Word: panetta
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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...
...current uproar concerns Panetta's controversial decision to immediately alert the congressional intelligence oversight committees about the secret terrorist-assassination program the CIA reportedly began developing (but never put into action) after Sept. 11, 2001. Informed of the program on June 23, Panetta told the committees the very next...
...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...
Nevertheless, many CIA watchers take the opposite view. Panetta's handling of the secret program was "the one bright lining in this whole business," says Amy Zegart, a national security expert and professor of public policy at UCLA. By immediately shutting down the program, he "signaled that he has turned a new page at the CIA," she adds...
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...