leon panetta

CIA Director Leon Panetta has just sent this letter to the CIA in advance of today’s anticipated release of the 2004 CIA inspector general report on torture — and, quite possibly, an investigation from Attorney General Eric Holder into the same. The last time he sent one of these, it was to buck up agency [...]

Anne Kornblut of The Washington Post writes a curtain-raiser on the unveiling of a story I broke about the contours of the Obama administration’s new team for interrogating the highest-value terrorism detainees. To boil the piece down to its essence, the new High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group will be an interagency squad, but housed at the [...]

Daphne’s already blown the kazoo and hung the streamers for today’s release of the 2004 CIA inspector general report on the agency’s use of torture “enhanced interrogation” techniques. We’ll be covering this throughout the day. But pay attention as well to what might not get released today: another long awaited report, this time from the [...]

Statement out from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence:
“The first thing to remember is that the program has been canceled. It was fully briefed to the Senate Intelligence Committee, first by Director Panetta in June, and afterward through additional oversight.
The program was never briefed to the Congress before June [...]

The Wall Street Journal reports that White House Counsel Greg Craig’s job is in trouble. Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina tells the paper’s Evan Perez that speculation to that regard amounts to “typical Washington parlor games.” Then he says that it’s unfortunate that “others spend their time pointing fingers in an attempt to promote [...]

Read Marcy Wheeler for a blistering takedown of CIA Director Leon Panetta’s Washington Post op-ed yesterday. The short version of Panetta’s argument is that he proved his good faith by informing Congress about the “significant actions” he shuttered, but Congress reacted with “a fresh round of recriminations about the past.” Stop the violence!
The op-ed itself [...]

There’s a dispute inside the Obama administration about who should have the authority to appoint and direct the chief intelligence officer at oversees outposts. Should it be CIA Director Leon Panetta, since the job is traditionally a CIA responsibility? Or should it be Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, who runs the intelligence community overall?
Blair [...]

More on that new provision in the intelligence authorization bill pushing disclosure on the efficacy of torture. The measure was proposed by Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.) to counter the Obama administration’s portrayal of torture as ineffective, and particularly in light of the release of the Justice Department’s 2002 and 2005 memoranda justifying its use. In [...]

Greg Sargent reported yesterday that Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) wrote to Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, after The Washington Post paraphrased Blair as suggesting that the CIA was never legally required to brief Congress on its controversial “significant actions.”
In a response to Feingold obtained by The Washington Independent, Blair attempted to clear up [...]

You knew it was coming.  Marcy Wheeler and Greg Sargent report that Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-Texas), the chairman of the House intelligence committee, will open an investigation into the lack of disclosure to Congress of the CIA’s “significant actions” canceled by Director Leon Panetta — and as part of that inquiry, they’ll get into what [...]