The Brilliance of the Panetta Appointment

Barack Obama's nomination of Leon Panetta to head the CIA is an excellent move and should help Obama manage many of the problems of the CIA. Panetta was a 7-term Congressman from California who served as the head of the Office of Management and Budget and Chief of Staff during Bill Clinton's first term between 1993 and 1997. Since the 2000 election, Panetta' has been circulating as part of this country's policy elite. Panetta frequently appears on television to discuss politics, heads up his own public policy institute, and was a member of the Iraq Study Group.

Unlike Rudy Giuliani, it appears that Panetta actually went to the meetings.

Like all of Obama's legal and intelligence appointments, Panetta is "committed to breaking with some of the past practices" of warrantless wiretapping, torture, and rendition of suspects to be tortured in other countries.

But that's not the end of the story.

The CIA is not the same as the Department of Justice or the Office of Legal Counsel. John Yoo may have proposed the guidelines that allowed illegal practices like torture. Attorney General John Ashcroft may have signed off on those illegal practices and the "Principles Committee" of Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice and others may have approved the specific implementation of those practices.

But it was CIA personnel who implemented the illegal practices authorized by the upper levels of the Bush administration legal apparatus. CIA people did the interrogating, supervised the waterboarding, set up the stress positions, calibrated the sensory deprivation, and engaged in all the other practices that constituted torture. CIA personnel also supervised the extraordinary rendition (i.e., kidnapping and torture) program and kept in touch with the interrogation apparatus in countries like Egypt and Romania.

In other words, CIA personnel carried out the crimes against humanity authorized by their superiors. Many if not most of those people believed that what they were doing was productive, important, and morally right.

And they're still going to be working for the CIA.

So will all the operatives who disapproved of Bush administration practices and/or leaked about them to the media.

As a result, the Obama CIA will probably be divided between those who were unhappy with the approach and those who are unhappy about moving away from the Bush approach. And it will probably be a big mess. There will be lots of complaints to the mainstream media, bloggers, and friendly members of Congress. Back-biting will flourish, pseudo-scandals about "intelligence failures" will emerge, and morale will be low.

That's why Panetta is such a good appointment. Panetta's a hard-headed guy who knows what he's doing bureaucratically and represents himself well on television. He's as good a bet as anyone to be able to manuever through all the land mines that are going to come out of the CIA over the next four years. What makes Panetta such a great pick is not so much that he wants to get away from Bush legacy. Rather Panetta is capable of dealing successfully with all the problems involved in getting away from the Bush legacy.

Good call Mr. President-elect.