How CIA Director Leon Panetta kneecapped the CIA

This story is important because even some on the Center/left are now realizing Leon Panetta’s emergency testimony to Congress about an illegal assassination program was a demonstration of incompetence from an inexperienced Director. No laws were broken. The alleged program was little more than a powerepoint presentation and was public knowledge since 2002. Of course, Nancy Pelosi "went off the deep end" and the rest is history.

From The Daily Beast:

CIA Director Leon Panetta’s emergency testimony to Congress about an illegal assassination program has set off a crisis at the spy agency. The Daily Beast’s Joseph Finder exclusively reports that:

• The secret assassination ‘program’ wasn’t much more than a PowerPoint presentation, a task force and a collection of schemes—it never got off the ground

• Panetta’s three immediate predecessors—George Tenet, Porter Goss, and Michael Hayden—have spoken to him, and that he now sees that no laws were broken.

• Panetta has frantically tried to rectify his gaffe, but now faces increased Congressional oversight.

CIA Director Leon Panetta stunned Washington earlier this summer by disclosing, in an emergency closed-door briefing to Congress, that for the last eight years, the agency he now runs illegally concealed a secret terrorist-assassination program. The reaction was predictably explosive. The House intelligence-oversight committee launched a major investigation. Here was official confirmation, from the very top, that the CIA in the Bush years had been flagrantly and systematically violating the National Security Act of 1947.

“If we briefed Congress on every single foreign intelligence collection activity,” one former CIA director tells me, “we’d be a very small intelligence agency attached to a massive congressional briefing agency.”

But according to a half-dozen sources, including several very senior, recently retired CIA officials, clandestine-service officers, and Cabinet-level officials from the Bush administration, the real story is at once more innocent—Panetta was mistaken; no law was broken—and far more troubling: an inexperienced CIA director, unfamiliar with how his vast, complicated agency works, unable to trust senior officials within his own agency, and desperate to keep his hands clean, screwed up.

Leon Panetta was hoping the whole thing would be forgotten, but you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube.

So Panetta ordered an internal CIA inquiry into the matter, headed by a widely respected senior official. In his private conversations with his three predecessors, Panetta “as much as admitted” to them (in the words of one CIA insider) that he’d misunderstood. Without explicitly apologizing, he assured the men—whom he’d in effect accused of breaking the law—not to worry: The whole thing would quietly go away. He told them that he’d been pre-briefed by the officer conducting the internal inquiry, and that when the report came out it would indeed back them up. It would come swaddled in vague banalities calling for improving communication between the CIA and Congress. And the whole thing would die a quiet death.

But of course it didn’t. The bell couldn’t be unrung.

Nancy Pelosi is in meltdown over CIA briefings

Nancy Pelosi is in meltdown over what she knew from the CIA briefings she received several years ago. The House Republican Conference has put together some video clips of Pelosi trying to explain.

What did Speaker Pelosi know?

Nanci Pelosi calls CIA liars

Speaker Pelosi attacked the CIA as liars in her press conference today.


Republicans respond the Pelosi is not credible.

"It's hard for me to imagine anyone in our intelligence area would ever mislead a member of Congress," House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, said at his weekly news conference. "They come to the Hill to brief us because they're required to under the law. I don't know what motivation they would have to mislead anyone."

The top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., told FOX News that Pelosi's accusation against the CIA is "not credible."

"I am afraid she has disremembered what she went through," he said. "We have had not only the records from the CIA but the contemporaries who were there with her had other views on it, so I am afraid that this is not a credible explanation."

Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.), the ranking member on the House Intelligence committee has already submitted a request for the briefing documents Pelosi requested today. Like Perino, he was less than impressed by Pelosi's responses today.

"This is Version 5.0 from Nancy on what happened in that Sept. meeting -- I'm not sure what today's explanation means," Hoekstra told my colleague Alex Isenstadt. "I believe that information should be released. Ive called for it to be released."

On Pelosi's claim she was lied to, he replied, "That's a very, very serious charge. If you're the Speaker of the House and you say you were lied to on a national security issue, that's a serious charge."

House majority leader wants Nanci Pelosi investigated for torture memos

The House Majority leader,Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md, has agreed to investigate what briefings Nanci Pelosi received from the CIA relating to waterboarding and other interrogation tactics. Nanci Pelosi has denied she was briefed about the enhanced interrogation techniques. She has said, "We were not — I repeat — were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used." However, released CIA memos indicate she had more information than she has admitted. This has caused Nanci Pelosi to make numerous conflicting follow up statements. AP via Google Hosted News is reporting:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The House majority leader reluctantly agreed Tuesday that congressional hearings should investigate Speaker Nancy Pelosi's assertion that she wasn't informed, more than six years ago, that harsh interrogation methods were used on an al-Qaida leader.

Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., called Republican challenges to Pelosi's assertion a diversion from the real question of whether the Bush administration tortured terrorist suspects. Nonetheless, he acknowledged the controversy should be resolved.

Democrats will hold a series of hearings on Justice Department memos released last month that justified rough tactics against detainees, including waterboarding — simulated drowning — and sleep deprivation.

While Democrats want the hearings to focus on what they call torture, Republicans have tried to turn the issue to their advantage by complaining that Pelosi and other Democrats knew of the tactics but didn't protest. Pelosi was briefed in 2002 while on the House Intelligence Committee.

Here is Pelosi's last sputtering statement on the briefings she received.

Pelosi changes her story on waterboarding briefing

House Speaker Nanci Pelosi has changed her story on receiving a waterbaording briefing from the CIA. Speaker Pelosi conceded in a statement released Friday, she was told they would be used. According to Fox News:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi insisted Friday that she was briefed only once about the "enhanced" interrogation techniques being used on terrorism suspects and that she was assured by lawyers with the CIA and the Department of Justice that the methods were legal.

Pelosi issued a statement after CIA records released this week showed that Pelosi was briefed in September 2002 on the interrogation methods. The briefings memo appeared to contradict the speaker's claims that she was never told that waterboarding or other enhanced interrogation methods were being used.

"We were not -- I repeat -- were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used," Pelosi said on April 23.

The emphasis seems to be on "were used," even though she conceded in a statement released Friday that she was told they would be used.

Watch as she stammers and stutters through a contrived story about the briefing she received.


Keep trying Nanci. You will be able to get the full truth out soon.