“When you’re confirmed, as I’m sure you will be,” Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.) says he looks forward to working with CIA Director-designate Leon Panetta.
Bond moves on immediately to assuring Panetta that the Senate intelligence committee seeks to act in “a spirit of bipartisanship.” So what was all this More…
CIA Director-designate Leon Panetta clarified his statement yesterday that there may be a class of terrorism detainee who can’t be tried in court, nor transferred to another country nor released. Or, at least he reiterated it.
Some detainees are so dangerous, he said, that “they may not More…
Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.) is harping on CIA Director-designate Leon Panetta for saying that people were rendered for torture. “What evidence are you basing that on, or would you like to retract that?”
“The press has identified extraordinary renditions, but no one has quite defined it,” he says, offering a More…
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) says she “has to live … every day” with her vote for the Iraq war, which was based on the “dead wrong” National Intelligence Estimate from 2002 on Iraq’s nonexistent WMDs.
“It’s really important to have analysts who are trained, who are aware of the country More…
The hearings are back underway …
Here’s Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), back in full effect. He wants to know about prosecutions for interrogators, which CIA Director-designate Leon Panetta rejected yesterday.
“My view is whether you agree or disagree with the opinions issued by the Attorney General [in the Bush administration] More…
The hearing is wrapping up. Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.) laments that some of the Republican senators have left “thinking they wouldn’t get a chance to ask questions.” He wants another bite of the apple on CIA Director-Designate Leon Panetta’s rendition history. “Were you fully advised of the extraordinary renditions that More…
CIA Director-designate Leon Panetta gave an odd answer when asked about future long-term detentions by Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.). He didn’t really go so far beyond the standard post-executive order line — there will be a review by the cabinet; the CIA is out of the long-term-detention business; Bayh seemed More…
How would CIA Director-designate Leon Panetta prevent the next dubious intelligence-based public presentation, a la then-Secretary of State Colin Powell’s 2003 disgrace on Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction before the United Nations?
“I promised the president of the United States that if I was fortunate enough to be More…
CIA Director-designate Leon Panetta took on a right-wing myth head on, saying that even in the hypothetical “ticking bomb case” — OMG there’s a bomb hidden in Times Square that this detainee knows about we better waterboard him or everyone will die GET ME JACK BAUER — you shouldn’t torture More…
As expected, CIA Director-designate Leon Panetta says that he doesn’t think anyone in CIA should be prosecuted for torturing detainees since they were told by the Bush administration’s legal experts that such actions were legal. “Waterboarding is torture and it’s wrong,” he told Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich). “Those individuals operated More…
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