Over the past few days we have seen a great deal of controversy over the pending nominations of Leon Panetta as CIA director and Sanjay Gupta as Surgeon General. The airwaves have been crackling with various legislators and pundits objecting to the selections. I must admit that, when I first heard the two names, I also wondered about them but as, I have considered them, I find the objections to be rather weak.

The principal concern over Panetta seems to be his reported lack of experience in the Intelligence arena. There are a couple of problems with these claims however. He spent 16 years in the House where he was regularly given intelligence briefings (indeed, as chair of the Budget Committee, he would have been in the loop). He also served as White House Chief of Staff for 3 years which also would have given him top access to all of our intelligence apparatus.

Furthermore, I am not sure that being CIA director necessarily requires a major background in the field. This is why they have the DDO (Deputy Director Operations) and DDI (Deputy Director Intelligence) positions. The job of the director is to gather together all of the information and provide briefings to the President. I am pretty sure that the CIA director does not put on a disguise and head out into the field to ferret-out information.

In fact the position is largely one of administration and analysis. The director needs to be able to read people and judge their competence. He needs to be able to determine what information is good and what information is bad. These kind of judgments require the exact background that Panetta has. As White House Chief Of Staff, as Budget Director and as a long time politician, he has the skills needed to make these kinds of decisions.

Indeed, if you look at some of the more recent CIA directors with backgrounds in the field, they have not exactly done a spectacular job in figuring out the good from the bad analysis. Thus I feel Mr. Panetta is a perfectly good choice for director and I think the Senate should confirm him.

The same kind of review would apply to the nomination of Dr. Gupta to the post of Surgeon General. Once again, the job of SG is to serve as a public spokesman and Gupta has years of experience at that kind of work. In addition he is also a well-qualified doctor with a pretty solid background. The mere fact that he happens to have worked for CNN should not take away from this.

So I hope the Senate will take a fair view of these nominations.