Keep Your Friends Close
As Jennifer Rubin put it, even the Clintons wouldn’t have tried this. Unless they just did … Clintonista-turned-Obamist/seasoned pol/bureaucrat Leon Panetta to head the CIA. So, what if Hillary, already controlling State, with Congress afraid of her, just triangulated on the Bush Pentagon and the Obama White House? Sorry, I meant the Clinton-Rahm White House. That’d be a clever girl. Diabolical.
NYT’s Caucus notes no intel depth, suggests the appointment may be headed for trouble already and hints that politics … anti-Bush “torture” politics in particular, might be behind the pick:
President-elect Barack Obama has selected Leon E. Panetta, the former congressman and White House chief of staff, to take over the Central Intelligence Agency, an organization that Mr. Obama criticized during the campaign for using interrogation methods he decried as torture, Democratic officials said Monday.
Yet the choice encountered early opposition on Capitol Hill, with some senior Democrats questioning why the president-elect would pick a C.I.A. chief without a deep reservoir of intelligence or counterterrorism experience.
“My position has consistently been that I believe the agency is best-served by having an intelligence professional in charge at this time,” said Senator Dianne Feinstein who, as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, would be in charge of Mr. Panetta’s confirmation.
Senator Feinstein said that she had not been notified by Mr. Obama’s transition team about the selection.
Mr. Panetta has a reputation in Washington as a competent manager with strong background in budget issues, but has little hands-on intelligence experience. If confirmed by the Senate, he will take control of the agency most directly responsible for hunting senior Al Qaeda leaders around the globe, but one that has been buffeted since the Sept. 11 attacks by leadership changes and morale problems.
OK, whatever, I guess a competent manager should put the fear of Allah into al-Qaeda.
About Panetta’s Clintobamism, by the way, he seemed to be all over the place. Gave heavily to Hill, was mildly but publicly critical of her campaign, advised Obama and was tasked with bringing the disaffected Clintonistas on board.
Malkin: Bad joke … yeah, but on who? Ace thinks Obama wants a partisan hack who knows how to keep lids on. Hot Air thinks it’s the torture thing. Reynolds channels Codavilla, it’s about keeping the CIA from making war on Obama like it did on Bush. Sheesh … that would say a lot about Obama’s war aims.
By the way, that title up there. “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.” I don’t even know why I put that on this post, just sounded about right. It’s one of those things you need to do the math on very carefully. Sort of like that “enemy of my enemy” calculus. Raise your hand if you think Obama has figured out who his friends and who his enemies are.
Topics: Clintons, Intel, Obama
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:11 pm on Monday, January 5, 2009
3 Responses to “Keep Your Friends Close”
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January 5th, 2009 at 11:21 pm
Actually I think that he has it figured out as well as George did. It seems that the ones that George left in their positions were sleepers.
Keep your enemies closer only works if you watch them too.
January 6th, 2009 at 11:38 am
[...] Jules Crittenden » Keep Your Friends Close [...]
January 6th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
[...] wrote to the farce that is the Leon Panetta appointement as CIA director last night. Jules Crittenden has a decent roundup, so does James Joyner. Reynolds has comments as well. I suspect, aside from [...]