Head Of Boy Scouts Says Group's Ban On Gay Adults 'Unsustainable'

MAY 21, 2015 3:29 PM ET

KRISHNADEV CALAMUR



Robert Gates, president of the Boy Scouts of America, warned that failure to make changes quickly could spell "the end of us as a national movement."Thierry Roge/Reuters /Landov

Robert Gates, the president of the Boy Scouts of America, says the organization must reassess its ban on gay adults, saying, "We must deal with the world as it is, not as we might wish it to be."

Gates, a former CIA director and former defense secretary, warned officials in the organization in Atlanta on Thursday that failure to make changes quickly could spell "the end of us as a national movement."

"I am not asking the national board for any action to change our current policy at this meeting," he said. "But I must speak as plainly and bluntly to you as I spoke to presidents when I was director of CIA and secretary of defense."

Gates said many local councils were already challenging the national organization's membership policy, and many more could be expected to follow.

"While technically we have the authority to revoke their charters, such an action would deny the lifelong benefits of scouting to hundreds of thousands of boys and young men today and vastly more in the future," he said. "I will not take that path."

Gates said several states had passed laws protecting employment rights based on sexual orientation.

"Thus, between internal challenges and potential legal conflicts, the BSA finds itself in an unsustainable position," he said. "A position that makes us vulnerable to the possibility the courts simply will order us at some point to change our membership policy. We must all understand that this probably will happen sooner rather than later."

Gates cited his experience with a California court's decision that sparked the end of the military's so-called don't ask, don't tell policy, which banned gays in the services, and said the Boy Scouts of America must act before it is compelled to do so by the courts.

"If we wait for the courts to act, we could end up with a broad ruling that could forbid any kind of membership standard, including our foundational belief in our duty to God and our focus on serving the specific needs of boys," he said. "Waiting for the courts is a gamble with huge stakes."

Gates noted that the U.S. is changing and "we are increasingly at odds with the legal landscape at both the state and federal levels."

"The one thing we cannot do is put our heads in the sand and pretend this challenge will go away or abate," he said. "Quite the opposite is happening."

Gates acknowledged that his remarks might prove controversial within the organization, but he said he only wanted to "apprise you of the new reality I see: that both internal and external events and pressures over the past year and looking to the future will require action at some point. For now, I ask that, in the days and months ahead, everyone here reflect and pray on our path forward. We can act on our own or we can be forced to act but, either way, I suspect we don't have a lot of time."

In response, the Human Rights Council, a group that supports LGBT rights, calledGates' remarks a "step in the right direction."

"But, as we have said many times previously, half measures are unacceptable, especially at one of America's most storied institutions," HRC President Chad Griffin said.

You can read Gates' full remarks here, or watch them here:



This isn't the first time Gates has raised the issue of the organization's ban on gay scoutmasters. He spoke about it last year soon after he became the BSA president when he said that while he would have supported hiring gay scoutmasters, he would "oppose any effort to reopen this issue" because such a move could divide the organization.

The BSA voted in 2013 to allow gay members, but not scoutmasters. As NPR's Kathy Lohr said at the time:

"This is a first step ... at this point, youths who are openly gay are going to be allowed into the Boy Scouts, but the ban was not dropped for adults who are openly gay. So, I think the movement is going to be to not have the adults who are openly gay be kicked out of scouting if they say they are gay. ... And that is because at age 18, people in the Boy Scouts would transition into adult positions and to associate-leader type positions, but right now they're not allowed to do that if they say they are gay. And many have been kicked out for that reason."

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Related

Gates then received an M.A. in history from Indiana University in 1966. He completed his Ph.D. in Russian and Soviet history at Georgetown University in 1974. The title of his Georgetown doctoral dissertation is "Soviet Sinology: An Untapped Source for Kremlin Views and Disputes Relating to Contemporary Events in China"[14] and is available from University Microfilms International as document number 7421652. He received an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from William & Mary (1998), the University of Oklahoma (2011)[15][16] and Georgetown University (2014).[17]

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Gates

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Gates: Obama Made Solid Decisions, But Was Swayed By Factious Staff

by Eyder Peralta and Mark Memmott
January 13, 201412:01 AM




Robert Gates in June 2011, his last month as secretary of defense. Alex Brandon/AP


This is Part I of Morning Edition's interview with Robert Gates. Part II and a link to the complete transcript are below.



Listen to the Story
Morning Edition
9 min 0 sec



Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates says his criticism of President Obama is more nuanced than , Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, would have you believe.

In a long and surprisingly frank interview with Morning Edition's Steve Inskeep, Gates talked about his relationship with the commander in chief and his rivalry with Vice President Joe Biden, and described a deep rift between the approaches of senior military leadership and Obama's young Cabinet.


Part II of the 'Morning Edition' conversation with Robert Gates





Gates, the only secretary of defense in U.S. history to keep his job with a newly elected president, said Obama was always kind to him personally and that Obama always made "decisions based on what he thought was in the best interest of U.S. national security."

However, he said, he always felt Obama thought the military was trying to force his hand on certain decisions. Gates explained that early in Obama's first term, generals and other high-ranking officials were making public statements essentially saying their strategy was the only one that would work, leaving the impression that Obama had no other choices. The suspicion that resulted, Gates said, was only fueled by the president's Cabinet.




An example of that, Gates said, was the surge in Afghanistan. , that's the part of Gates' book that has stirred the most controversy, because he implied that Obama lacked passion and approved the 2009 troop surge "believing the strategy would fail."

Gates said Obama didn't go into the surge believing it would fail; instead he was led to that belief by his Cabinet and especially by Biden.

That's when Steve asked Gates about perhaps the most explosive statement in his book: that Biden has been wrong about every foreign policy issue for 40 years.

Gates explained:


"First of all, I think it's fair to say that particularly on Afghanistan, the vice president was my — he and I were on opposite sides of the fence on this issue.

"And he was in there advising the president every day. He was, I think, stoking the president's suspicion of the military. But the other side of it is, frankly, I believe it. The vice president, when he was a senator — a very new senator — voted against the aid package for South Vietnam, and the — that was part of the deal when we pulled out of South Vietnam to try and help them survive. He said that when the, when the Shah fell in Iran in 2009 — 1979, rather — that that was a step forward for progress toward human rights in Iran. He opposed virtually every element of President Reagan's defense buildup. He voted against the B-1, the B-2, the MX and so on. He voted against the first Gulf War. So on a number of these major issues, I just — I, frankly, over a long period of time, felt that he had been on the wrong — he'd been — I think he had been wrong."

Perhaps one of the more insightful parts of the interview was when Gates talked about the young members of Obama's National Security Council.

He described a clash of cultures in which those young members eschewed the chain of command. Gates, and whose service dates back to 1966 when he joined the CIA, said he had a "different world outlook and a different experience."

Here's part of the exchange:


INSKEEP: You seem considerably less respectful of the president's staff than you were of the president himself.

GATES: Well, I had a lot of battles with those folks. And, frankly, my attitudes were shaped by the fact that I worked in the White House on the National Security Council staff and as deputy national security adviser for nearly nine years under four presidents. And I had certain ideas about how the national security staff and how the White House staff ought to comport themselves in discussions on national security and military issues. And let's just say that the way it worked under — in the Obama White House — was not anything like I had seen before.

I had worked for probably three of the most significant and toughest national security advisers in our history: Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft. And there were things that went on in the Obama White House that, under those three guys, I am confident would have been a firing offense, such as direct calls from NSC staff members to four-star generals and so on. That just wouldn't have been allowed.

INSKEEP: Oh, they should have gone through the chain of command, you think, or through the hierarchy?

GATES: Absolutely — absolutely.

INSKEEP: And they were effectively giving orders or going around their own nominal bosses on the staff? That's what you're saying?

GATES: Well, I think the key is what you said. They were going outside the chain of command. It's not appropriate for somebody on the National Security Council staff to be in direct contact with combatant commanders.

Gates did not lay all the blame on Obama and his Cabinet. He also talked about his failures.

"At the end of the book, I also point out that I think we all did a disservice to President Obama, because the debate on Afghanistan became so divisive that the opportunities to reach across those differences I think were missed," Gates said.


"I fault myself for not reaching out more to the vice president to see where we could find common ground, because at the end of the day, in a number of important respects, I don't think our positions were that far apart. But because of the environment, because of the suspicion, because of the — just the flavor of the debate and the difficulty between the Department of Defense and the National Security Council staff, I think that those edges were sharper than they needed to be, and that's partly my responsibility."

Much more of Steve's interview with Gates is on Monday's Morning Edition. to find a local NPR member station that carries the program. We'll also post the as-aired version of the interview on this post. .

Update at 9:55 a.m. ET, Jan. 13: Now that the audio of Morning Edition's as-broadcast conversation with Gates is available, we've added it — in two parts, as they did on the radio. To simplify our layout, we've removed the small clips from the conversation that we posted earlier. Those moments are included in the Morning Edition clips.

Meanwhile, we've added a related post: Gates Says He Wept Each Evening Over Troops' Deaths.

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Book review: ‘Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War’ by Robert M. Gates

View Photo Gallery — Robert Gates: A look at his career in government: He served as defense secretary under presidents Obama and George W. Bush, bridging the two administrations and earning a reputation as careful, conservative and consensus-oriented.




By Greg Jaffe, Published: January 7




Greg Jaffe covered the Pentagon for The Washington Post and is a co-author of “The Fourth Star: Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army.”

Maybe it was the time of year, just before the Christmas holidays. Maybe it was the setting — a bare-bones combat outpost in the violent mountains of eastern Afghanistan. Maybe it was the strain of more than four years of signing deployment orders that he knew would lead to the deaths of more young Americans. But in December 2010, speaking to troops clustered around him,Robert M. Gates was overcome by an uncharacteristic flood of emotion.

The soldiers in their dirt-splattered uniforms had been ordered to stop whatever they were doing and listen to the defense secretary, who, with his neatly parted white hair, khakis and starched button-down shirt, looked as if he had helicoptered in from another planet. “I feel a personal responsibility for each and every one of you,” Gates said. “I feel the sacrifice and hardship and losses more than you’ll ever imagine. I just want to thank you and tell you how much I love you.”




(Knopf) - “Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War” by Robert M. Gates.

More on Bob Gates

Gates issues harsh critique of Obama in new memoir ‘Duty’ 

 

Bob Woodward JAN 7

The former defense secretary describes a contentious relationship with the president and his top aides.



How Bob Gates’s memoir could haunt Hillary in 2016  

Chris Cillizza JAN 7

The former defense secretary says Clinton opposed the Iraq surge for political reasons.


Gates bashes Biden in memoir

Aaron Blake JAN 7

“I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades,” Gates wrote of Biden, according to the New York Times.

It is impossible to imagine former wartime defense secretaries Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney or Robert McNamara ever telling his troops that he loved them.

As a military reporter who covered Gates throughout his nearly five-year tenure and witnessed many of his increasingly emotional thank yous to troops in Afghanistan, I often wondered what was going on inside his head: He rarely showed anger or frustration. “I have a pretty good poker face,” he explains in his new memoir, “Duty.”

While his rivals at the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon loudly staked out their positions, Gates held back his opinion. The uncertainty about where he stood was a source of his power, allowing him to swoop in at the last moment and broker a bargain, usually on terms that were most acceptable to him. Unlike his predecessors, he had a reputation for quietly and ruthlessly holding subordinates accountable. He fired senior people, including Gen. David McKiernan, his top wartime commander in Afghanistan, whom Gates thought wasn’t up to the job — the first such dismissal since the Korean War.

In his new book, which has nearly 600 pages of text, Gates takes the reader inside the war-room deliberations of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama and delivers unsentimental assessments of each man’s temperament, intellect and management style. “It is difficult to imagine two more different men,” Gates writes.

Gates left Washington in 2011 with a reputation as a steady, sober-minded member of the foreign policy establishment, who had served eight presidents and was admired equally by Republicans and Democrats. The next time Gates visits the capital, his reception may not be quite so warm. “Duty” is his second memoir, and this time he cuts loose.

He slams Congress for its grandstanding and gridlock. “I would listen with growing outrage,” he writes, “as hypocritical and obtuse American senators made all these demands of Iraqi legislators and yet themselves could not even pass budgets.” He describes members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee as “rude, nasty and stupid.”

Joe Biden haters will enjoy Gates’s description of the vice president as loud, garrulous and obsessed with politics over substance. “I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades,” Gates writes. He accuses the vice president of poisoning Obama’s relationship with his generals: “I thought Biden was subjecting Obama to Chinese water torture, every day saying, ‘the military can’t be trusted.’ ”

Gates admires Obama’s decisiveness and smarts, but accuses him of sending troops to fight and die in support of a strategy in Afghanistan that, according to Gates, the president himself believed would fail. “I never doubted Obama’s support for the troops, only his support for their mission,” Gates writes.

He recounts his thoughts during a tense 2011 meeting with Obama and Gen. David H. Petraeus, then in charge of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, in the White House Situation Room: “As I sat there I thought: The president doesn’t trust his commander, can’t stand Karzai, doesn’t believe in his own strategy and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.”

The critique will infuriate the parents and spouses of troops who were killed trying to execute Obama’s Afghan war strategy. But Gates doesn’t prove his damning accusation and can be maddeningly self-contradictory in his criticism of Obama. He describes the president’s decision to send 33,000 more troops to Afghanistan as courageous and politically unpopular. “Obama overruled the policy and domestic political concerns of his vice president and virtually all the senior White House staff,” Gates writes. Why would the president pursue a politically unpopular strategy that he believed would fail? Gates never attempts to explain the contradiction.

Though he decries Obama’s White House staff as the “most centralized and controlling” since the Nixon administration, he offers little substantive criticism of the president’s big decisions on Afghanistan. Hawkish Republicans and some in the military slammed Obama for putting firm limits on the number of troops he was willing to send to Afghanistan and for setting a withdrawal date, saying the timelines and troop caps betrayed a lack of resolve and emboldened the enemy. Gates, however, dismisses this argument, writing, “I believe Obama was right in each of these decisions.”

Gates’s problem with the president is less about strategy or substance than about heart. “I myself, our commanders, and our troops had expected more commitment to the cause and more passion for it from him,” Gates writes. He compares Obama unfavorably with Bush, who “had no second thoughts about Iraq, including our decision to invade.”

No civilian in Washington was closer to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan than Gates. As Washington and the rest of the country were growing bored with the grinding conflicts, he seemed to feel their burden more acutely. He describes how his trips to Afghanistan and Iraq wore on him: “On each visit I was enveloped by a sense of misery and danger and loss.” His anger at Obama, Congress and even some in the Pentagon seems to spring from his belief that they didn’t match his sense of mission in Afghanistan. They didn’t feel the sting of the troops’ deaths with the intensity that he felt.

More than 3,800 soldiers and Marines died on Gates’s watch in Iraq and Afghanistan. The losses are small compared with the numbers in the Civil War, World War II or Vietnam. But for Gates and his generals, they were extraordinarily difficult to bear. Gates spent most of his evenings as defense secretary alone, writing condolence letters to the families of the deceased. He asked his staff for a picture of the soldier and some hometown news clippings so that he would be able to personalize his message. It was a major change from the early days of the war, when Rumsfeld relied on an autopen machine to sign the letters — a practice he abandoned after lawmakers publicly flayed him for it.

Like Gates’s profession of love for the troops in Konar, his descriptions of the guilt and pain he felt from these losses are touching, heartfelt and occasionally a little over the top, especially when he recounts his predawn jogs around the Mall in Washington: “I would ritually look up at that stunning white statue of Lincoln, say good morning, and sadly ask him, How did you do it?”

McNamara published his autobiography, “In Retrospect,” two decades after the Vietnam War as a kind of pre-death-bed confession. “We were wrong, terribly wrong,” he wrote of his and his colleagues’ mistakes. Rumsfeld’s autobiography, “Known and Unknown,” was fueled by his desire to settle scores with his Bush administration foes and shoot back at critics of his tenure as defense secretary.

Gates, widely considered the best defense secretary of the post-World War II era, seems to have been driven by a desire to sort through all of the anger, frustration, sadness and guilt that he held inside during his tenure. The book comes off a bit like an extended therapy session.

In public Gates was always polite and in control. His private and deep sense of obligation to the men and women he was sending to war made him an effective defense secretary. He fought to buy special mine-resistant vehicles for U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan over the objections of many of his generals, who didn’t want to spend the money. He forced the Air Force to scale back its plans to buy high-tech fighter jets and instead to boost spending on surveillance drones that were desperately needed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He insisted that the military add field hospitals and helicopters in Afghanistan to ensure that every wounded soldier or Marine would receive treatment within an hour of his injuries. Military doctors insisted that two hours was fast enough. Gates imagined a wounded soldier waiting for a helicopter in the dirt and dust, and told the military doctors and generals to make it an hour.

There are moments when Gates seems to realize that he let his pain, guilt and frustration overwhelm his judgment in the latter days of his tenure. “My fuse was really getting short,” he writes. “It seemed like I was blowing up — in my own, quiet way — nearly every day, and no longer just in the privacy of my own office with my staff.”

Like most soldiers, journalists and civilians who passed through Iraq and Afghanistan, Gates still seems to be struggling to make sense of his war years and the toll they took on him. He says he is “indescribably proud” of the U.S. military’s efforts to stem the chaos in Iraq and believes that the American war effort in Afghanistan is on a path to reasonable success. He also carries the heavy burden of knowing that troops were killed and maimed following his orders.

This confusing, frustrating and sometimes fascinating book is best summed up by a pair of conflicting statements Gates uttered during his tenure.In a meeting with Obama’s national security team a few days before the president’s inauguration, Gates described being defense secretary as “the most gratifying experience of my life.” Only days earlier, in an e-mail to a friend, he confided: “People have no idea how much I detest this job.”


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Globalist Richard Haas Calls for NATO Occupation of Libya

Monday, August 22, 2011

Globalist Richard Haas Calls for NATO Occupation of Libya
Or, "How the Devil Pays"

By Tony Cartalucci

The Financial Times has featured an editorial penned by Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haas titled, "Libya Now Needs Boots on the Ground," where the arch globalist states that Libya's rebels are in no way capable of rebuilding Libya properly and will require an "international force" to maintain order. Haas breathtakingly admits that the NATO intervention to "protect civilians" was in fact a political intervention designed to bring about regime change. With NATO leading the offensive against Tripoli, a relatively calm city until now, the alleged cause of "protecting civilians" rings hollower than ever.

Photo: One of the founding fathers of Al Qaeda, Robert Gates (left) and CFR president Richard Haas (right).

Haas goes on to explain that NATO's "success" is what requires this international assistance in the predictable form of an occupation force to deal with looting, "die-hard regime supporters," and tribal war. Haas also implores Obama to reconsider his decision to rule out American boots on the ground and to do so quickly.

Of course, NATO didn't just spend the last 5 months conducting 7,000+ airstrikes on Libya to "protect civilians" and then ride off into the sunset. This was a war of conquest from the very beginning, with globalists openly declaring it would determine the "primacy of international law" over the nation-state. In fact, the initial uprising itself was gestated in Washington and London where opposition leaders were provided resources and safe-havens to conduct their sedition, with globalist stooges like Ibrahim Sahad literally sitting in front of the White House calling for NATO to bomb his homeland. NATO, its members, particularly the US, UK, and France, and the globalist corporate-financiers behind them, fully intend to rebuild Libya according to their own aspirations shoehorned into a national consensus imposed upon the Libyan people under the guise of "democracy" and "civil society." We are watching a modern empire expand its boundaries into yet another sovereign nation.


Readers may remember an April 2011 article titled "Libyan Rebels Fighting the Globalists' War" with the ever increasingly appropriate subtitle, "How the Devil Pays." In it a caption attempts to sum up Libya's future by stating, "if these rebels really think the West is going to hand them Libya and its riches, they have another thing coming. The Neo-Con arm of the globalist agenda is already seeding the ground to deal with "extremists" coming to power after the "Arab Spring" runs its course. That means Libya's oil & future will be left in the hands of NATO troops, not the Libyan people."

The article continues:

"While the dichotomy of Western politics is merely for public consumption, what each camp states publicly can be put together as a composite giving us a clearer picture of the overall globalist agenda. Neo-Conservative war monger Daniel Pipes, a PNAC signatory, CFR member, and co-conspirator in many of the darkest chapters of recent American history, was recently sharing his "doubts" over the final result of the "Arab Spring." He believes that ultimately extremists will prevail in many cases and only complicate US relations with certain countries.

Of course, Pipes most likely didn't miss the memo and is fully aware that the "Arab Spring" is a US funded gambit, one his fellow "Neo-Cons" lining the National Endowment for Democracy and the fraudulent Freedom House are admittedly involved in. At the very least, he must have picked up the New York Times and read as much. So what exactly is Pipes trying to tell us? He is saying that as soon as the Libyan rebels secure Libya, or the Muslim Brotherhood takes hold of Syria, or Yemen, or wins out in a co-opted counterrevolution against International Crisis Group stooge Mohamed ElBaradei in Egypt, the blinders Western propagandists seem to be wearing will suddenly drop and point out that indeed the globalists have installed extremists "by accident."

To rectify this, Libyan rebels will be betrayed just as quickly as Qaddafi was. They will be removed from power, and replaced by Western stooges protected by NATO ground troops, conveniently already being put on the ground in Libya, and will stay there permanently. The globalist "Neo-Con" think tank Foreign Policy Initiative has stated, "The best way to reduce the potential dangers posed by extremist infiltration is for the United States and its allies to remain engaged in Libya."

This engagement most likely will take the shape of the other unending "engagements" in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the years of cross-border raids into Pakistan. The oil money that once built water ways, public housing, and farms from Benghazi to Tripoli, will be funneled directly out of the country and into the corporate-financier's accounts. The corporate-financier oligarchs will have taken yet another nation-state down with the help of its own gullible population, and for their gullibility, they will pay for the rest of their lives, as will their children and their children's children.

To understand the full scope of the global corporate-financier oligarchy's designs toward any given nation, we must simply look back at the brazen admissions made over the intended future stemming from the outright military conquest of Iraq and Paul Bremer's (CFR) planned economic reformation of the broken nation. The Economist enumerates the "economic liberalization" of Iraq in a piece titled "Let's all go to the yard sale: If it all works out, Iraq will be a capitalist's dream:"

1. 100% ownership of Iraqi assets.
2. Full repatriation of profits.
3. Equal legal standing with local firms.
4. Foreign banks allowed to operate or buy into local banks.
5. Income and corporate taxes capped at 15%.
6. Universal tariffs slashed to 5%.

Anyone who would willfully make a deal with such people must have their discernment called into question. As Hugo Chavez of Venezuela said of Hosni Mubarak's decades of appeasing the globalists and his eventual ousting from power at the hands of US funded, trained, and supported protesters, "that's how the devil pays." Indeed it is, and it is an instructive lesson for others including the rebels of Benghazi to consider as they attempt to make their own deals with the globalists today."

And indeed, as NATO rushes through to the finish line with a spectacular display of mass-murder and mayhem in Libya, and with the rebels dancing in the streets as NATO warplanes roar overhead, the time is soon approaching for Benghazi to pay back the West for their "help."

As pundits in the duplicitous corporate media feign ignorance over the future of Libya, as if it is truly in the hands of the Libyan people as Obama cartoonishly portrayed in his latest teleprompter reading, the self-proclaimed "Transitional National Council" leader Gibril Elqarfally gave us cyrstal clear picture of Libya's future - one inspired by globalization. In a May 12, 2011 talk before the Brookings Institution, he claimed “what’s taking place is a natural product of the globalizational process that started in the mid-80′s.”

Elwarfally talks about a “new global cultural paradigm,” “new global values,” common values, shared by many “young people.” These young people, he says, are calling for human dignity, democracy, and inclusion at all levels of national government, repeating verbatim statements coming from geopolitical meddler Zbigniew Brzezinski and the myriad of US-funded NGOs that promote these “new global values.”
Photo: Libyan rebel leader Gibril Elqarfally stands before the Fortune 500-funded Brookings Institution openly declaring fealty to the globalist agenda of interdependency and subservience to a Wall Street-London international order.

....


When asked by an audience member what Libya will look like in 2025, it turns out conveniently he was part of a study by Libyan professors and “Libyan practitioners” in 2007-2008 titled “Libya: Vision 2025.” Not surprisingly, this project was conducted with input from the IMF and involved Libya’s placement within the “global scene.” Elwarfally laments that Libya’s oil reserves are limited and that the solution is a transition to a service economy. He also claims Vision 2025′s conclusion included an education shift, turning Libya into “a lake” to develop the skills of Africans to serve the needs of the European Union.

Surely Africans are eager to once again be in the service of wealthy Europeans, who at one point owned tremendous swaths of their continent, some tycoons naming entire nations after themselves in the ultimate expression of imperial megalomania. Elwarfally, a man educated in Pittsburgh, and apparently a lifelong fan of globalization, stuns us with his frank comments and his disturbing vision for the future of not only Libya, but the role it will play in directing Africa’s efforts and resources toward American and European corporate-financier interests.

While Qaddafi's comments are dismissed out of hand, a recent message sent to his followers amidst fighting in Tripoli declared, "the traitors are paving the way for the occupation forces to be deployed in Tripoli." It seems no truer words have ever been spoken and the Libyan people, including the rebels, will have no one but themselves to blame if they allow such a way to be paved.

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Jesuit trained bureaucrats switch posts

Leon Panetta, new United States Secretary of Defense

Leon Panetta was born in Monterey, California, the son of Carmelina Maria (née Prochilo) and Carmelo Frank Panetta, Italian immigrants from Siderno in Calabria^[6] who owned a restaurant in Monterey. He was raised in the Monterey area, and attended Catholic schools San Carlos Grammar School and Carmel Mission School. He continued his education at Monterey High School, a public school where he became involved in student politics, and was a JSA member.^[7] As a junior he was Vice President of the Student Body, and became President of the Student Body as a senior.^[8]

In 1956, he entered Santa Clara University, and in 1960 he graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science. He also received a Juris Doctor in 1963 from the Santa Clara University School of Law, and soon after began practicing law. In 1964, he joined the United States Army as a Second Lieutenant, where he served as an officer in Army Military Intelligence.^[9] There he received the Army Commendation Medal, and was discharged in 1966 as a First Lieutenant.^[10]

General David Patraeus is the new CIA Director (replacing Leon Panetta):

Petraeus has a Bachelor of Science degree from the United States Military Academy from which he graduated in 1974 as a distinguished cadet (top 5% of his class). He was the General George C. Marshall Award winner as the top graduate of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College class of 1983.^[6] He subsequently earned an M.P.A. in 1985 and a Ph.D. in International Relations in 1987 from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. He later served as Assistant Professor of International Relations at the United States Military Academy and also completed a fellowship at Georgetown University.

Robert Gates retired from Secretary of Dept. of Defense post on July 1, 2011.

A native of Wichita, Kansas, Gates attained the rank of Eagle Scout in the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) and received the Distinguished Eagle Scout Award from the BSA as an adult.^[12][13] He graduated from Wichita High School East in 1961, with straight A's.^[14] Gates is also a Vigil Honor member within the Order of the Arrow, Scouting's National Honor Society.

Gates then received a scholarship to attend the College of William and Mary, graduating in 1965 with a B.A. in history. At William & Mary, Gates was an active member and president of the Alpha Phi Omega (national service fraternity) chapter and the Young Republicans; he was also the business manager for the William and Mary Review, a literary and art magazine.^[15] At his William & Mary graduation ceremony, Gates received the Algernon Sydney Sullivan Award naming him the graduate who "has made the greatest contribution to his fellow man." ^[15]

Gates then pursued an M.A. in history from Indiana University in 1966. Finally, he completed his doctorate in Russian and Soviet history, while working for the CIA, from Georgetown University in 1974. The title of his Georgetown doctoral dissertation is "Soviet Sinology: An Untapped Source for Kremlin Views and Disputes Relating to Contemporary Events in China" and is available from University Microfilms International as document number 7421652. He received an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from both William & Mary (1998) and the University of Oklahoma (2011)

Biographical data from WIKIPEDIA.
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