Word: questionable
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...Catholic world abuzz. Even more than protests over the University of Notre Dame's decision to invite President Barack Obama to speak, disputes over the Kennedy funeral have brought into the open an argument that has been roiling within American Catholicism. The debate nominally centers on the question of how to deal with politicians who support abortion rights. Burke and others who believe a Catholic's position on abortion trumps all other teachings have faced off against those who take a more holistic view of the faith. But at the core, the divide is over who decides what it means...
...retrospect, it should have been obvious that the funeral plans for Kennedy would reignite a lingering dispute within the church. The question of whether the Senator should even be described as a Catholic because of his support for abortion rights and his checkered life history was hotly debated on Catholic blogs and religion websites like Beliefnet.com. Right-wing Catholics lobbied the Boston archdiocese to refuse the Kennedy family a church funeral. Robert Royal of the Faith & Reason Institute called O'Malley's decision to go ahead with the Mass a "grave scandal" on a par with the sexual-abuse crisis...
...military intelligence, et al. - and one of them is designated the top dog, responsible for liaising with the intelligence agencies of the host country, among other things. For decades, that job has fallen automatically to the CIA station chief. But after the DNI was created in 2004, a question arose: As head of 16 intelligence agencies, should the DNI have the right to name someone other than the CIA station chief as the top intel officer in each mission? (See who's who on the CIA payroll...
Since the legislation creating the DNI was hastily put together, the question - like many others - is not clearly answered. Successive CIA directors have pointed out that because the main task of the top intel person in any mission is to interact with the host country's spy agencies, the CIA station chief is the natural choice. The DNI view, however, is that in some missions, the CIA role is relatively small, and it might make sense for the representative of another agency to take the lead role...
When Blair and Panetta were appointed by President Obama, the question was still unanswered, and the matter was taken to the NSC for adjudication. In May, when Blair issued a directive claiming the right, "in rare circumstances," to nominate a non-CIA person as the top intel official in foreign missions, Panetta immediately took issue with it, and the dispute quickly escalated. (See the top 10 CIA movies...