President Elect Barack Obama has picked what some consider a surprise choice to head the Central Intelligence Agency: Leon Panetta, a former White House chief of staff, former Congressman, critic of torture as a policy — and about as centrist and solid a public official on the scene today:
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 Sept. 11 attacks by leadership changes and morale problems.
Given his background, Mr. Panetta is a somewhat unusual choice to lead the C.I.A., an agency that has been unwelcoming to previous directors perceived as outsiders, such as Stansfield M. Turner and John M. Deutch. But his selection points up the difficulty Mr. Obama had in finding a C.I.A. director with no connection to controversial counterterrorism programs of the Bush era.
Indeed, Panetta is on the record as being strongly against the use of torture.`
(UPDATE: Panetta comes under some additional scrutiny — and fire — via this post on Red State.)
MSNBC reported it this way:
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The appointment of Panetta comes as a kind of one-two punch for Obama, as he filled two slots with two appointments that are generally expected to be well-received:
The officials also said that retired Adm. Dennis Blair, who formerly headed the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Command, will be tapped as director of national intelligence.
Both Panetta and Blair have long careers:
Panetta, 70, has had a long political career, beginning in 1966 when he was a legislative assistant to U.S. Sen. Thomas H. Kuchel, R-California.
Panetta was elected to the House of Representatives in 1977, serving California’s 16th (now 17th) Congressional District until Clinton appointed him to head the Office of Budget and Management in 1993. He was chief of staff from 1994 to 1997.
Panetta and his wife, Sylvia, founded and co-direct the Leon and Sylvia Panetta Institute for Public Policy at California State University, which provides study opportunities for students there and at several other schools. He serves on several boards and committees, and lectures internationally on economics.
Panetta has a strong background in economics but little hands-on experience in intelligence. However, he is known as a strong manager with solid organizational skills.
Blair, 61, was a 1968 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and attended Oxford University in Britain as a Rhodes scholar at the same time as Clinton. Blair retired from the Navy in 2002.
He was the CIA’s first associate director of military support and served on the National Security Council.
He has been sharply critical of U.S. policy in terms of strategic long-term planning.
“I am in awe of the sophisticated strategies that American politicians can devise and pursue over many years,” he told a House panel in July. “They involve very public activities — speeches, programs, alliances — but also backroom deals, and stratagems, tactical flexibility but strategic constancy, investment in intellectual and organizational capabilities that will not pay off for years.
PERSONAL NOTE: I dealt with the Panettas some years ago, before founding TMV. I called the Panetta Institute to get some information for a nonpolitical project I was doing for a non-profit group. I talked to Sylvia Panetta, who set aside some time to give me an extensive rock-solid, non-nonsense interview that helped prove answers to some key questions related to programs and universities. Since then, I’ve told people that the Panettas are two highly serious, thoughtful, issue-oriented individuals who were not your typical partisans.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.