Obama's choice of Panetta to lead CIA suggests shake-up is comingBy JONATHAN S. LANDAY AND MARGARET TALEV
McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON -- President-elect Barack Obama will name former congressman and Clinton White House chief of staff Leon Panetta to head the CIA, tapping a veteran government manager who once oversaw the top-secret U.S. intelligence budget but has no hands-on espionage experience, Democratic officials said on Monday.
If he's confirmed by the Senate, Panetta would take over an agency that's leading the fight against terrorism as it struggles to overcome the damage dealt to its credibility and integrity by its Sept. 11 and Iraq intelligence failures and by its use of interrogation methods on suspected terrorists at secret prisons that many experts consider torture.
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Panetta's selection suggests that Obama intends to shake up the agency, which has had little public accounting of its role in detaining top terror suspects and transferring others to regimes known to use torture, a procedure known as extraordinary rendition. The CIA, which denies subjecting detainees to torture, is part of a 16-agency intelligence community whose annual budget now exceeds $47.5 billion. The agency keeps its own budget and number of employees secret. Its successes, too, are mostly kept secret while some of its failures reach front pages.
Panetta has suggested that Obama could do much to signal a break with Bush administration policies by signing executive orders during his first 100 days that ban the use of torture in interrogations and close the Guantánamo Bay prison."Issuing executive orders on issues such as prohibiting torture or closing Guantánamo Bay would make clear that his administration will do things differently," Panetta wrote Nov. 9 in a regular column he published in his local newspaper, the Monterey (Calif.) County Herald.
Panetta, a Democrat, represented Monterey in the House of Representatives from 1977 to 1993.
He served in the early 1960s as an intelligence officer at Fort Ord, a former Army base in Monterey, where he and his wife established a public policy institute affiliated with California State University.
Panetta has no experience in espionage or contemporary intelligence analysis, however. That would make him an outsider at an agency whose veteran officers often resent those who come from outside their highly secretive world.
"He will be an outsider and I think the president wants an outsider's perspective on the CIA," said Lee Hamilton, a former Indiana congressman and a former chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence who heads the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington.
"The intelligence community has lost a lot of confidence with the American people and the Congress. I'm talking about 9/11, the Iraq war."http://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics/AP/story/838984.html
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