CIA Director Leon Panetta

The Secret History -- The New Yorker

Can Leon Panetta move the C.I.A. forward without confronting its past?

The Central Intelligence Agency typically fights distant enemies, but on May 21st its leaders were preoccupied with a local opponent. A few miles from the agency’s headquarters, which are in Langley, Virginia, former Vice-President Dick Cheney delivered an extraordinary attack on the Obama Administration’s emerging national-security policies. Cheney, speaking at the American Enterprise Institute, accused the new Administration of making “the American people less safe” by banning brutal C.I.A. interrogations of terrorism suspects that had been sanctioned by the Bush Administration. Ruling out such interrogations “is unwise in the extreme,” Cheney charged. “It is recklessness cloaked in righteousness.”

Read more ....

Update: Cheney Responds to Panetta -- Weekly Standard Blog

My Comment: The New Yorker article is a long one, but it gives a lot of insight into the Director. Bottom line .... Leon Panetta is there because of his political loyalty to President Obama and the Democratic Party. Does this make him the ideal man to be there .... probably not. Will he succeed in changing U.S. counter terrorism policy .... he probably will.

But what scares him and (probably) the White House is that in the event that things go wrong, they will be held responsible ... a point that Vice President Cheney is making clear in his public announcements. They clearly do not like to be held directly responsible for policy changes .... and while this CYA altitude may be OK in the political world, this cannot be the case in the intelligence world.