Similarities Between Panetta, Bush as CIA Director | Newsweek Scope

All We Ever Do Anymore is Fight
Mark Hosenball 8/28/2009 12:00:00 AM
CIA Director Leon Panetta, trying to fend off a new Justice Department investigation of agency interrogation practices, got into a shouting match at the White House and was on the verge of quitting—or so went the scuttlebutt in Washington last week. Suggestions that Panetta is leaving are "trash, pure and simple," says Paul Gimigliano, a CIA spokesman. He adds that Panetta, "who's had good jobs in Washington, views his current post as the best of all," and that the CIA chief intends to be at his job "for a good long time." White House spokesman Ben LaBolt says there's "not a shred of truth" to the suggestion Panetta is on the way out.
Don’t Shoot
Mark Hosenball 7/14/2009 12:00:00 AM
A ferocious dispute between the CIA and congressional Democrats centers on an ultrasecret effort launched by agency officials after 9/11 to draw up plans to hunt down and kill terrorists using commando teams similar to those deployed by Israel after the 1972 Munich Olympic massacre, according to a former senior U.S. official.
Watch Who You’re Calling a Liar
Mark Hosenball 7/9/2009 12:00:00 AM
CIA Director Leon Panetta has ordered an internal inquiry into the agency's handling of a contentious and still highly classified intelligence program that has caused a heated dispute between the CIA and Democrats on the House intelligence committee. The move by Panetta appears to be an implicit acknowledgment by the agency that it should have disclosed information about the post-9/11 secret program to Congress much earlier than it did.
Theocracy and its Discontents
Fareed Zakaria 6/20/2009 12:00:00 AM
We are watching the fall of Islamic theocracy in Iran. I don't mean by this that the Iranian regime is about to collapse. It may—I certainly hope it will—but repressive regimes can stick around for a long time. We are watching the failure of the ideology that lay at the basis of the Iranian government. The regime's founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, laid out his special interpretation of political Islam in a series of lectures in 1970. In this interpretation of Shia Islam, Islamic jurists were presumed to have divinely ordained powers to rule as guardians of the society, supreme arbiters not only on matters of morality, but politics as well. When Khomeini established the Islamic Republic of Iran, this idea, velayat-e faqih, rule by the Supreme Jurist, was at its heart. Last week that ideology suffered a fatal blow.
To Disclose Or Not To Disclose: A Fight Inside The CIA
Mark Hosenball 5/30/2009 12:00:00 AM
The honeymoon between CIA director Leon Panetta and veterans of the agency's undercover division—the National Clandestine Service—may be coming to an end. The dispute concerns how much access congressional investigators should be given to ultraclassified CIA "operational traffic" regarding the agency's post-9/11 use of "enhanced interrogation" techniques on suspected terrorists, some of which President Obama and many others have called torture. "Operational traffic" refers to cables from the field to CIA headquarters, and they go well beyond the intelligence reports routinely provided to Congress, chronicling in exacting, minute-by-minute detail who did what to whom, and how detainees responded to particular questions and techniques. Panetta favors greater disclosure. But three current and former officials close to the clandestine division worry that his decision could damage morale and make spies risk-averse.
The Peace Maker
Dan Ephron 5/23/2009 12:00:00 AM
One might be forgiven for thinking that Benjamin Netanyahu and Rahm Emanuel hark from parallel universes. Both are the sons of strong-willed, right-wing Israeli fathers. Both have sought to prove their bona fides as defenders of Israel (Netanyahu by serving in an elite commando unit of the Israeli military; Emanuel by rushing off to volunteer for Israel during the first Gulf War). And both men come from intense, competitive broods consisting of three successful brothers—Netanyahu's older brother, Yoni, was a national hero, the slain commander at Entebbe; Emanuel's younger brother, Ari, is a Hollywood superagent who has earned a kind of immortality, American style, as the inspiration for an HBO character. (The other brother of each is, naturally, a doctor.) Emanuel grew up in Chicago but spent summers in Israel. Netanyahu grew up in Israel but spent his teen and college years in the United States. The two men are alike in other ways as well: both can be abrasive and appear arrogant. Both are political infighters who hate losing.