Jack Kelly Sunday

A little late. Sorry.

Jack Kelly takes on Leon Panetta in this week's column.

He doesn't like Panetta as CIA head:

There are, I suspect, quite a few jobs in government for which having no experience is not a liability. But few would list director of central intelligence among them. Which is why Barack Obama's pick of Leon Panetta is causing so much consternation.

A former congressman, Mr. Panetta, 70, served as budget director and then as chief of staff in the Clinton administration. But he's never spent a day serving in the intelligence community.

Then, a little historical revisionism regarding John Brennan:

Mr. Obama originally had planned to tap John Brennan, who was head of the National Counterterrorism Center at the time of his retirement in 2005. But the rumored appointment ignited a storm of protest from left-wingers who opposed the coercive interrogation techniques the CIA used on some high- level al-Qaida prisoners.

"The fact that I was not involved in the decision-making process for any of these controversial policies and actions has been ignored," Mr. Brennan said in a Nov. 26 letter withdrawing his name.

As with most things Jack reports, reality is a bit different. Conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan:

[The Atlantic] reports the Republican, former chief-of-staff for George Tenet (who authorized war crimes as CIA head), admirer of Dick Cheney, CEO of the company one of whose contract employees improperly accessed Obama's and McCain's passports, and defender of renditions and "enhanced interrogations" is still Obama's front-runner pick to head the CIA.

And this is what the Atlantic reported:

But, as George Tenet's chief of staff and deputy executive dierctor, Brennan was undoubtedly read into some of the Bush Administration's more controversial intelligence programs, although there is no evidence that he made decisions. In interviews since leaving the government, Brennan has expressed support for the government's rendition policy, calling it effective, "enhanced" interrogation techniques and immunity for telecommunications companies involved in government spying efforts.

More stuff Jack leaves out.

But then Jack takes an odd turn:

Many of those worried about Mr. Panetta have an outdated view of the importance of the CIA. After 9/11 a huge new layer of bureaucracy was imposed on the intelligence community. This was mostly stupid, because there was too much bureaucracy already. But it made the CIA much less important.

Most of the intelligence we gather is collected by the National Security Agency, through its electronic eavesdropping, and by the satellite photos taken by the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency.

The CIA essentially got out of the HUMINT business (human intelligence) when the Clinton administration slashed its budget in the early 1990s. Most of such little intelligence as the CIA now gathers comes from the interrogation of prisoners. But most prisoner interrogations are done by the military.

The CIA still has its analysis branch, which has missed most of the major developments of the last 20 years. And analysis work has been migrating to the various multi-agency intelligence centers established after 9/11.

So the CIA, in Jack view, has a diminished level of importance. He goes on:

The real head cheese is the director of national intelligence. For this job Mr. Obama has selected retired Adm. Dennis Blair. He's a former commander of Pacific Command, a former associate director of the CIA and a Rhodes scholar who once water-skied behind the destroyer he was commanding.

So now I'm lost. The reduced CIA is headed by someone Jack feels isn't qualified. But "the real head cheese" (i.e. the person really in charge) is qualified?

So what's Jack worried about?

By the way one small fact check. Jack writes:

The CIA essentially got out of the HUMINT business (human intelligence) when the Clinton administration slashed its budget in the early 1990s.

You hear that often from the right wing media. But is it true? Hard to tell. Politifact has the story - starting from Rudy Giuliani making the charge that the CIA budget was reduced by Clinton. It's all based on the testimony of former CIA-head cheese George Tenet.

Things get more complicated after that:

It is true that Clinton oversaw decreases in the intelligence budget and that Tenet has described the budget situation when he became CIA director in 1997, four years into Clinton’s presidency, as a disaster. But Tenet has never placed blame on Clinton in the way Giuliani describes (which makes sense since Clinton made him director).

Likewise, Giuliani neglects to provide some important context: The CIA budget cuts began under the first President Bush and were reversed, under Tenet’s leadership, late in the Clinton presidency and before the 9/11 attacks.

And:

But Tenet doesn’t say whether Clinton accelerated the rate of decline or followed the trend begun by Bush, and proving it is impossible. That’s because, with the exception of the current fiscal year and fiscal years 1997 and 1998 — when Tenet agreed to release the overall budget figure after the Federation of American Scientists filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit — the government has classified the intelligence budget on national security grounds.

And then finally:

In his testimony to the 9/11 Commission, Tenet said that he’d made considerable headway in boosting the agency’s resources prior to the 9/11 attacks. “Between 1999 and 2001, our human agent base against the terrorist target grew by over 50 percent,” he said.

Interesting what you can find once you actually look.