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CIA Director Leon Panetta and National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair squared off in May over Blair's effort to designate his own representative at U.S. embassies to be his personal eyes and ears abroad, instead of relying on CIA station chiefs. Two intelligence officials said Thursday that the CIA won a monthslong turf battle with the Office of National Intelligence, assuring the primacy of CIA station chiefs over other U.S. intelligence operations and personnel around the world. The territorial dispute was resolved only after it got all the way to the office of national security adviser Gen. James Jones. The CIA...

With the appointment of a prosecutor to investigate detainee abuses, long-simmering conflicts between the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department burst into plain view this week, threatening relations between two critical players on President Obama’s national security team. The tension between the agencies complicates how the administration handles delicate national security issues, particularly the tracking and capturing of suspected terrorists overseas. It also may distract Mr. Obama, who is trying to move beyond the battles of the Bush years to focus on an ambitious domestic agenda, most notably health care legislation. The strains became evident inside the administration in...

As Obama’s Presidency sinks, and his healthcare plan continues to fall apart, mention of dropping the ‘public option’ has enraged his far-left base. As a diversion, and as a sop to them, Obama has backed away from previous promises and has thrown the CIA to the wolves. He has named a special prosecutor to investigate, harass and possibly prosecute CIA interrogators who saved us from a dreaded second attack – thus ensuring that no-one will want to serve our country in this role again – to the detriment of all of us and to the deaths of some of us.

Well, it looks like President Obama has finally decided to take a side in the "Who's it gonna be boy, us or them?" contest of wills between Leon Panetta's Central Intelligence Agency and the rest of the executive (and parts of the Democratic-dominated legislative) branch. Yesterday's decision by Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a special prosecutor to look into alleged abuses of captured Al Qaeda leaders by CIA interrogators seems to completely contradict President Obama's earlier reassurances of no action to be taken against those CIA employees. At the time, it was clear that polls showed the public had...

Panetta orders internal probe of secret spy program after some members of Congress say CIA misled them. ### CIA Director Leon Panetta has ordered an internal inquiry into the agency's handling of a contentious and still highly classified intelligence program that has caused a heated dispute between the CIA and Democrats on the House intelligence committee. The move by Panetta appears to be an implicit acknowledgment by the agency that it should have disclosed information about the post-9/11 secret program to Congress much earlier than it did. *snip* CIA and congressional officials have refused to describe the nature of the...

Panetta Says CIA Officials Have Misled Congress Since 2001 By SIOBHAN GORMAN WASHINGTON -- Central Intelligence Agency Director Leon E. Panetta has told lawmakers that CIA officials misled Congress "for a number of years" since 2001, according to a letter released Wednesday from six Democratic lawmakers. The lawmakers say the CIA also withheld information about unspecified "significant actions." The letter didn't identify when Mr. Panetta made the statements or to what they referred. "This is similar to other deceptions of which we are aware from other recent periods, " the letter continued. CIA spokesman George Little said "it is not...

Weeks after President Obama took office, the CIA extended its contract with a firm run by two psychologists who helped introduce waterboarding and other harsh methods to the agency's interrogation techniques, according to a news report. Two months later, CIA Director Leon Panetta fired Mitchell, Jessen & Associates and all other contractors that aided the CIA in its interrogations of alleged terrorists, the New Yorker reported this weekend. The firings took place in April, around the same time the Senate Armed Services Committee reported on the role played by James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen in developing "countermeasures to defeat" the...

WASHINGTON (CNN) – John McCain said Friday that his former rival Barack Obama has put together an "excellent" national security team, and defended the selection of Leon Panetta to head the Central Intelligence Agency. "I'm not here trying to argue that this president is perfect and that there aren’t still disagreements, but I do think his national security team is an excellent one," McCain told Fox News. He described his post-election conversations with Obama as "cordial" and said he has spoken with the president-elect about the situations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Asked about Obama's decision to name Panetta to...

WASHINGTON - A turf war between the two senior intelligence chiefs over the role of CIA station chiefs in U.S. embassies has forced National Security Adviser James L. Jones to step in to mediate, according to current and former U.S. government officials. The jockeying between CIA director Leon Panetta and National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair centers on Blair's effort to choose his own representatives abroad instead of relying only on CIA station chiefs, the current and former officials said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the dispute.

It's obvious that either Leon Panetta, Obama's head of the CIA, or Nancy Pelosi, his party's Speaker of the House, has to go. No administration can tolerate a permanent, public civil war between two such high-ranking officials. Especially when their disagreement stems not from issues of policy but from matters of veracity and credibility, the battle must end in one of their resignations. You cannot have the head of the nation's first line of defense against terrorism calling the Speaker of the House a liar and being attacked by her in turn.

Charles Krauthammer opined on Special Report on Fox News about Nancy Pelosi.

America's spy chief has been sent on a secret mission to Israel to warn its leaders not to launch a surprise attack on Iran without notifying the US Administration. As Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, prepares to visit Washington, it emerged yesterday that Leon Panetta, the head of the CIA, went to Israel two weeks ago. He sought assurances from Mr Netanyahu and Ehud Barak, the Defence Minister, that their hawkish new Government would not attack Iran without alerting Washington. Concerns have been rising that Mr Netanyahu could launch a strike on Tehran's atomic programme, in the same way...

Argentina on Thursday blasted the head of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency for saying the country, along with Ecuador and Venezuela, could be pushed into instability by the global economic crisis. Lumping Argentina together with Ecuador and Venezuela, both led by leftist anti-Washington firebrands, raises concern in this country, where center-left President Cristina Kirchner is trying to keep the economy from stagnating.

Bush bashing.Gee, how original.The new CIA Chief has decided that Congress needs a big hug, maybe more – and he’s ready to start dispensing the love. According to the agency’s new chief, Leon Panetta, all of those years under President Bush saw a nasty rift fester between the CIA and Capitol Hill – a relationship Panetta says was “badly damaged” with W in the lead – and the time has come to make it all good again. In other words, those lousy Bush-era policies that kept this nation safe from attack for over seven years need to be tossed...

Following Leon Panetta’s confirmation hearing Thursday, several reporters approached the CIA director-designate in the hallway outside room G-50 in the Dirksen Building. There, CongressDaily reporter Chris Strohm — upon asking a question — was physically restrained by a man who accompanied Panetta at hearings both days. Strohm, when reached by phone Friday, said he was unsure of the man’s role. “I felt this hand grab my right arm and push me aside,” Strohm said. By his account, Strohm told the man, “Please don’t touch me” more than once. Eventually, the man let him go. Tim Starks, a reporter for Congressional...

WASHINGTON -- The White House's nominee for Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Leon Panetta, has earned more than $700,000 in speaking and consulting fees since the beginning of 2008, with some of the payments coming from troubled financial firms and from a firm that invests in contractors for federal national security agencies, according to financial disclosures released Wednesday. Mr. Panetta received $56,000 from Merrill Lynch & Co. for two speeches and $28,000 for a speech for Wachovia Corp., according to disclosures released ahead of Thursday's scheduled Senate hearing on Mr. Panetta's nomination.

February 04, 2009, 4:00 a.m. Leaker for Langley?Leon Panetta’s upcoming hearing is a chance to solve a 39-year-old mystery. By Tevi Troy Before he was a Democratic congressman, before he was director of the Office of Management and Budget, before he was White House chief of staff, and certainly before he was President Obama’s nominee for CIA director, Leon Panetta was director of the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare—the precursor to today’s Department of Health and Human Services. He was also a Republican. Around the time he left HEW in 1970, Panetta...

From PoliticalWarfare.org... Compañera Panetta, with Hugo Chavez and Daniel Ortega January 10, 2009 This photo shows Chavez with his arm around Linda Panetta, while former Sandinista junta leader Daniel Ortega smiles on, at left. You saw it here first. If the adult daughter of a CIA Director-designate hangs out with sworn enemies of the United States, it's a matter for the United States Senate to probe aggressively. And so the Senate really has to ask some very pointed questions about Linda Panetta, daughter of President-Elect Obama's pick to lead the CIA, and her ties to Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega and...

If the adult daughter of a CIA Director-designate hangs out with sworn enemies of the United States, it's a matter for the United States Senate to probe aggressively. And so the Senate really has to ask some very pointed questions about Linda Panetta, daughter of President-Elect Obama's pick to lead the CIA, and her ties to Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega and Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. Linda Panetta is a noted anti-military activist who has accused the US military of teaching Latin American officers how to torture. She has also been close to causes hostile toward the United States and friendly...

Leon Panetta, White House chief of staff under X-42, from 1994-1997 (better known as the Lewinsky scandal era), didn't know a thing about the ex-president's Oval Office liaison's with The Big Cigar Lover. Which, of course, makes ALL the sense in the world for Barack Obama to appoint him head of the CIA. A great spy always looks the other way, they say (or did I just make that up?). What's even way cooler, Panetta's qualifications (he's tough with an Excel spreadsheet and knows how to fire the most important company man and heap even more work on the overworked,...

Sunday's New York Times ran two columns that advocated for investigations into America's use of coercive interrogation techniques - known to editorial writers as "torture" - of enemy combatants, as well as one that opposed a show trial. Also Sunday, television's "24" uber-agent Jack Bauer stood before a U.S. Senate subcommittee investigating intelligence abuses and gave a bombastic Senate inquisitor what-for: "Please do not sit there with that smug look on your face and expect me to regret the decisions that I have made, because, sir, the truth is, I don't." Asked if he had tortured a suspect, the Kiefer...

Sen. Boxer approves Panetta at CIA: a reckless pick in a dangerous time (Chuck DeVore is an Assemblyman from California running for the US Senate against Barbara Boxer in 2010)On Monday, January 5, President-elect Obama selected former Cong. Leon Panetta to be the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Panetta’s chief qualification is his utter lack of intelligence experience – meaning that he has not been involved with any of the intelligence activities in the past 7 years that have kept America safe. This makes him an acceptable candidate to the anti-war left. Obama’s first choice to head the 20,000...

"In April 1985 [Leon] Panetta joined with 13 of his leftist congressional colleagues — including Ron Dellums, Don Edwards, George Miller, Christopher Dodd, and Les Aspin — in sponsoring a 20th anniversary fund-raising gala for the pro-Marxist Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), which had been described by Brian Crozier, director of the London Institute for the Study of Conflict, as the "perfect intellectual front for Soviet activities which would be resisted if they were to originate openly from the KGB." The IPS was originally funded with millions of dollars from the Faberge perfume magnate and Communist Party member Samuel Rubin...

excerpt... In April 1985 Panetta joined with 13 of his leftist congressional colleagues — including Ron Dellums, Don Edwards, George Miller, Christopher Dodd, and Les Aspin — in sponsoring a 20th anniversary fund-raising gala for the pro-Marxist Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), which had been described by Brian Crozier, director of the London Institute for the Study of Conflict, as the "perfect intellectual front for Soviet activities which would be resisted if they were to originate openly from the KGB." The IPS was originally funded with millions of dollars from the Faberge perfume magnate and Communist Party member Samuel Rubin...

This great and wonderful nation has survived many disasters and near-defeats. It will survive the appointment of the corrupt and inexperienced Hillary Clinton to head the State Department. It will survive the appointment of the One-Worlder, Susan Rice, to be our Ambassador to the United Nations. We may not survive, and our grandchildren and their children WILL not survive the appointments of Leon Panetta to head the CIA and Eric Holder to be the nation’s Attorney General.

Leon Panetta, President-elect Barack Obama's pick to head the CIA, could be "a fabulous choice" to lead the agency or a nominee who is inexperienced with intelligence matters and will have a chilling effect on the agency, according to top former CIA officials.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein said Tuesday that President-elect Barack Obama apologized to her for not notifying her ahead of time that Leon Panetta was his pick for CIA director. His name leaked to the press before Obama informed Feinstein, a California Democrat and incoming Senate Intelligence Committee chairman, who will oversee Panetta's nomination hearing. "I have been contacted by both President-elect Obama and Vice President-elect Biden, and they have explained to me the reasons why they believe Leon Panetta is the best candidate for CIA Director," she said. Feinstein complained Monday she had not been told about Panetta and expressed doubts...

Barack Obama's choice of former Congressman Leon Panetta to lead the CIA at least puts a grownup, if also an intelligence rookie, in that crucial job. It also means that Mr. Panetta and Director of National Intelligence-designate Dennis Blair will soon have to decide if they want to join the left-wing crusade to purge their agencies of anyone who had anything to do with "torture." In particular, at their nomination hearings they're likely to be asked to support a "truth commission" on the Bush Administration's terrorist interrogation policies. We hope they have the good sense to resist. And if they...

Panetta's a patriot, an experienced Washington hand, and close to the president-elect. As with many of the other early appointments on the incoming national security team, conservatives should be asking themselves if they ought not to be thanking their stars that the new team appears very realistic about the world they are being called on to lead and the enemies they will be facing.

President-elect Barack Obama has selected Leon E. Panetta, the former congressman and White House chief of staff, to take over the Central Intelligence Agency, an organization that Mr. Obama criticized during the campaign for using interrogation methods he decried as torture, Democratic officials said Monday. Mr. Panetta has a reputation in Washington as a competent manager with strong background in budget issues, but has little hands-on intelligence experience. If confirmed by the Senate, he will take control of the agency most directly responsible for hunting senior Al Qaeda leaders around the globe, but one that has been buffeted since the...

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Barack Obama nominates someone to head the CIA whose major qualification is his inexperience. Even Democrats are dismayed. John Travolta's son, sadly, died. So in its crucial first half-hour this morning, the Early Show naturally devotes almost five minutes to the Travolta story while ignoring the controversy surrounding Leon Panetta's appointment. Far from revealing that even senior Dems like Senators Feinstein and Rockefeller have signalled their displeasure over the naming of Panetta, CBS' Chip Reid painted the pick as a sign of how Obama is briskly taking charge. Here was the sum total of the Early Show's discussion of the...

A month ago I wrote an article titled, "Obama Searches In Vain For CIA Director Who Won't Offend Left." Well, Obama has at last found a CIA Director, but only at the expense of abandoning any intelligence experience whatsoever as a prerequisite for the job. I return to the same Star Tribune article I cited on December 4: Finding a candidate for CIA chief who has the operational experience and is politically “clean” will be difficult, agreed a current senior intelligence official. John Radsan, a former assistant general counsel at the CIA, said Obama has to strike a difficult balance....

Hillary Clinton has been in politics long enough to know the value of the word "change." In 1992, her husband's political guru, James Carville, hung a white sign in the Clinton campaign war room that read CHANGE VS. MORE OF THE SAME. Bill Clinton won the presidency that year with 370 electoral votes. Over the course of the summer, she watched her rivals for the Democratic nomination try again and again to define themselves as change and Clinton as the status quo. ("We're more interested in looking forward, not backward," Barack Obama told reporters. "And the American people feel the...

A new biography of Hillary Rodham Clinton alleges she masterminded efforts to cover up Bill Clinton's draft record during the 1992 campaign - and coolly executed a "20-year project" to place both spouses into the Oval Office regardless of their marital woes. "Her Way," a decidedly unauthorized biography written by longtime New York Times reporters Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr., also reveals that Clinton chose not to read a critical National Intelligence Estimate on Saddam Hussein's weapons programs days before casting her controversial 2002 vote authorizing the Iraq war. The book portrays Clinton as a politically savvy manipulator...

A senior Democratic adviser said yesterday he is disappointed and dismayed by the efforts of House and Senate Democrats to change administration policies in Iraq, predicting they would lead to further division and stalemate in Congress on the war. "If you stand back, the whole debate has been pretty frustrating. The bigger problem is that [Democratic leaders'] proposals are not going anywhere, such as some revised authority for the war," said Leon Panetta, a key Democratic member of the Iraq Study Group whose proposals to stabilize Iraq were largely dismissed by President Bush. "But those efforts are doomed. Either they...

Sunday Shows for 3/23/06This main post is the Sunday Shows.  Message 1 will be the Saturday Shows and message 2 will be the show guest links post.  Then I'll post the ping list.Fox News Sunday (Chris Wallace) Meme: Hoekstra & Harman both don't like Negroponte, hurrah, hurrah!Panetta and Duberstein both don't like Bush's men, hurrah, hurrah!And Gilbert Arenas plays online poker at halftime....???? (that's the best I can figure as to why he's on) Topics: Reps. Peter Hoekstra and Jane Harman on Iran's nuclear ambitionFormer Chiefs of Staff Leon Panetta and Ken Duberstein on White House shake-upWashington Wizards' star Gilbert...

A former chief of staff to impeached ex-president Bill Clinton said Sunday that President Bush owes the nation an apology because the White House had misled the nation during the Leakgate investigation. Asked on Sunday by "Meet the Press" host-turned-Leakgate prosecution witness Tim Russert what President Bush should do to get out from under the scandal, Leon Panetta urged: "I think he's really got to approach the American people, and I would do it first thing Monday morning . . . have Scott McClellan go forward and say, 'We apologize to the American people for having misled the people about...

Indoctrination UBy Philip LavertyFrontPageMagazine.com | September 16, 2005 California State University Monterey Bay (CSUMB) opened in 1995 on the former Fort Ord Army Base through President Clinton’s “Peace Dividend,” that Democratic plan to exploit President Reagan’s triumph over the Soviet Empire to devastate our military and intelligence services. Now, a former, thriving military community has become a Marxist boot camp and bastion for radical, militant, racial identity-politics as well as a refuge for academic hacks. The conflict I experienced while teaching at CSUMB and the resulting actions taken against me are the topics of the latter half of this article....

Students urged to stand up against corporate violations By VICTORIA MANLEY Herald Staff Writer Facing more than 200 students in CSU-Monterey Bay's University Center, Leon Panetta on Thursday voiced urgency and outrage over the deep-pocketed influence on policymakers. "I don't sense the outrage of what we're seeing in corporate America, or even in the media," s aid Panetta, co-director of CSUMB's Panetta Institute for Public Policy and a panelist in a discussion on professional ethics presented by CSUMB's School of Business. "Money is speaking a great deal these days in terms of policy," he said. "If people remain quiet,... then...

Leftist filmmaker Michael Moore was awarded seven and a half minutes of air time in the 7:30 half hour of Thursday's Today show to offer his political analysis of why the Democrats failed to oust Bush. Katie Couric felt that wasn't enough, so she invited him back an hour later for another eight minutes and forty seconds of air time, or 16 minutes, 10 seconds overall. While Couric tried to suggest that maybe Hollywood liberalism hurt the Democrats (and even noted the "vitriol...you seem to embody"), she also inaccurately promoted Moore's latest book as "new" and "currently on many bestseller...

Two weeks after Republicans tightened their grip on terrified Democrats, Sen. Olympia J. Snowe, Maine Republican, traveled to Pebble Beach, Calif., to accept an award for bipartisanship. Retiring Sen. John B. Breaux, Louisiana Democrat, similarly received the annual Jefferson-Lincoln Award award from the Leon and Sylvia Panetta Institute for Public Policy, presented to politicians who are able to put politics aside for the interest of the country. "The fact is, we've all witnessed this mounting chorus of partisanship that has engulfed our nation's politics," Mrs. Snowe said Saturday night. "Indeed, our current system appears infused by a coarse partisanship, a...

California's Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, is trying to keep his state's military installations out of the Pentagon's sights during next year's round of base closures. Schwarzenegger this week appointed an 18-member council to advise state and local communities as well as coordinate with the California congressional delegation on base closing and retention issues. And in case the recommended strategies don't work, the council will also recommend ways of mitigating the adverse effects of closing or downsizing bases. The council is to be chaired by Leon E. Panetta, former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton and a former House member...

Political pundits, take note. The USCCB is meeting in just a few days and the participants will have several new items on their agenda. Two items of note include the approval of a first-ever national catechism for adults and the decision to join a new national ecumenical association called Christian Churches Together. When these two items are considered together with another item that does not seem to be on the agenda, we will catch a glimpse of the serious problems the USCCB has. How these items are handled will directly affect American politics.

Leon Panetta was in Washington [9-12] and had planned to fly back to Monterey that evening. But with the nation’s airports shut down, he was stuck. I’m seriously considering a rental car, said Panetta.

The staffer said, Well, we can’t take the risk that he’s known to be seeing an expert on lying. Ekman rather liked Clinton, and wanted Clinton’s ‘trademark expression,’ to have been no more than a meaningless facial tic.

<p>The Terminator, who stormed into Sacramento vowing to throw out the rascals who broke California, has met his match. She looks like his wife.</p> <p>The deal that put a $15 billion bond issue on the ballot as the solution to the state's money mess may be the cure for what ails California. Or it may just be more of the hair of the ravenous dog that threatens to eat the nation's largest state. Whatever. Maria Shriver's getting the credit is all the buzz.</p>

Leon E. Panetta appearing on C-SPAN's Washington Journal this Monday morning ( 10-28-03 8:20 AM EST ) said that he was in the White House and that President Clinton received the same intelligence information about the danger of Iraq's WMD's as President Bush did. He believes that President Clinton did what he thought was best and that President Bush did what he thought was best. Panetta was responding to a caller about the Iraq situation. He stated that either there was a massive intelligence failure or the intelligence community was lied to or both. Panetta is a former Democratic congressman,...

This guy has been on TV all day. Looking for a run in 2006?

The people have called an election, and the political elites of both major parties hate it. So does big business and, for the most part, the media. But it's amazing the level of ownership real people feel over the recall. It is something they have done in defiance of California's ruling establishment...