Steve Kappes instead of Leon Panetta at head of CIA. I wonder if we can discover why. I suspect it isn't because their feathers were ruffled.
http://www.talkleft.com/story/2008/12/26/1937/3526Stephen Kappes & The Rendition of Abu Omar
It has been reported (here and here) that Stephen Kappes, current Deputy Director of the CIA, is a leading candidate for Director of the CIA under President-Elect Barack Obama. The NY Daily News goes so far as to say that "Some Democrats on Capitol Hill have strongly advocated" the nomination of Kappes.
Critics of the bloggers who were against John Brennan's nomination to a top intelligence position frequently whined that he was getting a bad rap (see Greenwald's article "The CIA and its reporter friends: Anatomy of a backlash"). One critic goes so far as to say "Brennan's hands were not very dirty at all. He was apparently thrown under the bus because some ill-informed bloggers thought they were
and the transition folks didn't have the will to explain that they were wrong." (as quoted by Greenwald from Jeff Stein's CQ article).
Let's see how they choose to defend Stephen Kappes. There can be no vague denials that Kappes had dirty hands - at his feet rests the responsibility for the bungled and unnecessary rendition of Muslim cleric Osama Mustafa Hasan Nasr aka Abu Omar.
Kappes and Valerie Plame Wilson:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/03/news/plame.php
NEW YORK: Valerie Wilson may be the best known former intelligence operative in recent history, but a U.S. judge in New York has ruled that she is not allowed to say how long she worked for the Central Intelligence Agency in the memoir she plans to publish this fall.
Although the fact that Wilson worked for the CIA from 1985 to 2006 has been published in the Congressional Record and elsewhere, the judge, Barbara Jones of U.S. District Court in Manhattan, said Wilson was not free to say so.
"The information at issue was properly classified, was never declassified and has not been officially acknowledged by the CIA," Jones wrote.
(snip)
But she said a classified court filing from Stephen Kappes, the deputy director of the CIA, which lawyers for Wilson and her publisher were not allowed to see, contained a reasonable explanation for the agency's position. Jones did not reveal it, saying only that Kappes had convinced her of "the harm to national security which reasonably could be expected if the CIA were to acknowledge the veracity of the information at issue."
(snip)
"Trying to argue a case in which the government was able to submit a supersecret affidavit which we were not able to review was like playing an opponent who has 53 cards in his deck," he said.
(end snip)
Here are a couple of possibilities. I will post more if I find them, or post your own.
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