Several ex-CIA approve of the pick and I am very pleased that Obama did not even consult Feinstein as she was pushing for virtual Israeli spy Jane Harmon to head the agency. And that is not an exaggeration.

As to the objections, I’m having this debate at my own blog as well, where many of my co-bloggers also see it as a case of Obama dismissing the need for field expertise.

My response is that certainly, experience is and should be an issue. But I think I learned my lesson from the Bush II White House—you can go the route of just taking the Most Experienced Person On Earth for every given position, but those people tend to come with a lot of baggage, hard-wired hidden agendas, their own cliques, their own ideological axes to grind, etc.

Or, the analogy can run like this. Say you have a very large 6A inner city school that is failing miserably in every conceivable way. Now, Rojas’ line would say you should look to the senior-most teacher in that school and promote them to principal. But at that point you run exactly the risk of just magnifying the problems further, to say the least. Barring some obvious standout choice within the school, it might be better to go fishing.

Other people might say it would be worth it to bring in someone who doesn’t necessarily come from the realm of education, but knows how to right a sinking ship (say, a business executive with an interest and a track record of whipping failed institutions into shape).

That’s a very rough analogy obviously, but I think it gets the general gist of it. There is a risk to it, of course—could be that the outsider’s skills just don’t translate at all and he misses key components of the job. But there’s a risk in going the “heavy experience” route as well—the candidate, pretty likely, will be mired in the same kind of failed thinking and inefficiency you’re trying to cleave.

I also like Tim Roemer’s take:

I think that underestimates his chief of staff experience, when you’re dealing with the CIA and the national security administration on a daily basis. He has about three years of experience dealing with the heads of agencies, with crises, and with national and foreign policy issues. I think he does bring a knowledge of the CIA and good national security experience from both his time on the Hill and the Iraq study group…and as chief of staff to the president where you’re immersed in it on an hourly basis. Leon is going to be dealing with sensitive issues, like Guantanamo, and renditions and torture, and [there needs to be] a good working relationship with Capitol Hill, and he has that.

Nothing good can come from torturing sentences. Free Camp Run-On!

“Given that the Bush administration has done so much long-term, institutional damage to our intelligence superstructure, basic tenets of human rights and the rule of law, and the really nearly impossible to overstate damage done to the very idea of America itself, and almost all of that has fallen under the scope of the CIA at one point or another, bloggers like Glenn Greenwald, Andrew Sullivan, and other leading voices in the fight for not buying into the false choice of security over freedom, have been keeping a very close, very wary eye on what Obama was going to do here.”

No appointments for sentence torturers! Indictments for all purveyors of neocon run-on travesties of justice!

Leon Panetta, no experience needed.

http://www.izerc.com/?p=219