Word: panetta
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Obama apparently spent weeks debating the merits of releasing the documents and was lobbied by CIA Director Leon Panetta to keep them classified. In the end, the case for transparency was too great. The harsh tactics--isolation, sleep deprivation, humiliation, waterboarding--not only had been widely reported, but much of it was also acknowledged to have originated in "Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions from Air Force Prisoners of War," a 1957 article written for the Air Force about abusive Chinese interrogations of U.S. troops during the Korean War. Anyone who wanted to could find it via Google for years...
...heart was almost a self-fulfilling prophecy: after all, it was Obama himself who last week ordered the release of four Bush Administration legal memos justifying interrogations that included waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other harsh methods. The documents - with their excruciating details largely intact, despite CIA Director Leon Panetta's call that more be blacked out - outraged partisans on both sides...
...prison work has also been a serious drain on CIA resources. In Thursday's announcement, CIA Director Leon Panetta said that in closing the prisons, the agency would save $4 million per year on contractors. What he didn't mention was that hundreds of CIA staffers were involved in overseeing the prisons. The tail to tooth ratio in the CIA is no different from any other government agency. (Read Wikipedia for Spies: The CIA Discovers...
...Closing the prisons will put an end to a major distraction. But it shouldn't stop there. If Panetta can get away with it at the White House, he needs now to slash the CIA stations in Iraq and Afghanistan - by at least half. The stories I hear from Baghdad and Kabul all run in the same direction: people falling over each other chasing a few sources, all frustrated that they are not allowed to get out more because of the very real risk of kidnapping or assassination...
...agency is also looking to reduce its dependence on outside contractors, which increased dramatically after 9/11. "I think we have to bring those capabilities in-house," Panetta said...