to stand.