The Man From Monterey Rights Langley

Despite its world-wide reputation and how it is portrayed in countless novels and films, the Central Intelligence Agency has for some time now been laboring without the confidence of the rest of the USG. While on paper it still was the head honcho of USG's spawling intelligence community, in reality the CIA had lost all credibility and eyes rolled across Washington, DC when it gave a straight answer.

Writing today in the Washington Post, David Ignatius sets forth the work Beltway veteran Leon Panetta has done since becoming the Director of Central Intelligence.

CIA Director Leon Panetta has a new trophy in his seventh-floor office at
Langley: It's the fuse from a Chinese-made rocket that he helped disable (with a
CIA technician hovering close by) during a visit to an agency paramilitary
training base.

That's a good metaphor for Panetta himself as he completes 14 months as CIA director. He has defused a number of bombs that threatened to blow up what was left of the agency's credibility, and in the process he has focused the CIA on getting the job done.

Panetta was a controversial choice because his experience was in politics, rather than espionage. But that Washington savvy was just what the beleaguered agency needed
most. Panetta took on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi after she accused CIA officials
of lying, and he quietly prevailed. Congressional Democrats have tempered their
CIA-bashing, recognizing that Panetta is carrying out President Obama's
policies.

Panetta also defused the ticking bomb of the intelligence reorganization. When Adm. Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, tried to assert authority over CIA operations, Panetta protested to the White House. He complained that he couldn't operate on that basis -- and that Blair should have no more say over CIA operations than over those at the FBI. Panetta won that fight, too. Blair is now focusing on his main challenge of coordinating the sprawling intelligence community.

That's the bureaucratic angle. How has Panetta handled the operational angle? Let's let one of the nation's leading liberal newspapers tell us what the DCI nominated by the most liberal President in the history of the United States has been up to.

The surprise with Panetta is how aggressively this Democratic former congressman
has been waging the war against al-Qaeda. One official describes the Predator
campaign to assassinate al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders as "the most aggressive
operation in the history of the agency." The tempo has increased to two or three
strikes a week, up roughly fourfold from the George W. Bush years.

To provide intelligence for the Predator strikes, the agency is
running clandestine sources inside Pakistan and paying off tribal leaders on
both sides of the border. The agency's assets are hardly squeaky clean: They are
former terrorists who have decided to flip. And Panetta has authority to direct
the Predators to hit "signature" targets, meaning vehicles or training locations
that are connected to known al-Qaeda operatives.

This is good news, but let's think about this for a moment. For years, the Democratic Party and its institutional supporters--from NGOs to labor unions to establishment law firms to the university professoriate--loudly denounced such strikes as further evidence that President Bush had gone rogue, was engaging in illegal assassination and that the U.S. was guilty of war crimes.

Regarding this story, then, I am of two minds.

First, it is gratifying that even an openly left-wing administration is still recognizably American enough to know that enemies exist and that in the case of certain kinds of enemies taking them out is the only proper response.

Second, it is very frightening that almost all of the United States' legal, political, business and academic elite were able to turn on a dime and support a policy in silence that yesterday they had stated was nothing less than crimes against humanity.