Obama’s new man calls time on US torture

Leon Panetta is someone everyone who is anyone in Washington knows well. He's a huge player in California Democratic politics, a congressman for many years and a former Clinton chief of staff. A centrist, his expertise is in managing bureaucracies and budgets, not intelligence. But he served on the 9/11 commission and knows his way around the federal labyrinth. He is also the kind of genial fellow who appeals beyond party. Among the surprising supporters of his nomination were several leading neoconservatives – among them, Douglas Feith and Richard Perle – who had long been suspicious of CIA lifers.

Michael Ledeen, who makes Cheney look like Jane Fonda, put it this way: “I always liked Panetta. He served in the army and is openly proud of it. He seems to be a good lawyer (oxymoronic though it may seem). He's a good manager. And he's going to watch Obama's back at a place that's full of stilettos and has a track record for attempted presidential assassination second to none.”

The latter political point is particularly relevant. Getting solid intelligence to the president's desk outside other pressures and departments is the key task for a CIA director. With the heavyweights Hillary Clinton at the State Department and Bob Gates at the Pentagon, a CIA officer promoted from within to run the agency would never have stood a chance. Panetta is a real pol with great connections. Sometimes that matters more than being marinated in CIA culture for decades. And Obama could always give him a deputy who is more of a company man – and that figure has indeed been proposed in the figure of Stephen Kappes, the current CIA deputy director, whom Obama is tipped to keep on.

But Panetta's core qualification at this particular moment was his public statements on the Bush-Cheney torture programme. This is what Panetta wrote in the Washington Monthly last year: “How did we transform from champions of human dignity and individual rights into a nation of armchair torturers? One word: fear. Fear is blinding, hateful and vengeful. It makes the end justify the means. And why not? If torture can stop the next terrorist attack, the next suicide bomber, then what's wrong with a little waterboarding or electric shock? The simple answer is the rule of law. Our constitution defines the rules that guide our nation. . .

~ more... ~