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Panetta Says Defeat of Al Qaeda ‘Within Reach’ By ELISABETH BUMILLER KABUL, Afghanistan — Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, who arrived in Kabul on Saturday, said that the United States was “within reach of strategically defeating Al Qaeda” and that the American focus had narrowed to capturing or killing 10 to 20 crucial leaders of the terrorist group in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. Mr. Panetta, who took over as defense secretary from Robert M. Gates on July 1, made his comments aboard his plane before arriving on an unannounced trip to Kabul, the Afghan capital. They were Mr. Panetta’s first...

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"The potential for the next Pearl Harbor could very well be a cyber-attack," he testified on Capitol Hill Thursday Director of National Intelligence James Clapper also appeared, telling the committee, "This threat is increasing in scope and scale, and its impact is difficult to overstate." ........ Panetta told the committee, "This is a real national security threat that we have to pay attention to. I know there are a lot of aspects to it. "The Internet, the cyber-arena ... is a vastly growing area of information that can be used and abused in a number of ways." U.S. officials and...

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...

Leon Panetta, a guy who has not formally held an intelligence job, is Obama's pick for the head of the CIA and he already demonstrated the most important qualification for that office – that he is an awfully nice man. A little on the background importance of niceness: First, Obama has made plain that the War on Terror has been canceled outside of Afghanistan, and droves of terrorists are now leaving every country in the world except Afghanistan because they always obey the rules, just like Obama does. These developments are deeply essential to the coming victory of niceness, and...

If anyone needed more proof that Democrats are children who truly don’t understand how the world works, the selection of lifelong party hack Leon Panetta as the new Director of the Central Intelligence Agency should blow away all doubt. Barack Obama indicated he picked Panetta because he is thought of as a good manager who understands government bureaucracy. The unspoken “attributes” Panetta brings are his naïve objections to the methods of modern spying and counter intelligence operations. His pronouncement that America “must not use torture under any circumstances” elevates his selection from stupid to dangerous. To a Democrat lawyer who...

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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...