Cost of intelligence

When President-elect Obama first named Leon Panetta to head the CIA, there were a lot of objections from within his own party. Not to Panetta personally, he is well liked. But his qualifications.

This was the tenor at the time, little over a week ago.

The controversy over Panetta’s selection underscores the difficulty the Obama team had in finding someone to run the CIA. Their goal was to find someone that they did not feel was tainted by an association with President Bush’s intelligence policies, including harsh interrogations, wireless wiretapping, and the secret transfer of prisoners to other governments…

Diane Feinstein, the California Democrat who will chair the Senate Intelligence Committee in the new Congress, responded pointedly to reports of Panetta’s pending selection. “I was not informed about the selection of Leon Panetta to be the CIA director,” she said in a statement. Feinstein went on to say that, “My position has consistently been that I believe the agency is best served by having an intelligence professional in charge at this time.”

Meanwhile, Congressional Quarterly quoted an aide to West Virginia Senator Jay Rockefeller, the outgoing Democratic Chairman of the Intelligence Committee, as saying, “Sen. Rockefeller has some concerns about his selection. Not because he has any concerns about Panetta, whom he thinks very highly of, but because he has no intelligence experience and because he has believed this has always been a position that should be outside of the political realm.”

Obama got the party to fall in line behind his pick, for the most part, and some of these objections were withdrawn or reversed.

But some of Panetta’s admirers, who have experience in intelligence work, have some reservations. Parse this piece in USA Today recently, complimentary as it is, and it leaves you wondering where intelligence is heading.

The concern surrounding President-elect Barack Obama’s choice of Leon Panetta to head the agency is that the new administration is placing greater weight on the CIA’s image and reputation than on the intelligence the president needs to lead effectively. Addressing that concern will be Panetta’s first order of business, both in his confirmation hearing and after taking over at CIA.

It’s not quite ‘style over substance’, but we don’t want the Central Intelligence Agency to be so image driven.

After 9/11 and the spectacular misjudgments concerning Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, the agency began to focus less on the machinations of the CIA and more on the quality of intelligence the president receives. Now, the trend is in the other direction, toward a concern over what the CIA does and how it does it, a shift propelled by objections to torture, secret prisons, domestic surveillance and America’s tarnished reputation around the world.

The enemies of America are probably pleased about that surveillance part, at the very least.

But a little futher down, this snip caught my attention:

Panetta is a highly respected legislator and administrator with an affable personality, well-honed political savvy and a keen intellect capable of penetrating quickly to the core of complex issues. He is not overly partisan, having begun his career as a Republican and switching to the Democratic Party during the Nixon presidency. His credentials as House Budget Committee chairman and President Clinton’s budget director are decidedly centrist, having played a key role in efforts to curb spending and balance the budget in the early and mid-1990s. One offshoot of that effort, of course, was several consecutive years of cuts in spending on U.S. intelligence.

Of course? Examine that for a moment…

As budget director, Panetta saw fit to cut spending on U.S. intelligence for several years. What happened during those years? The Mogadishu uprising occurred that led to the ‘Blackhawk Down’ incident and U.S. forces casualties followed by evacuation from Somalia. The first World Trade Center bombing and the Luxor massacre in Egypt took place, both linked to Osama bin Laden. In 1995 the CIA learned that the Sudanese government was looking to expel bin Laden, but the US backed off involvement in any deal. They were years leading up to the bombing of the USS Cole, an attack that was believed to be organized and directed by bin Laden. Also, the years leading up to the millennium attacks plots.

So in that confirmation hearing, could somebody please ask the affable Panetta to explain those cuts, and how he now intends to head that intelligence agency?