posted July 13, 2009 08:01 PM         

Sometimes I think leftists must be insane. Their actions would get them into straight jackets upon even a casual examination by a proficient psychiatrist.

When the dust clears on all this the following facts will be established.

1. Nancy Pelosi is a liar and she was briefed along with others who were there and remember she was there when those members of Congress were told that water boarding WAS already being used on a few high value terrorists.

2. This latest effort to shield Nancy Pelosi by conveniently finding something else to moan, wheeze, whine, screech and shriek about is going to come to nothing at all...because it is nothing at all.

3. Congress was informed right after 9-11 that the CIA was "working" on a program to identify, track and either capture or kill al-Qaeda members...in other words go after them and take them out of circulation, one way or the other.

4. This particular CIA plan was never "implemented" and since it wasn't "implemented" there was no need to continue to "brief congress". The plan was "worked" on and off but wasn't pursued and was never "implemented". Any demoscat here recognize the operative word..."IMPLEMENTED"?

Imagine that, demoscats whining and sucking their widdle thumbs over a plan to kill or capture terrorists whose goal in life is to kill Americans and had already killed about 3,000 American civilians on 9-11. And demoscats are now whining and shrieking about a plan to take them out..that was never "IMPLEMENTED". God, these Congressional members and their butt sucking sychopants in the press are contemptible.

posted July 13, 2009 08:53 PM         

there were two articles there i notice you only saw the one from a source you discredit. despite the fact that this should be NEWS it's being kept pretty quiet. i first heard about it on the radio. and i don't listen to the whiners on NPR.

the story is about panetta testifying that repeated instances of the CIA not being completely straight with congress DID occur, starting in 2001. he has not backtracked on what he said about pelosi, but he doesn't have to because he was talking about the CIA HE is in charge of. so he has neither admitted nor refuted what pelosi said, nor as far as i know has he said on what issues these "deceptions" were exercised...

and no one on the right side of the table wants to talk about this except to say that panetta too must be a liar if he suggests there might actually be some hocus pocus going on. congratulations. you remind me of a horse with multiple blinkers on.

posted July 13, 2009 10:44 PM         

There's no "there", "there".

Something didn't happen, didn't work out and though the CIA informed Congress they were working on something, it was never put into effect.

Probably parts of it were in different programs but THAT program was never implemented and therefore Congress didn't need to know any more about it.

This is an operation to cover the butt of Nancy Pelosi who lied through her teeth about not being directly briefed by the CIA on waterboarding.

Hell, even Pelosi's aide was briefed about waterboarding. So, we're supposed to believe Pelosi's aide didn't tell her? That's nuts.

When the heat got too high for Pelosi over calling the CIA liars, she split the country to let the heat dissipate.

That's not going to happen.

For the Speaker of the House to call the CIA liars is not going away. This latest pile of bullshiiit is what's going to go away...and it will go away just as soon as these dipstick demoscats attempt to accuse Dick Cheney, who will flog them raw and bleeding.

These idiots would get a lot more traction if they spent their time reading the bills they're passing and dropped their obsession with Bush and Cheney.

If this continues there are going to be a lot fewer demoscats in the next congress.

posted July 14, 2009 09:10 AM         

Now, Panetta FINDS this non functioning CIA program..which Congress was initially briefed on when it was being considered and the logistics worked out to sic the hounds of hell on al-Qaeda.

Funny isn't it, that demoscats never found an enemy of the United States they didn't want to give a big hug.

Imagine demoscats being outraged that the CIA, Bush and Cheney intended to track down and kill or capture the terrorists who killed 3000 Americans. How outrageous they say.

Nancy Pelosi is a liar. This is nothing more than an attempt to dilute the outrage against her..some by members of her own party.

Bush, Cheney and the CIA were right. The terrorist friends in the Congress, demoscats, were wrong and still are wrong. Ditto for O'Bomber who wants terrorists read their Constitutional rights. What an idiot.

Congress was informed...when it appeared the CIA was going to put a program into place to track down terrorists and kill or capture them. The fact the CIA didn't implement that program and therefore didn't further brief congress...on a program they weren't using...IS NOT DECEPTIVE.

Further, with all the demoscat blabbermouths in the Congress, I wouldn't tell them if their hair was on fire...unless I wanted the details of top secret programs and operations to appear on the front pages of the Treason Times.

There's a hell of a lot of things and programs the CIA, DIA, NSA et al are not using..and also not briefing Congress on the fact they are not using them.

posted July 14, 2009 01:04 PM         

Perhaps not where you go for information but I would say your sources are both limited and suspect.

The current flap is about a non-implemented CIA plan to capture and/or kill al-Qaeda members.

It's a non issue designed to cover Nancy Pelosi's rear end for calling the CIA liars.

It's about politics and it's a disgrace. However, that's what we've come to expect from leftist members of the congress.

You will notice, Panetta didn't back up Pelosi's accusations of lying. Panetta said "deceptive"..a very different word. In this case they're trying to build a case on what they weren't told. What wasn't told is that the CIA never implemented the plan they disclosed to the congress right after 9-11.

There's lots of plans which don't work out. Is the congress to be briefed on every plan the CIA DOESN'T intend to implement?

posted July 14, 2009 04:36 PM         

unless the vietnam vets who were used in those experiments were all liars of course. we always treat our ex military with the utmost respect when they return home, don't we? of course, the fact that i saw no less than 4 last sunday holding signs that said i am a veteran, i am hungry type stuff begging for a living shows just how much we honor them.

posted July 15, 2009 10:10 AM         

1. demoscats are attempting to cover Pelosi's rear end after she called the CIA liars.

2. The program demoscats are hyperventilating over was revealed to Congress years ago.

3. The program demoscats are hyperventilating over was never implemented and never went past the planning and logistics stages.

4. Panetta did not back Pelosi up directly. His take is that the CIA mislead congress by not briefing them on a program the CIA WAS NOT USING..which is utter bullshiiit and only intended to give Pelosi cover for her remarks she wasn't briefed on CIA using water boarding on a few high level al-Qaeda prisoners.

5. Congressional demoscats are exactly what I said they are. A disgusting, contemptible bunch of leftist boobs and incompetents.

Ummm, note the date of this article...it's today's date, Wednesday, July 15, 2009. This article tracks perfectly with what I said about this issue days ago.

Lastly, this was supposed to be a briefing on a classified matter. As I said before, I wouldn't tell the leftist blabbermouths in the Congress if their hair was on fire. They took straight to the print media and airwaves to reveal a classified program to the world and it makes no difference that the CIA wasn't using the program to kill or capture terrorists.

July 15, 2009
Protecting Pelosi, not America
By Joel B. Pollak

Democrat Jan Schakowsky of Illinois proved last week why President Barack Obama was right to threaten to veto a bill that could give more politicians access to classified briefings about covert CIA operations.

Schakowsky took to the airwaves to accuse the CIA of misleading Congress on the orders of former Vice President Dick Cheney. According to Schakowsky and a handful of other Democrats, CIA director Leon Panetta told them at a classified briefing last month that the agency had practiced "systematic deception" for years. She demanded an investigation and suggested that charges could be brought against CIA officials.

But the CIA denied Panetta had made any such admission-and even Schakowsky had to allow that Panetta's briefing concerned "one occasion." That occasion was a program, conceived in 2001 but never implemented, to track and target Al-Qaeda terrorists around the world.

Not only did Congress know about the program, according to Panetta's predecessor Michael Hayden, but Congressional leaders apparently supported it. Indeed, President Obama made the hunt for Al-Qaeda a repeated theme of his 2008 election campaign, scolding Bush for not for diverting resources from the "real" war on terror. "We will kill bin Laden," he vowed in the second presidential debate in October. "We will crush Al-Qaeda."

So why the outrage from Schakowsky and her colleagues?

It appears that the controversy has less to do with protecting America than protecting Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

Pelosi was embarrassed several weeks ago by revelations that she not only knew about the CIA's use of waterboarding in terror interrogations, but failed to object when briefed about it. At first, Pelosi accused the CIA of lying, but information about the briefings she attended proved that she, and not the CIA, had misled the nation.

Schakowsky and other Pelosi allies pounced on Panetta's briefing as a chance to defend their boss: "It certainly confirms her characterization of the level of openness the intelligence community and the CIA have given to Congress," Schakowsky claimed.

Ironically, it was only a few weeks ago that Schakowsky slammed her Republican counterparts for commenting on what Pelosi had learned in intelligence briefings: "I am absolutely shocked that members of the Intelligence committee who attended a closed-door hearing...characterized anything that happened in that hearing."

She even suggested they had broken the law: "My understanding is that's a violation of the rules. It may be more than that."

Now, Schakowsky has rushed to reveal to the media what she learned in a classified briefing. Worse, she distorted what she and her colleagues were told-all to settle old political scores and to force President Obama into an investigation of the Bush administration that he initially, and wisely, resisted.

Another Democrat who joined Schakowsky's accusations was Senator Diane Feinstein of California, who accused the CIA of acting "outside of the law." Her claims were picked up by the international media, which ran sensational stories about Cheney and the CIA. A Pakistani news service claimed that the program "may have involved torture and possibly assassinations."

It was not the first time Feinstein had caused an uproar in Pakistan and damage to America's image in the Middle East. In February, she revealed that the U.S. was operating Predator drones from a base in Pakistan. Not only did her comments put America's enemies on notice, but they deeply embarrassed U.S. allies in a country fighting to keep its government-and its nuclear weapons-out of Islamist hands.

The incompetence and opportunism of Schakowsky and Feinstein reveal just how politicized intelligence oversight has become during Pelosi's tenure. Recall that one of Pelosi's first decisions-belatedly aborted-was to put Rep. Alcee Hastings in charge of the House intelligence committee. Not only did Hastings have no intelligence experience, but he had also been impeached and convicted for taking a bribe as a federal judge.

The fact that a close Pelosi lieutenant like Schakowsky has been given the chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence's Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations is cause for alarm. Not only has Schakowsky put politics ahead of national security, but her left-wing views on foreign policy are out of sync with the mainstream of the country, her party, and even her constituents.

One of the suburbs Schakowsky represents is Skokie, a community uniquely sensitive to the threat of terror, where Jewish Holocaust survivors and Arab refugees from Iraq live side-by-side. For several years after 9/11, a billboard near the expressway proclaimed: "U.S. And Israel: United Against Terror."

Re-elected thanks to the Chicago machine, Schakowsky has rarely been held accountable for her views on foreign policy. But after her performance in Washington last week, more Americans will begin to ask why a politician who abuses classified information to pursue political vendettas should have access to it at all.

She and her colleagues tried to cover up for Pelosi's lies about waterboarding. Now they have distorted the truth about what the CIA director told them in a classified briefing about efforts to destroy Al-Qaeda.

Trembling with purported outrage, Schakowsky faced the cameras last week and declared: "I know that I've been lied to."

So do we.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/07/protecting_pelosi_not_america.html

posted July 15, 2009 10:56 AM         

quote:

---

Who says it's not been divulged...what the flap is all about katatonic.

Perhaps not where you go for information but I would say your sources are both limited and suspect.

---

Quite true. The problem here seems to be that a lot of ppl don't understand the context within this situation. Panetta wasn't a very smart pick by Obama, which proves our Chief's fumbling inexperience for the umpteenth time. Panetta is biting the hand that feeds him, revealing himself as an immature official lacking the discretion that should have been acquired with his age. This is an obvious case of the tail wagging the dog, for those who can read between the lines.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124736381913627661.html

CIA Had Secret Al Qaeda Plan
Initiative at Heart of Spat With Congress Examined Ways to Seize, Kill Terror Chiefs

WASHINGTON -- A secret Central Intelligence Agency initiative terminated by Director Leon Panetta was an attempt to carry out a 2001 presidential authorization to capture or kill al Qaeda operatives, according to former intelligence officials familiar with the matter.

The precise nature of the highly classified effort isn't clear, and the CIA won't comment on its substance.

According to current and former government officials, the agency spent money on planning and possibly some training. It was acting on a 2001 presidential legal pronouncement, known as a finding, which authorized the CIA to pursue such efforts. The initiative hadn't become fully operational at the time Mr. Panetta ended it.

In 2001, the CIA also examined the subject of targeted assassinations of al Qaeda leaders, according to three former intelligence officials. It appears that those discussions tapered off within six months. It isn't clear whether they were an early part of the CIA initiative that Mr. Panetta stopped.

The revelations about the CIA and its post-9/11 activities have emerged amid a renewed fight between the agency and congressional Democrats. Last week, seven Democratic lawmakers on the House Intelligence Committee released a letter that talked about the CIA effort, which they said Mr. Panetta acknowledged hadn't been properly vetted with Congress. CIA officials had brought the matter to Mr. Panetta's attention and had recommended he inform Congress.

Neither Mr. Panetta nor the lawmakers provided details. Mr. Panetta quashed the CIA effort after learning about it June 23.

The battle is part of a long-running tug of war between the executive branch and the legislature about how to oversee the activities of the country's intelligence services and how extensively the CIA should brief Congress. In recent years, in the light of revelations over CIA secret prisons and harsh interrogation techniques, Congress has pushed for greater oversight. The Obama administration, much like its predecessor, is resisting any moves in that direction.

Most recently, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in a dispute over what she knew about the use of waterboarding in interrogating terror suspects, has accused the agency of lying to lawmakers about its operations.

Republicans on the panel say that the CIA effort didn't advance to a point where Congress clearly should have been notified.

CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said the agency "has not commented on the substance of the effort." He added that "a candid dialogue with Congress is very important to this director and this agency."

One former senior intelligence official said the program was an attempt "to achieve a capacity to carry out something that was directed in the finding," meaning it was looking for ways to capture or kill al Qaeda chieftains.

The official noted that Congress had long been briefed on the finding, and that the CIA effort wasn't so much a program as "many ideas suggested over the course of years." It hadn't come close to fruition, he added.

Michigan Rep. Pete Hoekstra, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said little had been spent on the efforts -- closer to $1 million than $50 million. "The idea for this kind of program was tossed around in fits and starts," he said.

Senior CIA leaders were briefed two or three times on the most recent iteration of the initiative, the last time in the spring of 2008. At that time, CIA brass said that the effort should be narrowed and that Congress should be briefed if the preparations reached a critical stage, a former senior intelligence official said.

Amid the high alert following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a small CIA unit examined the potential for targeted assassinations of al Qaeda operatives, according to the three former officials. The Ford administration had banned assassinations in the response to investigations into intelligence abuses in the 1970s. Some officials who advocated the approach were seeking to build teams of CIA and military Special Forces commandos to emulate what the Israelis did after the Munich Olympics terrorist attacks, said another former intelligence official.

"It was straight out of the movies," one of the former intelligence officials said. "It was like: Let's kill them all."

The former official said he had been told that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney didn't support such an operation. The effort appeared to die out after about six months, he said.

Former CIA Director George Tenet, who led the agency in the aftermath of the 2001 attacks, declined through a spokesman to comment.

Also in September 2001, as CIA operatives were preparing for an offensive in Afghanistan, officials drafted cables that would have authorized assassinations of specified targets on the spot.

One draft cable, later scrapped, authorized officers on the ground to "kill on sight" certain al Qaeda targets, according to one person who saw it. The context of the memo suggested it was designed for the most senior leaders in al Qaeda, this person said.

Eventually Mr. Bush issued the finding that authorized the capturing of several top al Qaeda leaders, and allowed officers to kill the targets if capturing proved too dangerous or risky.

Lawmakers first learned specifics of the CIA initiative the day after Mr. Panetta did, when he briefed them on it for 45 minutes.

House lawmakers are now making preparations for an investigation into "an important program" and why Congress wasn't told about it, said Rep. Jan Schakowsky, an Illinois Democrat, in an interview.

On Sunday, lawmakers criticized the Bush administration's decision not to tell Congress. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from California, hinted that the Bush administration may have broken the law by not telling Congress.

"We were kept in the dark. That's something that should never, ever happen again," she said. Withholding such information from Congress, she said, "is a big problem, because the law is very clear."

Ms. Feinstein said Mr. Panetta told the lawmakers that Mr. Cheney had ordered that the information be withheld from Congress. Mr. Cheney on Sunday couldn't be reached for comment through former White House aides.

The Senate's second-ranking official, Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, and Vermont Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, echoed those concerns and called for an investigation, an indication of how the politics of intelligence continue to bedevil the CIA.

Separately, Attorney General Eric Holder is considering whether to order a criminal probe into whether treatment of terrorism detainees exceeded guidelines set by the Justice Department, administration officials said.

President Barack Obama and Mr. Holder have said they don't favor prosecuting lawyers who wrote legal justifications for interrogation methods that the president and his attorney general have declared to be torture. They have sought to protect CIA officers who followed the legal guidelines.

"The Department of Justice will follow the facts and the law with respect to any matter," said Matthew Miller, a department spokesman. "We have made no decisions on investigations or prosecutions, including whether to appoint a prosecutor to conduct further inquiry."

posted July 15, 2009 12:25 PM         

what i asked, once again, is why the "right" give no coverage to the other side of the story? or how, given the "classified" nature of this whole episode, they can justify stating "facts" about pelosi or anyone else?

posted July 15, 2009 01:54 PM         

You questioned The American Thinker but
katatonic, you could have found many sources for the information I posted. Most of those would have lead back to the Wall Street Journal story NosiS posted.

You could have found the same information with any effort whatsoever. Instead, you jumped on a biased, slanted, phony story from a notorious leftist rag about a CIA cover up.

The only thing being covered up here is Nancy Pelosi's rear end.

I agree with you NosiS. Panetta isn't up to the job of keeping politics out of intelligence gathering and briefing. I at first thought he was going to defend the CIA...as he should considering the importance of the work they do there. As it is, he caved to political interests of taking the spotlight off Pelosi with a phony allegation...now proven to be a phony allegation.

Panetta is a democrat and former House member from California.

posted August 22, 2009 12:36 AM         

CIA Director Leon Panetta’s emergency testimony to Congress about an illegal assassination program has set off a crisis at the spy agency. The Daily Beast’s Joseph Finder exclusively reports that:

• The secret assassination ‘program’ wasn’t much more than a PowerPoint presentation, a task force and a collection of schemes—it never got off the ground

• Panetta’s three immediate predecessors—George Tenet, Porter Goss, and Michael Hayden—have spoken to him, and that he now sees that no laws were broken.

• Panetta has frantically tried to rectify his gaffe, but now faces increased Congressional oversight.

CIA Director Leon Panetta stunned Washington earlier this summer by disclosing, in an emergency closed-door briefing to Congress, that for the last eight years, the agency he now runs illegally concealed a secret terrorist-assassination program. The reaction was predictably explosive. The House intelligence-oversight committee launched a major investigation. Here was official confirmation, from the very top, that the CIA in the Bush years had been flagrantly and systematically violating the National Security Act of 1947.

“If we briefed Congress on every single foreign intelligence collection activity,” one former CIA director tells me, “we’d be a very small intelligence agency attached to a massive congressional briefing agency.”

But according to a half-dozen sources, including several very senior, recently retired CIA officials, clandestine-service officers, and Cabinet-level officials from the Bush administration, the real story is at once more innocent—Panetta was mistaken; no law was broken—and far more troubling: an inexperienced CIA director, unfamiliar with how his vast, complicated agency works, unable to trust senior officials within his own agency, and desperate to keep his hands clean, screwed up.

The Daily Beast has learned that shortly after his electrifying June 24 disclosure, Panetta spoke personally with each of his three predecessors—George Tenet, Porter Goss, and Michael Hayden—and only then realized the mistake he’d made about the program. An innocent mistake, but the consequences of his gaffe, which he’s unable to admit without damaging his own reputation further, will likely subject U.S. intelligence capabilities to unnecessary and intrusive oversight for years to come.

How did a mistake of this scale happen? My sources corroborate the following narrative:

On June 23, in the course of a routine briefing by the head of the National Counterterrorism Center, Panetta first learned about the assassination squads. Alarmed, he terminated the program at once and called the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-TX). He told Reyes he’d discovered something of grave concern, and requested an urgent briefing for the House and Senate intelligence committees as soon as possible. Less than 24 hours later, he was on the Hill, "with his hair on fire," as a Republican member of the House committee put it. “The whole committee was stunned,” said Rep. Anna G. Eshoo (D-CA).

Afterward, seven Democratic members of the House Intelligence Committee sent Panetta an indignant letter: “Recently you testified that you have determined that top CIA officials have concealed significant actions from all members of Congress, and misled members for a number of years from 2001 to this week," the Democratic lawmakers wrote. They demanded he “correct” his statement back in May that the CIA does not mislead Congress.

Ten days later, one of them leaked the letter.

posted August 22, 2009 12:39 AM         

Under three successive CIA directors, these plans for paramilitary hit squads had been given three different names. (In the CIA, a program isn’t real until it’s given a codename.) But they never got off the ground. The logistical, legal, and political obstacles proved to be insurmountable. George Tenet gave up on it—too many moving parts. Porter Goss took another stab at it, but nothing, and then Gen. Michael V. Hayden’s team studied it for a while but envisioned nothing but trouble. So there was a reason that none of the last three CIA directors had briefed Congress about it: There was nothing to brief.

In fact, in all of General Hayden’s three years at CIA he had exactly two meetings on this, according to a close associate of his. More indicative, Hayden—known to be extremely punctilious—didn’t once mention these plans to George W. Bush, Stephen Hadley (Bush’s national security adviser), or Dick Cheney. (So much for “Cheney’s secret CIA program,” as so many Web sites dubbed it.) Had it been anywhere close to implementation, he surely would have obtained White House signoff. Anything else would have been political suicide. Nor did he brief Congress, according to this associate, because it didn’t approach the legal threshold. It was hardly “significant anticipated action” that obligates a congressional briefing, and it wasn’t clear that it would ever in fact lead to covert action. This was still in the exploratory, intelligence-collection stage.

“If we briefed Congress on every single foreign intelligence-collection activity,” one former CIA director tells me, “we’d be a very small intelligence agency attached to a massive congressional briefing agency.”

In any case, there was no reason for the CIA to conceal information about these hypothetical assassination teams. Congress had already been briefed, repeatedly, on the White House order to kill terrorists.

So Panetta ordered an internal CIA inquiry into the matter, headed by a widely respected senior official. In his private conversations with his three predecessors, Panetta “as much as admitted” to them (in the words of one CIA insider) that he’d misunderstood. Without explicitly apologizing, he assured the men—whom he’d in effect accused of breaking the law—not to worry: The whole thing would quietly go away. He told them that he’d been pre-briefed by the officer conducting the internal inquiry, and that when the report came out it would indeed back them up. It would come swaddled in vague banalities calling for improving communication between the CIA and Congress. And the whole thing would die a quiet death.

But of course it didn’t. The bell couldn’t be unrung.

Once the controversy exploded, Panetta, having testified that the CIA had deliberately concealed information about covert action from Congress, was in the awkward position of insisting that he’d hadn’t really meant it like that. “Panetta didn’t say that the agency misled Congress,” a U.S. intelligence official explained to me. “He took decisive steps to inform the oversight committees of something that hadn’t been appropriately briefed in the past. He didn’t attribute motives to that. He wasn’t director at the time.”

posted August 22, 2009 12:40 AM         

But according to Reyes, Panetta outright told them that they’d been “affirmatively lied to” by the CIA. Panetta now insists he never said that.

To veteran CIA-watchers, something about this whole story didn’t track. How could such a risky and serious program be concealed from the new CIA director for four months? Had the CIA really gone rogue, as some headlines in newspapers and on cable news shows blared? That was, for a time, the popular narrative: the honorable but naïve new CIA director being played by shadowy rogue elements right out of a 1970s Hollywood conspiracy thriller.

Alas, the sad truth is that the CIA, despite its Bourne Identity reputation, has become a timorous, risk-averse bureaucracy. Any program as fraught as the one he disclosed to Congress would have been revealed to him on the day he moved into his seventh-floor office. The fact it took four months for him to learn about it, during a routine briefing, should have told him something. There was no there there.

Panetta’s big mistake has only emboldened those Democrats in Congress who have been pushing to have all CIA debriefings, even the most classified, videotaped, to avoid future ambiguity. As one very former, very senior Bush administration official said to me in annoyance, “You know what? Let’s videotape them all. And when some important covert action gets torpedoed by the those guys on the intelligence committees and then we get hit again, let’s put those tapes up on YouTube for everyone to see who disarmed us. See what they think. It cuts both ways.”

Were it not for Panetta’s gaffe, there’d likely be no congressional hearings into “possible” violations of laws by the intelligence community. A staffer on the oversight committee told me that, although Panetta’s disclosure will be the main event, there are two other areas of “concern,” including an incident that occurred in 2001. The Panetta hearings, however, were “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

More seriously, this controversy has given ammunition to congressional efforts to broaden CIA briefings. Instead of allowing the CIA to limit disclosure of the most sensitive, most highly classified stuff to just the “Gang of Eight”—the leaders of those committees and of the House and Senate—they want to require the CIA to brief the full membership of the intelligence committees.

At that point, the risks of leaks may become a serious issue (as the leaks in this incident prove). The CIA will then be faced with a choice: hold back as much as they can get away with legally—a risky game these days—or avoid any kind of covert action that might be jeopardized by congressional leaks, likely including the most high-risk attempts to target terrorist groups like al Qaeda.

As Jane Mayer illustrated in her excellent New Yorker profile, Leon Panetta faces a near-impossible job. He has to rally the troops while forcing them to confront their recent history. President Obama, reasonably, wanted an outsider to run the CIA, someone whose hands, by definition, were clean.

Unfortunately, what made sense in theory hasn’t worked out in reality. The job called for someone who knew where all the hidden levers were. Not only has Panetta become deeply unpopular within the agency, but, as these recent events demonstrate, Panetta—honorable, decent, savvy—probably wasn’t the best choice after all.