Gates to Obama?

[stoneonstone]

From another site:

"By Francis A. Boyle

According to today’s New York Times, flying home on his way back from Pakistan, Secretary of “Defense” Gates “relaxed on the 14-hour trip home by watching ‘Seven Days in May,’ the cold warrior film about an attempted military coup in the United States.” Gosh, that's really relaxing! All of a sudden out of nowhere Gates resurrects this ancient film and ostentatiously lets the New York Times and the other media know that he is watching it on his Pentagon plane home.

Obviously, Gates is sending a threat to Obama and the civilian “leadership” in America: You risk a military coup if you do not do exactly what those in the Pentagon tell you to do. This is no idle threat. And it can happen here in America. Just remember the plutocratic sponsored military coup attempt against President Franklin Roosevelt that was thwarted by retired Marine Corps General Smedley Butler under similar economic and political conditions. If it had succeeded that anti-FDR coup would have established a fascist dictatorship in America. I am not comparing Obama to FDR by any means. but the historical parallels should be obvious to everyone. And remember that Bush’s General Tommy Franks publicly stated that in the event of another major terrorist attack on America, the American people would demand that the military shut the civilian government down. In other words, Gen. Frank too publicly threatened a military coup against this Republic’s democratically elected civilian leadership.

URL http://www.=fterdowningstreet.org/node/49568

Dr. Francis Boyle was talking about this on AJ today. He watched the movie as he was flying back from the Middle East. It's a cold war story about overthrowing the government. Pretty weird choice of movies.

http://prorev.com/2010/01/robert-gates- ... e-for.html

http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=157177.0


NY Times - Nobody else in the Obama administration has been mired in Pakistan for as long as Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. . . The trip, Mr. Gates's first to Pakistan in three years, proved that dysfunctional relationships span multiple administrations and that the history of American foreign policy is full of unintended consequences.. . .

Mr. Gates, who repeatedly told the Pakistanis that he regretted their country's "trust deficit" with the United States and that Americans had made a grave mistake in abandoning Pakistan after the Russians left Afghanistan, promised the military officers that the United States would do better.

His final message delivered, he relaxed on the 14-hour trip home by watching "Seven Days in May," the cold war-era film about an attempted military coup in the United States.

Wikipedia - The plot centers on the fictitious U.S. President Jordan Lyman (Fredric March). As the story begins, Lyman faces a wave of public dissatisfaction with his decision to sign a treaty with the Soviet Union, an agreement that will supposedly result in both nations simultaneously destroying their nuclear weapons under mutual international inspection. This is extremely unpopular with both the President's opposition and the military, who believe the Soviets cannot be trusted.

As the debate over the treaty rages on, an alert and well-positioned Pentagon insider, United States Marine Corps Colonel Martin "Jiggs" Casey (Kirk Douglas) becomes aware of a conspiracy among the Joint Chiefs of Staff led by his own superior officer, the charismatic head of the JCS, Air Force General James Mattoon Scott (Burt Lancaster). As he digs deeper, he uncovers the conspiracy's shocking goal: Scott and his cohorts, Colonel Broderick (John Larkin), Colonel Murdock (Richard Anderson), Gen. Hardesty (Tyler McVey), along with allies in the United States Congress led by Sen. Frederick Prentice (Whit Bissell) and influential members of the news media led by Harold McPherson (Hugh Marlowe), are plotting to stage a coup d'etat to remove President Lyman and his cabinet seven days hence.

The plot itself, called ECOMCON (for "Emergency Communications Control"), entails the seizure of the nation's telephone, radio and television network infrastructure by a secret United States Army combat unit created and controlled by Scott's conspiracy and based in Texas near Fort Bliss. Once this is done, General Scott and his conspirators will control the nation's communications assets; then, from their headquarters within a vast underground nuclear shelter called "Mount Thunder" (based on the actual continuity of government facility maintained by the U.S. at Mount Weather in Berryville, Virginia), they will use the power of the media and the military to prevent the implementation of the treaty. . .
1/24/2010"

[norton ash]

Any questions, Barry?

[MacCruiskeen]

It's as subtle as a horse's head on your pillow. Jesus, these guys do not say one word to the NYT without very carefully considering it.

But why would Gates think it needed to be said?

[Sweejak]

Just an aside, JFK was key in getting 7 Days in May made.

[JackRiddler]

Just an aside, JFK was key in getting 7 Days in May made.

Interesting claim. Source please.

Interesting story, too. Gates being an apparently required holdover from the Bush Regime and a long-term high satrap of the Bush mob with hands all over the old Iran-Contra "enterprise" including the North/FEMA emergency rule planning. Those of you who dogmatically refuse nuance in distinguishing between the parties, or between military/paramilitary/bureaucratic/parapolitical power centers and the elected civilian authorities, should take note.

[JackRiddler]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/world ... tes&st=cse

Pentagon Memo
Gates Sees Fallout From Troubled Ties With Pakistan

By ELISABETH BUMILLER
Published: January 23, 2010

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Nobody else in the Obama administration has been mired in Pakistan for as long as Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. So on a trip here this past week to try to soothe the country’s growing rancor toward the United States, he served as a punching bag tested over a quarter-century.

“Are you with us or against us?” a senior military officer demanded of Mr. Gates at Pakistan’s National Defense University, according to a Pentagon official who recounted the remark made during a closed-door session after Mr. Gates gave a speech at the school on Friday. Mr. Gates, who could hardly miss that the officer was mimicking former President George W. Bush’s warning to nations harboring militants, simply replied, “Of course we’re with you.”

That was the essence of Mr. Gates’s message over two days to the Pakistanis, who are angry about the Central Intelligence Agency’s surge in missile strikes from drone aircraft on militants in Pakistan’s tribal areas, among other grievances, and showed no signs of feeling any love.

The trip, Mr. Gates’s first to Pakistan in three years, proved that dysfunctional relationships span multiple administrations and that the history of American foreign policy is full of unintended consequences. [Note: Gah.]

As the No. 2 official at the C.I.A. in the 1980s, Mr. Gates helped channel Reagan-era covert aid and weapons through Pakistan’s spy agency to the American allies at the time: Islamic fundamentalists fighting the Russians in Afghanistan. Many of those fundamentalists regrouped as the Taliban, who gave sanctuary to Al Qaeda before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and now threaten Pakistan.

In meetings on Thursday, Pakistani leaders repeatedly asked Mr. Gates to give them their own armed drones to go after the militants, not just a dozen smaller, unarmed ones that Mr. Gates announced as gifts meant to placate Pakistan and induce its cooperation.

Pakistani journalists asked Mr. Gates if the United States had plans to take over Pakistan’s nuclear weapons (Mr. Gates said no) and whether the United States would expand the drone strikes farther south into Baluchistan, as is under discussion. Mr. Gates did not answer.

At the same time, the Pakistani Army’s chief spokesman told American reporters at the army headquarters in Rawalpindi on Thursday that the military had no immediate plans to launch an offensive against extremists in the tribal region of North Waziristan, as American officials have repeatedly urged.

And the spokesman, Maj. Gen Athar Abbas, rejected Mr. Gates’s assertion that Al Qaeda had links to militant groups on Pakistan’s border. Asked why the United States would have such a view, the spokesman, General Abbas, curtly replied, “Ask the United States.”

General Abbas’s comments, made only hours after Mr. Gates arrived in Islamabad, were an affront to an American ally that gave Pakistan $3 billion in military aid last year. But American officials, trying to put a positive face on the general’s remarks and laying out what they described as military reality, said that the Pakistani Army was stretched thin from offensives against militants in the Swat Valley and South Waziristan and probably did not have the troops.

“They don’t have the ability to go into North Waziristan at the moment,” an American military official in Pakistan told reporters. “Now, they may be able to generate the ability. They could certainly accept risk in certain places and relocate some of their forces, but obviously that then creates a potential hole elsewhere that could suffer from Taliban re-encroachment.”

Mr. Gates’s advisers cast him as a good cop on a mission to encourage the Pakistanis rather than berate them. And he was characteristically low-key during most his visit here, including during a session with Pakistani journalists on Friday morning at the home of the American ambassador to Pakistan, Anne W. Patterson.

But Mr. Gates perked up when he was brought some coffee, and he soon began to push back against General Abbas. American officials say that the real reason Pakistanis distinguish between the groups is that they are reluctant to go after those that they see as a future proxy against Indian interests in Afghanistan when the Americans leave. India is Pakistan’s archrival in the region.

“Dividing these individual extremist groups into individual pockets if you will is in my view a mistaken way to look at the challenge we all face,” Mr. Gates said, then ticked off the collection on the border.

“Al Qaeda, the Taliban in Afghanistan, Tariki Taliban in Pakistan, Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Haqqani network — this is a syndicate of terrorists that work together,” he said. “And when one succeeds they all benefit, and they share ideas, they share planning. They don’t operationally coordinate their activities, as best I can tell. But they are in very close contact. They take inspiration from one another, they take ideas from one another.”

Mr. Gates, who repeatedly told the Pakistanis that he regretted their country’s “trust deficit” with the United States and that Americans had made a grave mistake in abandoning Pakistan after the Russians left Afghanistan, promised the military officers that the United States would do better.

His final message delivered, he relaxed on the 14-hour trip home by watching “Seven Days in May,” the cold war-era film about an attempted military coup in the United States.

So with the Pentagon preparing a big escalation within Pakistan proper against the stated wishes of the supposedly allied Pakistani military, and with lots of chaos and fallout likely to follow, Gates, more the boss of the empire at the moment than Obama, is making that clear to Barry - and anyone else who cares to understand. Just in case there's any hesitation, let's say among civilian officials looking at the economic situation and the polls, about a course already mapped out.

I wonder if Bumiller got to watch the movie with him.

[General Disarray]

That's scary as hell.

[thatsmystory]

Just an aside, JFK was key in getting 7 Days in May made.

Interesting claim. Source please.

Getting permission near the White House was easier. Frankenheimer said that Pierre Salinger conveyed to him President Kennedy's wish that the film be made, "these were the days of General Walker" and, though the Pentagon did not want the film made, the President would conveniently arrange to visit Hyannis Port for a weekend when the film needed to shoot outside the White House.[8]

from the Wiki writeup

[Sweejak]

Just an aside, JFK was key in getting 7 Days in May made.

Interesting claim. Source please.

I can't remember exactly where I read about it, just a couple of days ago. I think it was a review of Jim Douglass's book. Maybe I was it as part of a film.

Here is a youtube

Arthur Schlesinger and John Frankenheimer (director) talk about he movie "Seven Days in May", a 1962 movie about a military coup to overthrow the President and how JFK was anxious to have the movie made in order to create public awareness of the military's resistance to his policies.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRiZtqVPJ9U

[Sweejak]

OT regarding the release of 7 Days, and Strangelove
http://rigorousintuition.ca/board/viewt ... 106#271815

[JackRiddler]

Wow.

Why do politicians never risk speaking openly about these things, even when they know their number is up?

[Sweejak]

I've wanted to ask every retired general the same question.

[Joe Hillshoist]

Wow.

Why do politicians never risk speaking openly about these things, even when they know their number is up?

Lots of people never really believe their number is up, even when its staring them in the face, not to mention ...

When I was a kid, dad and I went to see the first Rambo film "First Blood".

The Old Man's comment:

You can't half tell he doesn't have a family. The first thing "they'd" do is grab them and use them against him.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Obviously, Gates is sending a threat to Obama and the civilian “leadership” in America: You risk a military coup if you do not do exactly what those in the Pentagon tell you to do.

Yes, obviously.

Where is the right emoticon for this....ah yes:

[bks]

Obviously, Gates is sending a threat to Obama and the civilian “leadership” in America: You risk a military coup if you do not do exactly what those in the Pentagon tell you to do.

Perhaps, but c'mon: the United States is already a military state. When was the last time a president did less than what he was told to by the Pentagon?

The President does not have the freedom to significantly cut the military's budget, even though it is the most bloated, godforsaken behemoth in any budget anywhere of any kind in the entire world.

There is no bigger governmental priority than dismantling that budget, yet the first president to move a muscle in that direction would likely suffer an unfortunate breach in security before he got anywhere near the press conference announcing the plan.

Having said that, yeah, it could be some kind of message. There's always more juice to be squeezed from the orange.