Matt Yglesias

The Panetta Pick

Leon Panetta’s served in congress, served in the military, served as Chief of Staff in the White House; he’s served on blue ribbon commissions and worked for politicians of both parties. And Barack Obama wants him to be CIA Director. Some Senate Democrats aren’t happy:

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who this week begins her tenure as the first female head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said she was not consulted on the choice and indicated she might oppose it.

“I was not informed about the selection of Leon Panetta to be the CIA director,” Feinstein said. “My position has consistently been that I believe the agency is best served by having an intelligence professional in charge at this time.”

A senior aide to Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), the outgoing chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the senator “would have concerns” about a Panetta nomination.

Rockefeller “thinks very highly of Panetta,” the aide said. “But he’s puzzled by the selection. He has concerns because he has always believed that the director of CIA needs to be someone with significant operational intelligence experience and someone outside the political realm.”

Not to be mean about this, but I wish Sens Feinstein and Rockefeller had shown such concern about pushing back against the executive branch on intelligence matters back when, as members of the Intelligence Committee, both decided to back the invasion of Iraq rather than doing their jobs and calling attention to the problems with the intelligence the administration was presenting. Somehow other members of the SSIC like Dick Durbin and Carl Levin managed to figure out what was going on.

On the merits, this idea that the CIA Director needs to be a career intelligence professional seems to have been pulled out of thin air. Porter Goss wasn’t a career intel guy. Neither was George Tenet. Neither was John Deutsch. Neither was James Woolsey. Nor William Webster. Nor George H.W. Bush. Nor several other past directors. Meanwhile, it’s not like Panetta was just pulled out of nowhere — he was White House chief of staff where he had a hand in overseeing the entire federal government. He’s got the administrative chops and he’s held the intelligence clearances.

Meanwhile, the sentiment that Obama is somehow obligated to appoint a current senior intelligence manager to the job seems merely designed to ensure that no senior intelligence officials are held to account for anything that happened during the Bush administration. And if you think there’ve been no serious intel problems during the Bush years, that makes a lot of sense. But if you live on planet earth, that’s crazy. But if you want to go outside the IC to find a Director and still want someone who’s up to the job of running the agency, that’s a difficult person to find. But maybe you could find someone like . . . a former White House Chief of Staff!.