Apparently I overestimated Leon Panetta and underestimated Denis Blair. The Washington Post reports that Panetta has all but lost his turf war with Blair, while ABC reports that Panetta threatened to quit over administration plans to go after CIA operatives for interrogations that went beyond what had been legally authorized by the Bush administration OLC -- Holder will appoint a special prosecutor to go after the Agency according to the Post. The Washington Post also reports that the interrogation of high-value detainees will no longer be conducted by the CIA. And that's not all. Eli Lake reports today that General Petraeus is setting up his own intelligence service at CENTCOM with a focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan. (It's almost like someone wants to change the subject from health care.)
The CIA is retreating on all fronts and Panetta seems powerless to stop the rout.
Conservatives will no doubt have mixed emotions over this latest turn of events. The CIA spent years undermining the Bush administration -- I heard one Republican say that he'd counseled Bush to clean out the Agency on day one of his first term, and that his failure to do so had been nothing short of a disaster. On the other hand, conservatives don't want to see patriotic Americans hung out to dry for pushing the envelope in interrogations of al Qaeda terrorists. To take just one example, this latest revelation that a CIA interrogator had brandished and fired a gun in an effort to scare a detainee into talking is not without precedent. Allen West was booted from the Army for engaging in similar conduct during the course of an interrogation in Iraq and subsequently ran for Congress in Florida and almost defeated incumbent Democrat Ron Klein. The point being, not all Americans are outraged by government officials who play fast and loose with the rules in order to save lives -- at least nothing that's been reported yet from Gitmo, unlike Abu Ghraib, has shocked the conscience of most Americans. West probably would have won that election if it hadn't been such a bad year for the Republican party.
The problem for Panetta is that he can't protect his own people from Democrats in Congress and at the White House, so it seems unlikely he will be getting a lot of support from his own people as all this plays out. They may even work to further undermine Panetta in the hopes of getting a more effective chief. But in the short-term, the intelligence community's center of gravity is clearly shifting away from the CIA and toward the DNI, which happens to be even worse than the CIA insofar as it is staffed and run by a bunch of incompetent political pantywaists.
One more thought: Barack Obama allowed Congressional Democrats to wage war on the CIA and has now allowed his administration to pile on. He allowed Congressional Democrats to put together the stimulus, cap and trade, and now health care, all with little leadership from his administration. Will the president ever stand up to Democrats in Congress as part of this new transformative, post-partisan politics he promised to usher in?
