holdovers from one admin to the next, 9/11 project

[dbcooper41]

i've oftern wondered about the fact the bush kept 2 members of clinton's cabinet. George_Tenet at the cia and Norman_Mineta the dept of transportation. both played important roles in 9/11. continuity in these 2 groups was pretty important to the event.
tenet particulary seems interesting to me since he came in in 1997 and it looks to me like the 9/11 project really started rolling in 1998.
coincidence?
now dear leader has kept ex-cia chief gates as sec of defense.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/0 ... 16006.html

does anyone have any history on other cabinet members who have been retained from one admin to another. particularly
when the party in power has changed(supposedly).

has anyone else considered this in relation to 9/11?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Tenet

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Mineta

[dbcooper41]

i've oftern wondered about the fact that bush kept 2 members of clinton's cabinet. George_Tenet at the cia and Norman_Mineta the dept of transportation. both played important roles in 9/11. continuity in these 2 groups was pretty important to the event.
tenet particulary seems interesting to me since he came in in 1997 and it looks to me like the 9/11 project really started rolling in 1998.
coincidence?
now dear leader has kept ex-cia chief gates as sec of defense.

just accidently saw this.
i'm still wondering about dear leader keeping him on.


http://www.defense.gov/bios/biographyde ... aphyid=115

"Dr. Robert M. Gates was sworn in on December 18, 2006, as the 22nd Secretary of Defense. Dr. Gates is the only Secretary of Defense in U.S. history to be asked to remain in that office by a newly elected President. President Barack Obama is the eighth president Dr. Gates has served.

Before entering his present post, Dr. Gates was the President of Texas A&M University, the nation's seventh largest university. Prior to assuming the Texas A&M presidency, on August 1, 2002, he served as Interim Dean of the George Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M from 1999 to 2001.

Secretary Gates joined the Central Intelligence Agency in 1966 and spent nearly 27 years as an intelligence professional. During that period, he spent nearly nine years at the National Security Council, The White House, serving four presidents of both political parties.

Dr. Gates served as Director of Central Intelligence from 1991 until 1993. He is the only career officer in CIA's history to rise from entry-level employee to Director. He served as Deputy Director of Central Intelligence from 1986 until 1989 and as Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Adviser at the White House from January 20, 1989, until November 6, 1991, for President George H.W. Bush.

Secretary Gates has been awarded the National Security Medal, the Presidential Citizens Medal, has twice received the National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal, and has three times received CIA's highest award, the Distinguished Intelligence Medal.

He is the author of the memoir, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insiders Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War, published in 1996.

Until becoming Secretary of Defense, Dr. Gates served as Chairman of the Independent Trustees of The Fidelity Funds, the nation's largest mutual fund company, and on the board of directors of NACCO Industries, Inc., Brinker International, Inc. and Parker Drilling Company, Inc.

Dr. Gates has also served on the Board of Directors and Executive Committee of the American Council on Education, the Board of Directors of the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, and the National Executive Board of the Boy Scouts of America. He has also been President of the National Eagle Scout Association.

A native of Kansas, Secretary Gates received his bachelor's degree from the College of William and Mary, his master's degree in history from Indiana University, and his doctorate in Russian and Soviet history from Georgetown University.

In 1967 he was commissioned a second lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force and served as an intelligence officer at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri."

they noticably omitted his affiliation with SAIC.

http://antemedius.com/category/tags/saic

"SAIC
Deeper Politics: For Profit Government, Intelligence, Foreign Policy, and War
by Edger,
February 4, 2010 - 6:40am

Last week we heard Peter Dale Scott, former Canadian diplomat and University of California at
Berkeley Professor, and author of Drugs, Oil, and War (2005), The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (2007), The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11 and the Deep Politics of War (2008), talk with Paul Jay of The Real News in the The Deep State, A Powerless President, The CIA, Afghanistan, And Heroin, the first and second parts of a multipart series about the corrupted mindset in Washington that chooses who becomes president, and about the war machine that co-opted Obama into his escalation of a drug-corrupted war in Afghanistan.

Scott also talked about an "iceberg" analogy of US politics in which which "the visible part, the
public politics, or, if you like, what goes on in the public state, is only a small percentage of
the totality of what's going on, a lot of this is not subject to the restraints of the Constitution
at all"

Here in part 3 of the series Scott again talks with Jay, this time about something much more
sinister that permeates American political reality penetrating and corrupting much deeper than the normal military-industrial complex we've read about in the past - about the fact that the way to succeed in Washington has become to support the next use of the war machine to attack its next chosen target - about privatized intelligence services creating for profit wars, representing a private business that has become a form of permanent government - and concludes that the only way he can see out of the mire is that "We have to pull back from the two-party system and start a new kind of politics. We have to essentially build a new kind of civil society in America. And this is not easy, and I'm not confident that it will happen. The most likely thing to happen is that America will just go into decline from overextension the way that Britain went into decline from overextension before it".
To give you an example of how powerful they are, when it was clear that the intelligence about Iraq [had] been skewed and we went in because of weapons of mass destruction that weren't there. And they commissioned (Science Applications International Corporation) SAIC to investigate what went wrong.

And SAIC came up with a report that didn't mention that some of the key people who had been saying that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction had been saying that it would be necessary to deal with him militarily were people who were in fact working for SAIC. So when you give a private corporation the job of seeing whether we should go to war against a country, and then you give that same private corporation the job of finding out why false information was given, you can see that there has been a very, very deep corruption of the process of gathering and analyzing intelligence in Washington and SAIC.

JAY: Who are some of the individuals you referring to?

SCOTT: If you don't mind, I'm going to read from an article by Donald Barlett that you already
quoted from. This was David Kay, who was on the committee, and this is what he said in 1998 to the Senate Armed Services Committee, that Saddam Hussein, quote, "remains in power with weapons of mass destruction," and that, quote, "military action is needed." Wayne Downing, a retired general and proselytized for an invasion of Iraq, stating that the Iraqis, quote, "are ready to take the war ... overseas. They would use whatever means they have to attack us." Both of these men, David Kay and Wayne Downing, worked for SAIC. And so a decent analysis of what went wrong would have pointed to the fact that we were relying on people who had, really, a profit motive. I'm not saying that they did all of this thinking only of profit; I'm saying that they were totally part of this dominance mindset that I'm talking about, and they know that the way to succeed in Washington is to support the next target, the policy for the next use of the war machine.

JAY: Now, Robert Gates, Obama's secretary of defense, used to be part of SAIC as well. Is that true?

SCOTT: Was on the board of directors of SAIC, yes. And, you know, for that matter, Mike McConnell was with Booz Allen Hamilton.

JAY: So, given the Obama administration, again, promises of a new mindset, has the role of SAIC and these kinds of companies changed in any way?

SCOTT: No. See, this is why I talk about deep politics."

to those who are not familiar with SAIC, they are one of the keys to the whole terror thang. it's amazing how invisible they've remained throughout it all.
google SAIC + just about any terror event you like and see what comes up.
i call them the operational wing of the evil empire.
i think an indepth discussion about them is in order.

[Uncle $cam]

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/feat ... ency200703

Science Applications International Corporation

To get some idea of the scale: contractors absorb the taxes paid by everyone in America with incomes under $100,000. In other words, more than 90 percent of all taxpayers might as well remit everything they owe directly to SAIC or some other contractor rather than to the IRS. In Washington these companies go by the generic name "body shops"

But the biggest, most powerful of the "body shops"—SAIC, which employs 44,000 people and took in $8 billion last year—sells brainpower, including a lot of the "expertise" behind the Iraq war.
It sells human beings who have a particular expertise—expertise about weapons, about homeland security, about surveillance, about computer systems, about "information dominance" and "information warfare."

[]
Robert M. Gates, the new secretary of defense, whose confirmation hearings lasted all of a day, is a former member of SAIC's board of directors.

[]
burglars managed to break into SAIC's headquarters, pry open 13 private offices, and walk out with one desktop-computer hard drive and four laptops. By SAIC's account, the computers contained personal data on thousands of present and past employees, presumably including the company's many former C.I.A. operatives, N.S.A. executives, and Pentagon officials. To date, the burglary remains unsolved.

[]
SAIC has displayed an uncanny ability to thrive in every conceivable political climate. It is the invisible hand behind a huge portion of the national-security state—the one sector of the government whose funds are limitless and whose continued growth is assured every time a politician utters the word "terrorism."

[]
SAIC represents, in other words, a private business that has become a form of permanent government.

[]
Civilians at SAIC used to joke that the company had so many admirals and generals in its ranks it could start its own war. Some might argue that, in the case of Iraq, it did.

[]
In October of 2006 the company told would-be investors flatly that the war on terror would continue to be a lucrative growth industry.


the article even includes gossip
Beyster's close associates within SAIC were a succession of young men. Known as aides-de-camp, they were usually handsome, well educated, and intelligent, with a facility for numbers and a willingness to perform personal tasks for their boss. Beyster was an ardent sailor, and in the summertime he liked to spend afternoons cruising the waters off San Diego aboard his yacht in the company of these young men. George Wilson, who once headed SAIC's public-relations operation, has stated in a legal proceeding that the young men provided a variety of personal services for Beyster, including using SAIC equipment to make copies of pornographic movies that Beyster would watch aboard his boat.

When Beyster traveled on business, he often took one of the aides-de-camp with him, and asked his secretary to arrange for them to stay in the same hotel room—this according to the secretary's courtroom testimony. Wilson said in a deposition that one of the young men he knew who slept in the same room with Beyster on these trips told him that he didn't like doing it, but that "it was part of traveling with Beyster." Some of the young aides-de-camp went on to become executives at SAIC. Bernice King testified that Beyster had a name for his young assistants: he called them his "baby boys."

[dbcooper41]

the vanity fair piece was interesting but it didn't really get into their true nastiness.
other than the bit about "founder" beyster.
he bailed out couple of years ago.
they also went public fairly recently. until then all stock was employee owned and you had to sell if you left the company. they even had their own "stock market" callen "the bull". i imagine that avoided a few minor reporting issues.

[JackRiddler]

Appreciating this.

[thatsmystory]

Hayden was another holdover (started as NSA chief in March '99) though the NSA may be less subject to party control than other agencies/departments. Hayden stands out because he was a key official in the warrantless surveillance programs. Wired Magazine reported that the warrantless surveillance began before 9/11. James Bamford reported that Hayden's excuse for not tracking the hijackers was concern about civil liberties. Bamford noted that this excuse made no sense at all because Hayden should have used FISA which was created to protect civil liberties.

I remember that Booz Allen was a company that had some key NSA contracts. Booz Allen appears to be a revolving door outfit (like Goldman Sachs) where intel officials rotate from government to Booz Allen. For example, Dale Watson went from being in charge of the FBI CT Division to Booz Allen. All the bizarre ITOS conduct (i.e. Moussaoui, UBLU withholding information about al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar from the Cole investigators) happened while Watson ran the CT Division. The man who was in charge of the FBI ITOS at the same time was Michael Rolince. He too went to Booz Allen. Former Bush administration DNI Mike McConnell went from Booz Allen back to government. It reminds me of Cheney and Halliburton. Does anyone really believe that Cheney forgot about the millions of dollars he made there? Of course not. So it's very doubtful McConnell forgot about his pals at Booz Allen when he went back to government work. Just as Goldman employees seem to remember their pals when they get powerful positions in the Treasury Department.

Black (chief of the CTC) and Blee (chief of Alec Station) were appointed in mid '99. Obviously these positions aren't associated with party affiliation but such appointments stand out due to the strange pre-9/11 conduct of Alec Station and the post 9/11 counterterrorism tactics.

Fran Townsend went from the Clinton DOJ to being the Homeland Security Advisor for the Bush administration. She now works for Baker Botts. She was a friend of John O'Neill. I would say Townsend is a very good example of Dem/Repub party collusion.

[dbcooper41]

http://www.historycommons.org/entity.js ... %28saic%29

away from home and i just found this.

[dbcooper41]

and now, another holdover. meuller took over the fbi on 04-sept-2001. i'm sure they wouldn't want to have a rookie in that spot again for the anniversary.

http://www.wral.com/news/political/story/9892882/

Senate votes to extend term of FBI director

WASHINGTON — The Senate has taken the first step to extend the term of FBI
Director Robert Mueller for up to two years.
The voice vote Thursday is part of a two-step process. The bill would authorize
the extension of Mueller's 10-year term, now set to expire Aug. 2.
Once the House approves the bill and President Barack Obama signs it, the
president would then formally nominate Mueller. Senate leaders have agreed to
vote on Mueller's confirmation before his term expires.
The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Democrat Patrick Leahy of
Vermont, says the extension will maintain continuity of leadership at the FBI as the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks approaches.
A House vote is likely next week.

[Nordic]

Good thread. I missed it the first time around.