In an op-ed in today’s Washington Post, CIA Director Leon Panetta pulls a Mark McGwire and asks Congress to stop looking into the CIA’s role in running secret torture prisons and planning political assassinations:
I’ve become increasingly concerned that the focus on the past, especially in Congress, threatens to distract the CIA from its crucial core missions: intelligence collection, analysis and covert action.
Why should we look to the future? Well . . .
The CIA no longer operates black sites and no longer employs “enhanced” interrogation techniques. It is worth remembering that the CIA implements presidential decisions; we do not make them.
That’s right! They were just following orders! Even the “enhanced” ones!
Nowhere in Mr. Panetta’s piece is there a “we learned our lesson” moment, because he hands responsibility for the agency’s actions to the office of the President. The closest we get is
[After 9/11] Judgments were made. Some of them were wrong. But that should not taint those public servants who did their duty pursuant to the legal guidance provided. The last election made clear that the public wanted to move in a new direction.
The thing is, without investigating those actions, we’ll never understand the processes that led to them, how that “legal guidance” was formed, and how people who should have been nowhere near the levers of power managed to put grotesque policies like this into place.
Can it be anyone *but* Congress? Can the White House just hire Jim Rockford or something?
It seems to me that this:
The CIA no longer operates black sites and no longer employs “enhanced†interrogation techniques. It is worth remembering that the CIA implements presidential decisions; we do not make them.
is a swipe at Bush–and notice that a new regime … I mean, administration… has taken over. I think he would like the root of the problem probed: Bush & his pals. As he points out, they don’t decide policy; they implement. If that’s an honest statment–of course it may not be–he may have a point.