Obama announces intelligence team – CNN.com.

I’m going to violate my own rule, right now, openly and honestly.  Criticism has been begged for, and I cannot resist.  There is small comfort to be had in the fact that Obama did take action on someething, and therefor this is not empty blathery.

Leon Panetta is going to be named as Director of CIA.  To say he is not qualified is to miss the point.  It is difficult to know where to begin explaining why, so bear with me.

The intelligence community and by extension the work it does, is one of the most misunderstood and thankless jobs one can do.  While the same can be said of other jobs, those jobs can usually be explained openly and publicly.  This is the grand challenge of secracy, and it sticks its ugly head out in a number of ways that Leon Panetta is ill-equipped to deal with.  We will return to that point, but now let us start with the obvious.

When a person joins the intelligence community, they are vetted (which is a nice way to describe a process that usually involves a microscope and your life).  If the person is taken in, there is an indoctrination that occurs both explicitly and gradually over time.  One gets used to handling classified material.  One knows that it cannot be disseminated to anyone without access.  One knows that doing so holds strict punishment, and hopefully, eventually, one recognizes that doing so holds unquantifieable damage to the security of the nation.  That may sound overblown (”unquantifiable damage to the security of the nation”), mere release of certain information could not only comprimise the information itself, but how it was attained, who was involved and any future action based on that information.  Leon Panetta is a political man, being Chief of Staff is an anti-qualification.  This is a person who uses media outlets strategically to sway oppinion, and the last person on earth you want holding the combination to the safe.  He has zero experience handling classified material (including his supposed high-level consumption of information, which is not the same thing).

Back to secracy and ambiguity.  Organized intelligence didn’t exist in the United States until WWII, that makes CIA and all of the other agencies less than 70 years old.  Prior to their existence, spying was considered truly unseemly and a dark uncivilized activity.  Today, the perception is not quite as bad, but it is still bad.  It is often said that you never hear of the success, only the failures, and that is true.  Part of success is retaining secrecy.  As a result, the things we hear about are torture (I’ll do that in another post), scandal and the infamous bad-intel.  As a result, directors of these agencies often find themselves defending something they cannot fully disclose, and beign forced to do so in the open, where they know they cannot speak openly or freely.
Leon Panetta is a Clinton-era  politician, and it seems almost wrong to declare him guilty by association, but at the same time it is inescapable to do so.  Clinton had that view of intelligence as being uncivilized, evidenced by his outright assault on human-intelligence operators by making them unable to work with people guilty of criminal activity (imagine telling police they cannot use informants who have ever committed a crime).  If Panetta has that same world-view, doesn’t it make sense that he might try to reform CIA into some more civilized organization?  That would be truly destructive.

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