What the Panetta Nomination Means (Bigger Intelligence Picture Edition)

I know a quick trick to determine the priorities in any program, look at the budget.

The US intelligence is $47½ billion dollars, with about 80% of that amount in the control of the Pentagon.

That actually puts the CIA pretty far down on the totem pole of priorities, and with the creation of the Director of National Intelligence, they no longer give the President the most expensive reading material in the world, the Presidential Daily Briefing.

First, we have a letter from a career military intelligence professional to Josh Marshall who makes a very legitimate point, that recently, particularly over the last 8 years, the CIA has been increasingly cast as an organ of the Pentagon, and that this is not the essential role of the CIA.

The essential role of the CIA is to provide the civilian decision makers, particularly POTUS, with the information that they need to make their decisions, not the provision of targeting data to Predator drones.

So, just who is Leon Panetta, and what does it mean for the intelligence community in an Obama administration?

Obviously, his forceful rejection of torture and warrantless wiretaps is the first thing that comes to mind.

This implies that as DCIA, he will be looking into what happened, and why with the domestic spying and torture, and (hopefully) it will mean the end of these programs. (I'm not enough of an optimist to believe that there will be referrals for prosecution).

Also, there is a bit of almost 20 year old history regarding Panetta and Congressional oversight of intelligence:

And there's this: in 1990, then-Representative Barbara Boxer (D-CA) introduced legislation that would have required the president to seek approval from the congressional intelligence committees before mounting most covert operations. (Under this legislation, the president could still stage secret ops to save American lives or rescue American hostages without asking permission from the committees.) The measure failed miserably. Only 70 members voted for it, but one was Panetta. Will that vote come up during his confirmation hearings? One wonders if Panetta still supports the idea of greater congressional oversight of CIA clandestine activities.

He was one of 70 people voting for this, so we can be reasonably assured of his support for Congressional oversight: he is unlikely to "go native," and start stonewalling Congress.

That being said, his real job will be to fight the 800 pound gorilla in the room, the Pentagon, and its institutional imperative towards total control of the complete intelligence apparatus.

Panetta was Chairman of the House Budget committee, head of the Office of Management, and finally Bill Clinton's White House Chief of Staff, and this background makes him uniquely suited to dealing with the separation of the CIA from the military octopus.

His background is budgets, bureaucracy, and access to the President, and these are precisely the levers that need to be worked in order for the CIA do its job properly.

Someone like Feinstein's^* favorite Steve Knappes, may very well have more hands on experience with intelligence, but he doesn't have is the ability to thread the various needles, both in the White House, and with the Congress, to create in voice in intelligence agency that is separate from the Pentagon (and to a lesser degree the State Department), has the resources to collect the intelligence.

More importantly, Leon Panetta has the skills to make sure that this intelligence is presented to, and seriously considered by, the President and the rest of the national security apparatus.


^*Full disclosure, my great grandfather, Harry Goldman, and her grandfather, Sam Goldman were brothers.