A story in Sunday's Washington Post depicting Guantanamo prisoner files in "disarray" is wrong, says the former Pentagon official in charge of terrorist detainee affairs.

According to the Jan. 25 account, Charles D. "Cully" Stimson, who served as deputy assistant defense secretary for detainee affairs in 2006-2007, "said he had persistent problems in attempts to assemble all information on individual cases."

Only "threats to recommend the release or transfer of a detainee" persuaded the CIA to "cough up a sentence or two," Stimson was quoted as saying.

But in a brief interview to double-check his statement Monday afternoon, Stimson maintained, "I never said they were in disarray."

"Through this unique alliance, clients will have access to advice and expertise from attorneys, diplomats, negotiators, financiers, lobbyists, policy- and opinion-makers, and intelligence analysts in Washington and around the world."

"He provided strategic policy advice on the region while serving at the White House Drug Policy Office, Office of the Secretary of Defense, the U.S. Southern Command, and the Army Staff. He also ran the Army Operations Center 24-hour Intelligence Watch, where he oversaw crisis-action support teams for Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and numerous disaster relief deployments. Mr. Donehoo was raised in Colombia and has lived in Costa Rica, Panama, and El Salvador..."

"In that time, he will co-teach the Studies in Grand Strategy seminar and will also teach undergraduate and graduate courses in international studies and international relations, the University said," according to the campus paper.

CIA ground teams operating on the vaguely determined Afghan-Pakistan frontier are well aware of  the presidential executive order banning assassinations, says a recent returnee from the region's fighting.

The problem is that al Qaeda suspects and their Taliban supporters don't wear what's normally considered a uniform, which puts American hit teams in potential legal jeopardy for violating Executive Order 12333, which bans the CIA from carrying out assassinations.

The order was signed by President Reagan in 1981 following congressional investigations into alleged CIA assassination plots targeting foreign leaders.

So the teams in Afghanistan have a simple rule of thumb:  If the target "looks military," i.e., carrying a weapon or walking in the company of other armed men, he's a legitimate target.

If there's an absence of same, the target is considered a civilian, and the decision gets bucked up the chain of command for further deliberation.

Of course, this may be a distinction without a difference. The CIA-administered Predator drones have been targeting al Qaeda "civilians" for some time now.

On Sept. 17, 2001, President Bush said Osama bin Laden was "wanted dead or alive," prompting a flurry of questions about U.S. assassination policy.

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said that E.O.12333 remained in effect, The Washington Post reported at the time, noting that Presidents Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter had issued their own executive orders on the subject, numbers 11905 and 12306, respectively.

While the directives forbid assassination, they do not define the term, Post reporter Barton Gellman noted.

Fleischer declined four times to interpret the text, he reported.

"I'm going to just repeat my words and others will figure out the exact implications of them, but it does not inhibit the nation's ability to act in self-defense," Fleischer said.

UPDATE: The CIA ground team veteran had emphasized that the agency and its operatives took care to operate within the law, a point that could have been made more clear in the first version of this story.

A CIA spokesman, for example, thought it had portrayed the agency badly. 

"This report is truly bizarre, an apparent part of the cottage industry dedicated to portraying the agency as careless and slapdash," CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said late Thursday.

Word hasn't leaked yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if President-elect Barack Obama has already figured out that when he wants quick answers to what's going on in the world, the last person to ask is the head of U.S. intelligence.

The steady deterioration of personnel and standards of intelligence analysis, especially at the CIA, has been going on for decades, a number of former top intelligence officials I know say.

The tip of the rot surfaces from time to time, such as with the 9/11 surprise and the gimcrackery reports on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

The dogs howl and the caravan moves on. Nothing changes, many well placed former intelligence officials have been telling me.  But the current, possibly fatal dangers we face demand the problems be fixed.

We've been spending too much time chattering about the operations side of intelligence lately, they say, in particular whether Leon Panetta, the former OMB head and chief of staff to President Clinton, is up to handling the spies and back-alley guys and gals.

But officials have been reminding me that it was the dismally poor analysis of intelligence that enabled President Bush to lead the nation into the disastrous invasion of Iraq -- not faulty espionage (such as it was).   

And it's the analysis served up by the CIA and other spy agencies, they point out, that will guide President Obama's decisions on Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and North Korea, among other front-burner emergencies.

And that, say many rueful former officials, is where the agencies need a severe spanking.

Can Obama do it where so many of his predecessors have failed? One can only hope that the erstwhile professor, forged by the Socratic methods of his Harvard Law School instructors, will lay the lumber on his intelligence chiefs and briefers, asking them harder questions than they're used to.

Such as, "How do you know that?" 

Now, this is a staple of a good newsroom. It's a question editors ask reporters, and good reporters ask sources, all the time. I like to think that an old-fashioned city editor would have laughed the pre-war intelligence on Iraq out of their newsrooms.

But the melancholy truth, according to my well placed sources, is that even after the  intelligence disasters of 9/11 and Iraq, President Obama has a better chance of getting up-to-the-minute information on, say, Hamas, from newspapers than he does the PDB - the President's Daily Brief - served up by the Directorate of National Intelligence and CIA.

"So," I asked a former intelligence agency head over seafood this week, "if I'm President Obama, and I call Leon Panetta into the Oval office and ask him to tell me how Hamas leaders are holding up under the Israeli assault, will he be able to tell me?"

The former official shook his head, nearly blushing.   

No.  "That's not the kind of information" they focus on.

"Well, what do they focus on?" I asked.

If the viability of Hamas isn't important right now, what is?
 
He said the CIA, State Department and Pentagon intelligence agencies do have people specializing on the Palestinians, and even Hamas. But it's not likely they would have up-to-the-minute information on whether, say, in response to Israeli military pressure, its leaders are fighting among each other, unifying, or even where they are.

They just don't have that kind of stuff, he said.

Wow.

What about the NSA? I asked. Could the CIA's Hamas guy call his NSA counterpart and get cell phone intercepts from Gaza to help fill in some holes?

"They won't give it to him, because they don't want their information to help CIA look good."

Right.

And the National Intelligence Directorate, which was set up to put an end to that kind of horse play?

A work in progress, he smiled.  

Ok then: What can CIA briefers tell Obama about Hamas next Wednesday morning?

"They would tell them what they know," said, like squids squirting ink, until they could get back to headquarters and ask around.

But even then, said this former official, Panetta or Adm. Dennis Blair, the incoming head of National Intelligence, would probably not have anyone on staff to answer such specific questions.

Unbelievable, even to me.

He agreed: Unbelievable.

He nodded. "You tell people this and they don't believe it."

This from a man who has devoted his entire adult life to U.S. intelligence.

But doesn't the CIA have guys like Robert Redford in "Three Days of the Condor"? I asked, half joking, guys who read books, who specialize in more or less arcane things?

Doesn't it have people immersing themselves in subjects like Hamas, as intelligence intellectuals? A CIA version of New York Times columnist and author Thomas Friedman, to name just one of the better known?

Not so much any more, he said. There was a time when the CIA and other agencies hired and encouraged analysts to drill down deeply in, say, Chinese wheat harvests. 

But no longer, he insisted.  And there's little intellectual curiosity in the analyst ranks today, he maintained. A roguish kind of independence among the best journalists is neither sought, nor encouraged, in U.S. intelligence these days, he said.   

Everyone in the spy agencies is feverish about "current intelligence," writing reports that might get the attention of their bosses, maybe even the President of the United States, he said.

But isn't the current leadership structure of Hamas - I kept coming back to that - "current intelligence"?

No, not necessarily, he said. "Current intelligence" is the big-picture stuff that CIA chiefs like to show off to the president -- "what we know about Iran,"  usually larded with sexy secrets -- not necessarily what the president needs to know. 

It's quite likely that the analysts' bosses might not have asked them to track the state of Hamas, he said.  And when their bosses haven't tasked them with such a challenge, the analysts then to be "passive," fixating on a hot piece of secret information that came in over the transom, no matter how incidental to the more critical question: what's Hamas up to?

After much resistance, CIA and DNI finally did set up an Open Source Center with analysts, some of whom don't even have security clearances, working from unclassified material. And they've proved to be very good, some experts say, giving the spy agency a fresh view on developments ranging from Iran to North Korea. The final verdict is far from in, but one well informed former official said that on at least one subject he was familiar with, the regular CIA analysts "couldn't hold a candle" to the Open Source Center's product.

But of course, that begs the question of exactly what the 16 agencies of the so-called U.S. intelligence community -- who still hoard information like children at day care, according to most accounts -- are actually doing with $65 billion a year.

And what, especially, should be done to fix the CIA, with all those floors upon floors of people scattered across Northern Virgina gathering and analyzing secret information?  

"Blow up the place," my lunchtime guest said, "and start over."

Unfortunately, that's not a new idea, either.

And statistics.  Yesterday's numbers showing the skewed priorities of the Treasury Department in throwing more investigative resources at petty violations of the Cuba embargo than uncovering illicit financial channels to Iran and al Qaeda were incomplete.

It turns out that the data, as presented by Ann Louise Bardach in an opinion piece  in Sunday's Washington Post that I cited approvingly, was not quite up to date.
 
Bardach rightly noted a 2007 government study which found that 61 percent of the investigations carried out by the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) since 2000 had "been aimed at just one target: Cuba," and that "between 2000 and 2005, OFAC penalties for violations of the Cuban embargo represented more than 70 percent of all the penalties the office imposed."

As Max Baucus, the Montana Democrat who chairs the Senate Finance Committee wondered out loud at a hearing last year,  "Is the office setting its priorities correctly?"

"In 2003, the Committee learned that two employees were assigned to go after Saddam's missing funds. And two employees were assigned to go after Osama Bin Laden's money. But 21 employees were assigned to go after those who violate Cuba sanctions," Baucus noted caustically.

His questions were directed mainly at Stuart A. Levey, Treasury's Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. 

In written answers to Baucus's queries - which I just discovered yesterday, thanks to Andrew Cochran and Douglas Farah at The Counterterrorism Blog - a more complete picture of Treasury's efforts emerged.

The statistics Levey produced show the department has begun to shift its priorities to where they belong. Partly that's because of  bureaucratic changes at the department, which in 2004 created the Terrorism and Financial Intelligence section.

As Farah informed me, the TFI office brought over the terrorism experts and their cases from the Office of Foreign Assets Control, including the Iran account. Since OFAC only designates terrorist entities and doesn't actually investigate cases anymore, its stats showed skewed and wasted resources spent on Cuba. 

Or, as Levey put it to Baucus:

"OFAC has adopted new strategies with respect to sanctions violations in recent years that have resulted in a significant reduction in Cuba penalty cases. Enforcement resources committed to Cuba are being reduced and enforcement efforts are being targeted in a more effective way by concentrating on those facilitating illegal travel to Cuba."

 The number of OFAC cases against Cuba violations, Levey said, had dropped from a peak of 587 in 2004 to 32 in 2007.

Levey conceded that in 2003, OFAC had 21 fulltime employees administering and implementing cases against violations of the Cuba trade sanctions. Since 2004, though, "most of OFAC's Cuba-related work has been centered in its Licensing Division ... processing applications for travel to Cuba to market and sell agricultural products."

Of the office's 155 fulltime employees, he said, six in Washington and five in Miami "are devoted full-time to the Cuba program."

To me, that's still about 10 too many, 10 financial sleuths who should be working on al Qaeda instead of this relic of the cold war, Cuba.

But the numbers don't lie -- or do they?

"But a 2007 government study found that 61 percent of the office's investigations since 2000 had been aimed at just one target: Cuba," Bardach reports. "Between 2000 and 2005, OFAC penalties for violations of the Cuban embargo represented more than 70 percent of all the penalties the office imposed."

"At the hearing, OFAC acknowledged that it had just four employees searching for the funds of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, as opposed to more than 20 full-time investigators charged with hunting down suspected violators of the embargo."

"Iranian banks illegally shifted billions of dollars through American financial institutions in recent years, and authorities suspect some of the money may have been used to finance Iran's nuclear and missile programs."

"It 'stripped' information that would have identified the transfers in order to deceive American financial institutions, which are barred from doing business with Iranian banks ..."

"This is the pipeline at its best. One simply has to shift addresses, at least on paper, the companies go again, and the pipeline is unclogged and continues to carry its vital products. The flexibility of the pipeline and its ability to adapt and reroute itself in a very short period of time is one of its greatest strengths." 

CIA legend Charles E. Allen is departing the Department of Homeland Security on Jan. 20, according to a colleague, drawing an end to a 50-year career in government intelligence work.

"Charlie," as he is universally known, joined the CIA in 1958 and spent the next 47 years climbing the ladder through a variety of analytical and managerial roles, culminating in his appointment as the agency's assistant director for collection.

In 2005 he joined DHS with the title of chief intelligence officer, the department's first, reporting directly to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. He is also its undersecretary for intelligence and analysis.

A source close to Allen, 72, said he would be retiring Jan. 20 and immediately report back to the CIA for its 90-day retirement debriefing process. He disclosed the news to his staff.

DHS spokesman William R. Knocke initially said he was not aware of Allen's retirement plans, but late Friday confirmed his departure on Jan. 20.

"Every American has benefited from Charlie's remarkable service, and we all owe him a deep debt of gratitude,"  Knocke said in a statement.

Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, I-Conn., called Allen "an unsung American hero."
 
"Although he will be returning to the CIA, his departure from DHS is a great loss," said Lieberman, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, in a statement.

Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif. who chairs the House Homeland Security subcommittee on intelligence, also praised Allen.

"Charlie Allen was legendary at the CIA, and his extensive experience proved invaluable in putting DHS's Intelligence & Analysis function on the map," Harman said.

"Now that the office is established, his successor needs to do some heavy lifting to ensure real participation by state and local personnel and far better two-way information sharing." 

In Dec. 2007 Chertoff awarded Allen, a native of North Carolina, the Secretary's Gold Medal, DHS' top employee award.

Lieberman said the nation is safer because of Allen's work as DHS intelligence chief.

"Our nation is more secure today as a result of his lifetime of service," Lieberman said. "He ... leaves the (intelligence) division in excellent readiness for his successor. I wish him the best of luck and warmest regards for the future."

But John Rollins, the first chief of staff of intelligence under DHS Secretary Tom Ridge, said Allen's legacy would be mixed.

"In all fairness, Charlie inherited an organization lacking focus, personnel, and resources," Rollins said.

But "many detractors will point to the Office of Intelligence's inability to provide timely and relevant terrorism related information to state, local and private sector entities."

"With that said," Rollins added, "my biggest concern is the office's continued lack of progress in cultivating and assessing domestic threat information. As the primary customer and contributor to DHS' mission, my hope is that individuals with state, local, and private sector experience will assume senior leadership positions in the Department, thus improving the quality of the Office of Intelligence's products and services."

"(T) he Israeli attack on Gaza, widely seen here as an act of aggression enabled by the United States, has become conflated in the minds of some Afghans with U.S. motives and actions in Afghanistan," she wrote on Jan. 5. 

"Taliban propaganda and sermons by conservative clerics," she adds, 'have contributed to a notion of the United States as an occupying power that seeks to subjugate the Muslim world."

"We have cable TV, and we know what the Americans are doing. First they attacked Iraq. They didn't find any nuclear weapons, but they killed a lot of Muslims. Now they are supporting Israel in killing innocent Palestinians. If they have come here to help us, we will welcome them. But if they come to destroy us, we will drive them out like we drove out the Russians. Real Muslims only need the protection of God."

"At best, it would be a tactical gain, but also an immense strategic loss," said Ali Jalali, a former Afghan interior minister and now a visiting professor at the National Defense University, noting that by fragmenting power and undermining the authority of the central government, the strategy in the long run could actually worsen the instability it sought to ameliorate.

He called this "effort to gain peace through manipulating tribal dynamics" a "colonial approach."

A Vietnam veterans group is suing the CIA for "thousands of secret experiments to test toxic chemical and biological substances under code names such as MKULTRA.," its attorneys said today.

The suit was filed in federal court in northern California on behalf of the Washington-based Vietnam Veterans of America, Inc., and six aging veterans with multiple diseases and ailments "tied to a diabolical and secret testing program, whereby U.S. military personnel were deliberately exposed, by government and military agencies, to chemical and biological weapons and other toxins without informed consent," the Morrison & Foerster law firm said in a press release.

The firm said the alleged CIA research program was launched in the early 1950s and continued through at least 1976 at the Edgewood Arsenal and Fort Detrick, Md., as well as universities and hospitals across the country contracted by the CIA.

Defendants include the CIA, the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense and various government officials responsible for these agencies.  

"The CIA secretly provided financing, personnel, and direction for the experiments, which were mainly conducted or contracted by the Army," the suit says.

According to the veterans, the experiments, conducted over a 25 year period, included:

·    the use of troops to test nerve gas, psychochemicals, and thousands of other toxic chemical or biological substances, and ... the insertion of septal implants in the brains of subjects in ... mind control experiments that went awry, leaving many civilian and military subjects with permanent disabilities;

·    the failure to secure informed consent and other widespread failures to follow the precepts of U.S. and international law regarding the use of human subjects, including the 1953 Wilson Directive and the Nuremberg Code;

·    a ... refusal by the DoD, the CIA, and the Army to ... locate the victims of their ... experiments or to provide health care or compensation to them;

·    the  destruction by the CIA of evidence and files

The plaintiffs have scheduled a news conference Wednesday at the San Francisco offices of the Morrison & Foerster firm.

UPDATE: CIA spokeswoman Marie Harf said the agency would have no comment "on specific matters before the court."

But, she added, "CIA activities related to MK-ULTRA have been thoroughly investigated, and the CIA fully cooperated with each of the investigations. In addition, tens of thousands of pages from documents related to the program have been declassified and released to the public.

"MK-ULTRA was investigated in 1975 by the Rockefeller Commission and the Church Committee, and in 1977 by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research," Harf added.

Several books have been written about the CIA drug experiments, which began with a Korean War-era mind-control race with Soviet and Chinese scientists. The idea was to create an American version of "The Manchurian Candidate," or drug-controlled assassin.

"These are people who are sweating blood everyday to make things happen and living for the day that somebody is going to come in, institute real reform and turn the CIA into the vital, effective organization it should be.  To them this choice just says that no such changes are impending and that all they can look forward to is business as usual."

"I am a big supporter of President-Elect Obama," Faddis added, "but Panetta is not the guy we need to run CIA right now. He may be a very good man. (But) he knows nothing about intelligence, particularly human intelligence" -- recruiting and managing spies.

"To fix that you need to get down in the weeds and really address the nuts and bolts of how CIA is performing its mission.  You cannot do that unless you understand the business, and, frankly, you probably can't do it unless you have been out on the street doing the work yourself."

"Other qualities are capacity to make decisions when there are no easy options and to take responsibility for them, situational awareness about the secondary and tertiary consequences of those decisions, good judgment about what is right, true, or advisable when presented with conflicting assessments -- a common situation in a field where you are almost always dealing with incomplete information.  An instinct for dealing with people -- at the core of the job.  The capacity to communicate clearly to a work force that needs an understanding of the larger picture in order to fit their discrete jobs into the broader mission."

"No matter how well intentioned he is or how intelligent, he does not have the background.  He does not even speak their language. He will end up like Porter Goss did, sitting in an office, talking on the phone, and, at ground level, nothing will change," Faddis maintained.

Many CIA veterans and their friends in Congress are generally groaning over the choice of Leon Panetta over an "intelligence professional" to run the nation's premier spy agency.

"The message is, 'I don't want to hear anything out of the CIA. Make it go away. No scandals. Keep it quiet,'" a former senior CIA manager told Laura Rozen for her new  Foreign Policy.com blog.

"They put over there a guy who is a political loyalist, who will keep everything nice and quiet, but who won't know a good piece of intelligence from a shi**y piece of intelligence, and wouldn't know a good intelligence officer" from a bad one."

Lamented another former top CIA officer, one who was hoping to get Obama's nod: "So much for a professional at the top."

"I find the choice of Leon Panetta to head the CIA a curious one," another former spy told Wired's Noah Shachtman at the Danger Room. 
 

"On the one hand, if you are looking to pick a nation's top spook, it is generally a good idea to pick someone with more than a cursory exposure to the intelligence business. It is also more than a little annoying that we can't seem to find a CIA chief that hasn't spent all of their adult life playing politics."

Speaking of which, my CQ colleague Tim Starks drew frosty responses about Panetta from Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the incoming chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and the man she is replacing, John D. "Jay" Rockefeller IV of West Virginia.

 "I was not informed about the selection of Leon Panetta to be the CIA director. I know nothing about this, other than what I've read," she said in a written statement in response to a query from Starks. "My position has consistently been that I believe the agency is best-served by having an intelligence professional in charge at this time."

Likewise, Rockefeller was worried that Panetta "has no intelligence experience," an aide told Starks,  "because he has believed this has always been a position that should be outside of the political realm."

Panetta's limited intelligence experience demands that his deputy "be an insider and must have strong internal management skills," a senior retired operative told me.

I, too, was one of those who thought the president-elect should find someone who knows their way around the Langley labyrinths well enough to fend off self-serving bureaucrats and whip that place into shape, especially by getting rid of mid-level managers who are routinely described to me as unimaginative and overcautious.

But the public, and by extension, Obama, obviously doesn't share as high a regard for "intelligence professionals" as we inside-the-Beltwayers.  

Indeed, to many people, "intelligence" and "professional" hardly belong in the same sentence after the surprise attacks of 9/11, the Iraq WMD fiasco, the continuing success of Osama Bin Laden in eluding capture, and, of course, the false confessions of top bin Laden lieutenants under torture.

The infamous "Curveball" episode, in which CIA bosses took the word of a lone informant they never even talked to as the main basis for declaring Saddam Hussein had biological weapons, showed the agency's standards of accuracy "were lower than a tabloid newspaper's," in the words of one disgusted CIA operations veteran.    

Among Washington's big hitters, moreover, running the CIA was no longer considered a plum, I was told, since the creation of the National Intelligence Directorate displaced the agency as the President's daily briefer and primus inter pares in the spy community.

People who might've jumped at the chance to run it in the past now saw it as second seat in the violin section, some longtime intelligence observers were telling me.

"I wish I could say that I disagree, but I can't. It's spot on," said one top former intelligence agency head, reflecting a sentiment I heard from others.

"Everybody wants to run the whole show, especially since it gives them 'player' status in Washington, and the opportunity to hobnob with the President. Never mind that the [intelligence] community they preside over is broken, long overdue for an overhaul, and mainly turns out crap."

But if the "intelligence professionals" take a deep breath, they may find that Obama's choice is the best thing that could happen to the CIA, at least in one regard: the former White House budget director, chief of staff, congressman, onetime Republican (a Nixon appointee) and longtime Washington power broker is hardly likely to play second fiddle to a mere general or admiral occupying the DNI's chair.

One way to look at the not-yet-announced appointment is that Obama is putting his own man at the top of a very sensitive agency, one that could make or break his presidency, in the same way that JFK installed his brother Bobby at the Justice Department.

Adm. Dennis Blair, the all but officially announced DNI nominee, is not likely to miss that.

Harry B. "Skip" Brandon, a former deputy head of counterintelligence at the FBI, compared Obama's selection of Panetta to Jimmy Carter's appointment of federal judge William H. Webster to run a troubled FBI in 1978. Nine years later, President Ronald Reagan turned to Webster to take over an even more troubled CIA, which was caught up in the so-called Iran-Contra, arms-for-hostages scandal.

"He could bring a bipartisan credibility to the CIA," Brandon said of Panetta, "and calm the troubled waters there." He could also be "an honest broker on Capitol Hill," Brandon said.

And as more than one close observer put it, "No one's saying Leon who?"

By all accounts, moreover, Panetta was a strong manager and effective chief of staff in the Clinton White House, "an honest, straight shooter," in the words of one Obama booster who asked not to be named.

And from his stints as OMB director, and before that, chairmanship of the House Budget Committee, "he knows the entire scope of the intelligence budget," this person added. As chief of staff, he also sat in on the President's daily intelligence brief.

More recently, Panetta was a member of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, which  recommended a timetable with U.S. troop withdrawals.

But it's not likely he'll get a free pass in his confirmation hearings.

As I wrote earlier today, Panetta's nomination is likely to give Republicans fresh ammunition to reopen questions about the Clinton administration's counterterrorism record, which Republican critics maintain was lackluster at best after the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, in 1993.

Panetta was budget director and later chief of staff during the first Clinton term.

Considering the Republicans had the White House when the 9/11 hijackers came calling, of course -- and by most accounts sloughed off warnings headlined "Bin Laden determined to strike in US" -- there's only so far they can take that line of attack.

But if only one thing is clear from the Panetta nomination, it's this: President Obama intends to make a clear break with the intelligence policies and personnel of the Bush administration.

"Having served in Congress in the wake of Watergate and the domestic surveillance abuses that surfaced during the 1970s, Mr. Panetta understands how a democratic government should operate," said Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., a member of the House Intelligence Committee and chair of its oversight Panel since 2007.

"We need the CIA to collect reliable, actionable intelligence in ways that respect American values and honor the Constitution," Holt added.

"Mr. Panetta's background and reputation indicate he would serve the intelligence community, the President, and the country well." 

President-elect Obama's selection of former congressman and White House official Leon E. Panetta to run the CIA is likely to give Republicans fresh ammunition to reopen questions about the Clinton administration's counterterrorism policies.

Critics have long maintained that Clinton was uninterested in intelligence issues and slow to come to grips with the threat of Islamist terrorism, even after the first attack on the World Trade Center, in 1993.

Panetta was budget director and later chief of staff during the first Clinton term.

In an interview three months after the 9/11 attacks, Panetta said that senior Clinton aides viewed terrorism as just one of many pressing global problems.

"Clinton was aware of the threat and sometimes he would mention it," Panetta told the New York Times. But the "big issues" in the president's first term, he said, were "Russia, Eastern bloc, Middle East peace, human rights, rogue nations and then terrorism."

"When it came to terrorism, Clinton administration officials continued the policy of their predecessors, who had viewed it primarily as a crime to be solved and prosecuted by law enforcement agencies," the Times said.

Information gathered through grand jury investigations by the Justice Department after the 1993 bombing pointed to overseas, but the information was not shared with the CIA because of the "wall" that existed then between intelligence and law enforcement operations.

As for Afghanistan, the CIA virtually abandoned the region in 1989 after defeating the Red Army, and the Clinton administration (and Congress) did nothing to reverse that policy, leaving the spy agency with few sources to follow the emergence of al Qaeda.

Another Clinton aide back then, George Stephanopoulos, said he believed the 1993 attack did not gain more attention because, in the end, it "wasn't a successful bombing."

"It wasn't the kind of thing where you walked into a staff meeting and people asked, what are we doing today in the war against terrorism?" he added.

It wasn't until a truck bomb tore into the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, killing 168 people, that plans to reorganize the government's counterterrorism efforts were revived, Panetta said.

If Oklahoma City could be hit, a terrorist attack could "happen at the White House,"  Panetta said.

Two months after the bombing, the Times reported, "Mr. Clinton ordered the government to intensify the fight against terrorism. The order did not give agencies involved in the fight more money, nor did it end the bureaucratic turf battles among them."

Three years later, Clinton responded to the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa with cruise missile strikes on Sudan and Afghanistan, moves that drew caustic comments from Republican presidential aspirant George W. Bush   during the 2000 campaign.

Panetta was appointed chief of staff to Clinton in 1994, and served in that position until 1997.

In 1996 he was handed the duty of informing then-CIA Director John M. Deutch that his appointment would not be renewed in the second administration.

He was a Democratic congressman from California's 17th district from 1977 to 1993.

Panetta was also a member of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, which recommended a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops.

He is firmly on the record against the use of torture to interrogate terrorist suspects.

"We cannot and we must not use torture under any circumstances. We are better than that," Panetta wrote in The Washington Monthly last spring.