Word: panetta
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...June 24, CIA Director Leon Panetta made a confession. For the past eight years, the agency has been running a top-secret unit to assassinate or grab members of al-Qaeda. The program was deliberately kept from Congress - supposedly on former Vice President Dick Cheney's orders - and Panetta stopped it as soon as he heard about...
...retired operations official says he feels at least a little sympathy for Panetta - and worries about the legacy he will leave his successor. "No matter how this thing works its way out," he says, "who in the world would want to be the next director...
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...
Some argue that Panetta's tendency to look through a political lens is a weakness. "He's a 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...
...daunting challenge for Panetta now, say the retired officials, is to get the Democrats to quit poking around the agency's past and focus on its future. "There's been too much discussion about what the CIA did in 2002-03, and not enough about what needs to be done in 2010-11," says a former official...