CIA chief vows to treat Congress better
CIA Director Leon E. Panetta says the relationship between the intelligence agency and Congress has “had a lot of problems” under the last administration and “has to be repaired,” which he said is one of his top priorities.
Panetta, a former House member and top White House official who was sworn in Feb. 13, told a media roundtable Wednesday that the “relationship was badly damaged” and that he hopes “to restore the trust between this Agency and Capitol Hill.”
“Frankly, I can’t do my job unless I have their trust.” he said. “And since I’m a creature of the Hill and understand what it means to be a member up there and have this kind of information, I’m prepared to try to do whatever I can to try to repair that relationship.”
Panetta made his comments at a meeting with two dozen reporters who were allowed into his conference room inside the agency’s heavily fortified headquarters compound, the George Bush Center for Intelligence in McLean, Va. Plates piled with big cookies were in the center of a massive conference table in a room a few doors from the director’s office.
The hall is lined with offices with secure doors opened with safe-like dials.
Facing a portrait of President Obama on the opposite wall, Panetta said that under the Bush administration, there was at times “a deliberate effort to not develop firm ground rules” about congressional notification “in order to be able to do this in a haphazard manner depending on what the issues were.”
“ I just think that’s wrong,” he said. “This country has to operate by a set of rules that are in line with our Constitution and in line with the laws of this country. … We swear to support and defend that Constitution in taking these jobs. I think that, unfortunately, there wasn’t a clear set of ground rules her … in terms of how to deal with the Congress.”
Panetta said that on some sensitive matters, the top congressional leaders (the “gang of four,” in Hill paralance) were notified by the Bush administration, while other times the intelligence committees were included (the “gang of eight”).
“One of the things I’d like to do, frankly, is set some ground rules as to when we do notify the Congress and who we do have to notify,” he said. “Do we notify the gang of eight; do we notify all of the members plus their staffs … so that we all know the rules that we’re operating by.”
At his confirmation hearing, Panetta vowed “a clean break” from some controversial Bush-era polices. He told the reporters: “If we stand by our ideals, if we stand by the beliefs that we have about what this country is all about, I think it makes us stronger, not only here but throughout the world.”
For one thing, he said, “We are closing black sites,” a reference to secret prisons abroad used to hold and question suspected terrorist combatants.
The phrase “war on terror,” a hallmark of President George W. Bush’s White House, is rarely used in the Obama administration, but Panetta that “there’s no question this is a war.”
Asked about Predator strikes are being launched from Pakistani airbases, he said: “Nothing has changed our efforts to go after terrorists and nothing will change those efforts. We are continuing at a level of action that is on a par with the challenges we’re confronting. None of that has diminished and none of it will.”
“There’s no question this is a war,” he said. “There are those who threaten us to come here and kill Americans. … CIA is engaged on the front lines to try to develop the intelligence necessary to make sure that that doesn’t happen.”
In his opening remarks, Panetta said: “Al-Qaeda has obviously suffered some key setbacks in recent months and with the …strong support of the president, the vice president, national security director, we are not going to let up on [counterterrorism]. We are going to continue to pursue. We are going to continue to bring pressure.”
Panetta, who will turn 71 in June, is returning to government after a remarkable career in which he was a Democratic House member from California for 15 years, then chief of staff and budget director for President Bill Clinton. Panetta’s formal residence remains in Carmel Valley, Calif., near the Leon & Sylvia Panetta Institute for Public Policy, which he and his wife started at California State University, Monterey Bay.
Asked about his new life, the director chuckled and said: “I probably should have my wife answer this one.” Then he went on to say: “I can’t go anyplace without a security detail. … Even as Chief of Staff I’ve never been in that situation. But of course that was before 9/11, so it’s a different kind of world.”
“I guess I’m a sucker for challenges and this is one of them,” Panetta said. “When the President called me on this and indicated he wanted me to consider this, he said, ‘Look, I need somebody I can trust, I need somebody who will be independent and will bring honest judgments on intelligence to me.’
“And when I looked at the situation in the world, … I kind of viewed this job as an opportunity to be able to take that kind of challenge on,” he said. “And I don’t regret it. … This is a fascinating and challenging world and there’s a lot of responsibilities associated with it, and I kind of look forward to those challenges.”
Breaking news, Panetta revealed that “at the administration’s request, the intelligence community -- with the CIA in the lead -- is producing a publication each day focusing on global economic issues,” since “what happens in the economy … is affecting the stability of the world.”
“We’ve seen the impact of a worldwide recession occur throughout the world,” he said. “As an intelligence agency, we’ve got to pay attention to that because we have to know whether or not the economic impacts in China or Russia or any place else are in fact influencing then the policies of those countries when it comes to foreign affairs and when it comes to the issues that we care about.”
Asked if any new prisoners would be going into the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, before it is closed on Obama’s orders, Panetta said: “Not that I’m aware of.”
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