Word: congression
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...more than 1,300 pages to Capitol Hill, only to see it shredded once it got there, Obama has kept his distance from the fine print. He set forth a few ambitious goals: expanding coverage, reining in health-care spending, improving medical quality. And then he left it to Congress to develop a plan that could win the votes necessary to pass...
...spokesman George Little defends his boss, pointing out that "the program he killed was never fully operational and never took a single terrorist off the battlefield. Those are the facts he shared with Congress. This agency and this Director value a candid dialogue with Congress...
...intelligence expert who has done contract work for the CIA says many in Langley feel Panetta, who had only weeks before testified that the agency did not lie to Congress, was acting "to protect his own skin," rather than in the agency's best interests. "He was looking to make sure nobody could accuse him of knowing about this program and being complicit in keeping it from Congress," says the official. (For his part, Panetta might well argue that it was the agency that misled and embarrassed him in the first place...
Another official familiar with the matter says Panetta "understood the political context in which this whole thing unfolded, and recognized that there would be heat on this - even if the program never amounted to much. When something's not adequately briefed to Congress, unlike a fine wine, it doesn't get better with...
...decent guy, but I think he doesn't fully understand the intelligence business, and that hurts," says a former high-ranking operations official. An intel veteran, he argues, would have recognized the program for what it was - little more than an idea - and not rushed to inform Congress. But others, like Zegart, say Panetta's political chops may have saved the agency from even greater criticism. In any case, she says, "we don't know the counterfactual: How much worse would it have been [for the CIA] if Panetta was not the director?" (See the top 10 unfortunate political...