Why Obama Picked Panetta To Run the CIA

[Hestia]

Why Obama Picked Panetta To Run the CIA
He's clean, he knows where the line items are buried, and the director isn't the chief spook anymore.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2009, at 6:54 PM ET

The puzzler of the hour: Why is Barack Obama picking Leon Panetta, a former congressman and White House official with no intelligence experience, to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency?

snippage

This has been Obama's persistent dilemma on the matter of picking a CIA chief (and the reason it has taken him so long to do so): finding someone who is a) up on the issues and the workings of the intelligence bureaucracy but b) not tainted by the Bush administration's record of renditions, torture, or extralegal surveillance.

Panetta's pick suggests that no such person exists—and that, if forced to make priorities, Obama values b) over a). Panetta has written articles denouncing the use of torture under any circumstances. In that respect, he is clean.

It is worth emphasizing, however, that Panetta is not as green to the spook world as some of his appointment's critics have maintained. In the 1990s, as President Bill Clinton's budget director and White House chief of staff, he was not just passively exposed to intelligence issues.

Richard Clarke, who was the White House counterterrorism director under Clinton (and, briefly, under Bush before resigning and then emerging as a celebrated critic), wrote in an e-mail today:

Leon was in all of the important national security meetings for years, both as director and as chief of staff. He made substantive contributions well outside of his job description. And as OMB director, he was one of a very few people who knew about all of the covert and special-access programs.

more at link:

Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate. His book, Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power, is now out in paperback. He can be reached at [e-mail].

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2208020/

[yardwork]

1. I think that this is a very good choice.

[glowing]

2. Do you think its possible to take the entire agency out?

How much spy/ enforcment do we need? I was really hoping Homeland Security would go bye-bye.

[Captain Hilts]

3. CIA is "the most liberal thinktank" in town. THAT's why Bush blamed...

the "intelligence failure" on them, even though he got his intell from the Office of Special Plans he set up in the Pentagon to avoid professional analysts.