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sounds like he'll fit right in
from Marshall and Scott Cocaine Politics
Signs of any new thinking about drug issues in Congress are hard to find. The U.S. Senate confirmed the nomination of Robert Gates as CIA director by a vote of 64 to 31 on November 5, 1991, despite voluminous testimony suggesting that he lied as to his ignorance of key matters in the Iran-Contra affair and that he distorted the production of intelligence estimates to serve the political ends of his boss, former Reagan campaign director William Casey. In this respect, one critic testified that Gates pushed the administration line on "narcoterrorism," which blamed drug trafficking on leftwing states and insurgent movements (see Chapter 2). Accusing Gates of shopping for analysts to make that case, Mel Goodman testified that "a senior analyst was called in by Bob Gates and told that Bill Casey wanted a memo that would link drug dealers to international terrorists. This senior analyst looked at the evidence and couldn't make those conclusions. The evidence wasn't there. He was told to go back and look again. He did that. Said the evidence wasn't there. Gates took the project away from him and gave it to another analyst. I believe there is an ethical issue here." Gates admitted asking analysts to look into accusations of a linkage between traffickers and terrorists but said in his defense that three separate agency analyses concluded any such linkage was weak.
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