Former CIA analyst issues critique of Panetta record

Goodman

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Former CIA analyst Melvin Goodman, currently senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University, has issued a scathing critique of the CIA leadership record of Leon Panetta. In an article published in The Public Record, Goodman, who supported Panetta during his confirmation hearings, accused the Agency director of letting down “[t]hose of us who […] were hopeful that he would bring a much-needed era of openness, accountability and credibility to an Agency that has lost its moral compass”. Goodman takes issue with New Yorker writer Jane Mayer’s recent article on the CIA under the Obama administration, in which she referred to Panetta’s “great judgment, [reputation for integrity, and his ability to] restore the integrity of the intelligence process”. Instead, the former Agency analyst accuses Panetta of actively working to block the release of further documentary evidence of torture of terrorism detainees by CIA interrogators, and of retaining “all the senior [CIA] officials […] who were the ideological drivers for the creation of secret prisons and the use [of torture]”. Goodman also offers a somewhat different view of current agency deputy director, Stephen Kappes, who is regularly celebrated in the US media and was favored by CIA hawks last December to lead the Agency. The former CIA analyst claims that “many Agency officers, in fact, do not admire [Kappes], who is considered old-school and hard-line”. Furthermore, he describes Kappes’ recent past at the CIA as “controversial” and accuses him of being “one of the ideological drivers [at the Agency] for enhanced interrogation techniques”.