Gupta - good pick

Panetta - not so good?

Neo-Neocon thinks Sanjay Gupta is a good pick for Surgeon General. She is impressed by the fact that he:

showed moral courage when he performed emergency surgery on several Iraqis and US Marines while he was embedded in 2003 as a medical correspondent there.

She adds:

And he tangled with the abominable Michael Moore, as well.

The fact that Paul Krugman comes out swinging in Moore's defense confirms that Gupta is a good pick.

Neo-Neocon is less happy with the choice of Panetta as director the CIA:

To say Panetta is inexperienced in intelligence would be an understatement. He is profoundly inexperienced, even more so than other previous CIA chiefs who came from a basically non-intelligence background. His main qualification appears to be that he was President Clinton’s chief of staff, and yet nevertheless supported Obama in his campaign against Hillary.

True. But the CIA has been a rogue operation for a generation and utterly useless in its primary mission. The CIA declared war on Bush and caused his administration no end of trouble. Plame and Wilson were the most obvious examples of CIA shenanigans. I think one of New-Neocon's commenters got it right:

Break it all down and take a hard look at what has become of the CIA. I think the Church Hearings of the Seventies killed it, and the 1978 FISA made sure that the CIA was managed by House and Senate committee people. The essence of intel gathering is

a. ability to improvise

b. stealth means everything

If you have to divulge all black ops and get permission for them, too many eyes see what is happening. People on the Hill, staffers, and people in the State Department have thick dossiers of incidents where they talked and leaked. Most of the time, they do it to settle scores and scuttle policy.

The CIA is no longer an effective organization. It is a huge waste of the taxpayer’s dollars. It could not serve the nation well to save its own life. I would argue that the best outcome would be to break it apart and put the better parts under Defense and State departments.

What the Agency did to President Bush for the past eight years inclines me to be very uncharitable in my feelings about the CIA. Wouldn’t bother me if someone did the sensible thing and shot it in the head.

Panetta is not going to make any difference with respect to the condition of the CIA and its inability to excel at HUMINT. It does not even have agents and station chiefs in many countries. The only thing Panetta is hired to do is to make sure the CIA does not do to President Obama what it did to President Bush.

That makes sense.

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