Word: director
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...some CIA veterans, the haste was unseemly, and may have precipitated the controversy. "It was a moment for [Panetta] to take a deep breath," says a retired official who hears regularly from colleagues still in the agency. The director should have anticipated the reaction of the Democrats and come up with a smart way to communicate that this was "not a big deal," says the former official. Instead, by rushing to Congress, "he set off their alarm bells, and gave them the impression that it was a big deal." After all, says the official, the CIA has "God knows...
...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...
When Leon Panetta earlier this year was nominated as director of the CIA, the strongest argument in his favor was his long experience in dealing with Capitol Hill. With Democrats in Congress already sharpening their knives over the CIA's Bush-era policies and practices, the Agency would need protection - and Panetta, a veteran pol with contacts on both sides of the aisle but no real intel background, seemed the best possible shield...
Distancing the agency from a project with Cheney's fingerprints was politically astute. "As a good politician, Panetta probably knew that [Cheney's involvement] was precisely the reason we should get nervous about it," says Paul Pillar, a former deputy director of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center...
...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 one-liners...