January 15th 2009
More Trouble For Panetta
It turns out Leon Panetta might have more intelligence experience than some of us initially thought … and the news isn’t good news for the beleaguered incoming Obama admin. The WashTimes reports:
President-elect Barack Obama’s choice for CIA director, Leon Panetta, served as White House chief of staff during the time the Clinton administration accelerated a practice of kidnapping terrorist suspects and sending them to countries with records of torturing prisoners, human rights organizations and former U.S. officials say.
Wait a minute! You mean renditioning of terrorist to countries that allow torture wasn’t an evil scheme of the Bush/Cheney/Rove cabal? Panetta and Clinton cooked it up? Sweet! Somehow I’d missed that in the NYT and WaPo coverage of Panetta’s nomination.
This gives GOP senators on the Intelligence Committee a gleeful opportunity to go after the lame and dangerous Panetta nomination while setting the record straight on reditioning. It’s ironic. It’s silly. How ironic and silly? Well …
“What is ironic here, you have the incoming administration basically reaching outside the circle of individuals with direct intelligence experience ostensibly to avoid any taint with any policy the hard left dislikes, which is interrogations and renditions,” said David Rivkin, who was a White House and Justice Department national security lawyer for the Reagan and first Bush administrations.
“Here you have a person who was involved in rendition, at least at the very senior level, in Panetta. The whole thing is silly,” Mr. Rivkin said.
Sadly, Obama doesn’t yet seem to fully realize that there’s nothing silly about taking strong measures to protect America from the Islamist jihadist threat.
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