Pat Dollard | Young Americans

By January 20 I may have a commentary summing up the last 8 years …

However, it’s easier to distance Clinton and his staff from the war than from an attack on our own soil only months after leaving office … so one simple gets ignored.

WaPo:

Panetta’s Peers Back Him for CIA

They Cite Years of Relevant Experience

By Michael Abramowitz

As a top official at the White House in 1996, Richard A. Clarke was looking for an ally after concluding that the CIA and FBI needed an additional $1 billion for counterterrorism programs. Officials at the Office of Management of Budget were dismissive of the request, so Clarke sought an audience with Chief of Staff Leon E. Panetta.

Clarke said he made his case to Panetta, who queried him closely about the need for the funds and whether the agencies were prepared to spend them. As Clarke recalled yesterday, Panetta then gave the go-ahead for the initiative, disappointing a large retinue of hostile budget officials who had gathered in the chief’s spacious West Wing office expecting the onetime budget director to skewer Clarke.

“He was in the small handful of people who knew there was a terrorism problem long before anybody else had heard of al-Qaeda,” Clarke said of Panetta.

As questions continued to swirl on Capitol Hill about President-elect Barack Obama’s selection of Panetta to be his CIA director, several of his former White House colleagues rebutted criticism that he lacked the necessary experience and qualifications for the post. They said Panetta worked closely with President Bill Clinton and his most senior lieutenants on every national security issue that came through the White House between 1994 and 1997 while becoming a sophisticated consumer of intelligence during the daily briefings the CIA provided for Clinton and senior advisers.

“I would seek out his opinion all the time because it was very useful and it was not political,” Tony Lake, the national security adviser during Clinton’s first term, said in an interview. “He was a very good ally when I needed to go the president.”

Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger, Lake’s deputy before becoming national security adviser himself, said that Panetta “was part of the decision-making process for every single issue we were dealing with, whether this was in the Oval Office with the president or the Cabinet Room — the Middle East, Kosovo, China. He was a part of a small group of people who advised the president how to proceed on strategy and substance.”

But others remained skeptical of the pick, saying such experience is not what is needed in taking over a spy agency that has been haunted by allegations of ineffectiveness over the years. “He is a very savvy about when intelligence guys walk in the doors and they are putting out a proposition for the president,” said Gary Schmitt, an analyst at the American Enterprise Institute who once served as the staff director for the Senate intelligence committee. “But that’s a different kind of perspective from understanding whether the chief of station in Pakistan has a handle on what the Pakistani intelligence is really doing.”

Panetta is probably best known for his work on domestic issues, including a stint as director of the Office of Civil Rights during the Nixon administration, experience as an eight-term congressman from California and his tenure in the Clinton administration. He initially served as the budget director but was named chief of staff in 1994, in part to bring some order to the Clinton White House, though his tenure was marked by clashes with Clinton’s secretive political adviser Dick Morris.

Since leaving the White House, Panetta has occasionally opined on foreign policy issues from his perch as founder and co-director of the Leon and Sylvia Panetta Institute for Public Policy in Monterey, Calif. In op-ed pieces, he said the use of torture in CIA interrogations could never be justified and attacked the Bush administration for excessively broad claims of presidential war powers.

In policy circles, he is well known for his work as a member of the Iraq Study Group, the panel of former officials that developed a compromise plan in late 2006 for a gradual reduction of the U.S. presence in Iraq. A recent book by Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward on President Bush and the Iraq war describes Panetta as very engaged in querying senior officials about the conduct of the war and skeptical of assertions of progress. Yet while Panetta became an early advocate of a timeline for U.S. withdrawal, he ultimately fashioned a compromise with Republican members who did not want to tie Bush’s hands, according to panel members.

“He recognized that for the report to have credibility, we had to have a consensus product,” said Lee H. Hamilton, who was a co-chairman of the panel. “He reached out and participated in the effort to create consensus.”

Former secretary of state Lawrence S. Eagleburger, a former GOP member of the panel, said that from his brief exposure to Panetta on the project he did not see him as somebody who would be out to gut the CIA or rein it in. “He was not a bomb thrower. He wasn’t excessively political. He was a part of the team,” Eagleburger said. “Like everybody else, he was prepared to find some kind of middle ground.”

But let’s ask someone who is above the politics, and has an inside view of what is needed here:

NYPost:

AN AWFUL PICK

O OPTS TO POLITICIZE INTELLIGENCE

by Ralph Peters

WOULD you ask your accountant to perform brain surgery on your child? That’s the closest analogy I can find to the choice of Democratic Party hack Leon Panetta to head the CIA.

Earth to President-elect Obama: Intelligence is serious. And infernally complicated. When we politicize it - as we have for 16 years - we get 9/11. Or, yes, Iraq.

The extreme left, to which Panetta’s nomination panders, howled that Bush and Cheney corrupted the intelligence system. Well, I worked in the intel world in the mid 1990s and saw how the Clinton team undermined the system’s integrity.

Al Qaeda a serious threat? The Clinton White House didn’t want to hear it. Clinton was the pioneer in corrupting intelligence. Bush was just a follow-on homesteader.

Now we’ve fallen so low that left-wing cadres can applaud the nomination of a CIA chief whose sole qualification is that he’s a party loyalist, untainted by experience.

The director’s job at the CIA isn’t a party favor. This is potentially a matter of life and death for thousands of Americans. But the choice of Panetta tells us all that Barack Obama doesn’t take intelligence seriously.

Mark my words: It’ll bite him in the butt.

After the military, the intel community is the most complex arm of government. You can’t do on-the-job training at the top. While a CIA boss needn’t be a career intelligence professional, he or she does need a deep familiarity with the purposes, capabilities, limitations and intricacies of intelligence.

Oh, and you’d better understand the intelligence bureaucracy.

Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.), who was blindsided - and appalled - by the Obama mafia’s choice, has the essential knowledge of how the system works. She, or a similar expert, should have gotten this nod. But the president-elect wanted a clean-slate yes-man, not a person of knowledge and integrity.

We’re witnessing the initial costs of Obama’s career-long lack of interest in foreign policy, the military and intelligence. He doesn’t think the top job at the CIA’s important and just wants political cover on that flank. (Guess we got Panetta because Caroline Kennedy has another engagement.)

Forget a “team of rivals.” Obama’s creating a campaign staff for 2012.

Of course, he’s reeling from the shrill rage of the Moveon.org crowd over his nomination of grown-ups to be his national-security adviser, director of national intelligence, administrator of veterans’ affairs and, yes, secretary of state. (By the way, how could Hillary be dumb enough to accept a job where success is impossible?)

Panetta’s appointment is a sop to the hard left, a signal that intelligence will be emasculated for the next four - or eight - years.

Think morale’s been bad at the CIA? Just wait.

Conservatives played into this scenario by insisting that any CIA analysis that didn’t match the Bush administration’s positions perfectly amounted to an attack on the White House. Well, sorry. The intelligence community’s job isn’t to make anybody feel good - its core mission is to provide nonpartisan analysis to our leaders.

To be a qualified D-CIA, a man or woman needs a sophisticated grasp of three things: The intel system, foreign-policy challenges and the Pentagon (which owns most of our intelligence personnel and hardware). Panetta has no background - none - in any of these areas. He was never interested.

If you handed Leon Panetta a blank map of Asia, I’d bet my life he couldn’t plot Baghdad, Kabul or Beijing within 500 miles of their actual locations. (Maybe he can see China from his California think tank?)

This shameless hack appointment is the first action by the incoming administration that seriously worries me. Get intelligence wrong and you get dead Americans.

Ralph Peters was a career intelligence officer in the US Army