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Panetta at the CIA
PANETTA AT THE CIA....Fred Kaplan asked Richard Clarke about Leon Panetta today, and Clarke mentioned that a point in Panetta's favor as CIA director is that as Bill Clinton's budget director and White House chief of staff during the 90s 
"he was one of a very few people who knew about all of the covert and special-access programs." That could come in handy:
These "special-access programs" — satellites, sensors, and other intelligence-gathering devices whose very existence is known only to those with compartmentalized security clearances — form a welter of costly, overlapping, ill-coordinated, and largely unsupervised projects that are run by private contractors to a greater extent than most people might imagine.
One former CIA official who is familiar with these programs (and who asked not to be identified) speculates that Panetta's main task might be to clean up not only the agency's high-profile mess — the "black ops" that have tarnished America's reputation around the world — but this budgetary-bureaucratic mess as well. Certainly, he knows where the line items are buried to a degree that few insiders can match.
But I wonder how much control Panetta would have over this stuff. Isn't most of it part of NSA, NRO, or other Pentagon outfits? Still: an interesting point. Panetta's past experience may be more relevant than people think.
Yet more evidence that PEBO is playing a longer and deeper game than anyone realizes.
This gives me more hope that Obama is not as naive about congressional repugs as he seems to be on the stimulus bill.
But I wonder how much control Panetta would have over this stuff. Isn't most of it part of NSA, NRO, or other Pentagon outfits?
Still, knowledge is power as is access to (and trust from) the President.
SAPs are everywhere in the DoD and the intelligence community. The NRO is half controlled by CIA people. I really hope Panetta takes the knife to many of the NRO SAP pet projects.
That's an argument for nominating Panetta as Director of National Intelligence, not as DCI, given the restructuring of the intelligence community following the 9/11 Commission Report.
One of the biggest fiascos in the SIGINT department was TRAILBLAZER. That was entirely the work of Michael Hayden when he was DIRNSA. $10 billion wasted. But worse: the failure of TRAILBLAZER directly led to the need for unfiltered collection, that is, warrantless and unmonitored collection and datamining.
This reminds me of IBM picking Louis V. Gerstner to run it in 1993. IBM was a mess at that time but in 9 years at the helm he cleaned it up. Gerstner had no background running a tech firm but had the management smarts and previously ran companies, including American Express, that were IBM customers.
I have found it surprising that some neocons support this choice, but they have never liked the CIA and maybe they see an outsider in charge as the only way to clean it up.
However, many thought Rumsfeld could clean up the Pentagon. He may have done it except for a couple of wars that he was totally unsuited for.
Am I the only one to hear "Heil Hitler" when looking at that photo?
Here's a breakdown of the payroll costs of the difference agencies:
http://www.fas.org/irp/commission/budget.htm
It should be taken with a grain of salt because, first, these guys lie a lot, and second, because CIA "human intelligence" and other costs are not included. Nor are CIA self-funding black ops or secret operations buried in the Army, Navy, and Air Force budgets.
Anyone who thinks the CIA director doesn't have visibility into 100% of the intelligence budget is probably dreaming.
Hells bells rather than all the speculation just read your copy of Legacy of Ashes on the insane waste and failure of the CIA since WWII and the millions the agency has helped kill or wound in name of the national security state (read Gore Vidal too) of the democratically elected governments CIA has helped overthrow or undermine. Such blood covered hands but other main lesson from the book is how so many directors with reformist intentions were destroyed or neutered by rebellion and resistance in ranks at all levels. CIA is quagmire. Or as Dante said, Give up hope all ye who enter here. Amen.