About Robert Gates: MEET THE BOSS
Gates is the only U.S. secretary of defense ever to be asked to remain in office by a newly elected president. The 2008 election was an unambiguous popular rejection of the Bush administration and its imperial foreign policy. The people of the United States, including the majority of people in the military, wanted to sweep out the Bush team. But President Obama asked Gates, a key architect of the current conflicts, to stay.
Gates must have some valuable experience and qualifications to remain the head of the war machine after our “great democracy” voted those policies out!
Gates’ illustrious military service spans an entire two years in the Air Force as a second lieutenant. He spent the Vietnam War at a base in Missouri and attending top-notch universities. His subsequent career in the CIA includes heavy involvement in the Iran-Contra affair, a notorious criminal scandal that caused the deaths of thousands of innocent people.
But most valuable to the Pentagon would be Gates’ wealth of experience serving on the boards of directors of a variety of private companies, many of which he holds personal financial investments with.
This is the real résumé of our esteemed leader:
* Board of Trustees of Fidelity Investments, the largest mutual fund company in the world. Among other defense investments, Fidelity works in partnership with the Boeing Company, one of the largest war-profiteering corporations in the world, holding some of the largest defense contracts with the Pentagon.
* Board of Directors of Parker Drilling Company, which is drilling for oil all over the world. Particularly, Parker Drilling operates in Kuwait and has heavy investments drilling for oil in Kazakhstan, one of the former oil-rich Soviet-bloc countries that the Pentagon hopes to win control over by having a U.S. base in Afghanistan.
* Board of Directors of NACCO Industries, which has approximately $30 million in defense contracts.
* Board of Directors of Draper Labs, which was once known as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Instrumentation Laboratory. After scoring huge defense contracts to develop navigation systems for ballistic missiles during the criminal war in Vietnam, massive anti-war protests at MIT against the research program shamed the group into splitting off and becoming Draper Labs, which still holds multi-billion-dollar defense contracts with the Pentagon.
* Board of Directors of Science Applications International Corporation, a defense contractor that made a killing off of the war in Iraq, elevating it to the ninth largest defense contractor in the world. SAIC is now a Fortune 500 company holding multi-billion-dollar defense contracts with the Pentagon.