Panetta Makes A Gaffe*

*A gaffe in politics is when you say something truthful.

The New Yorker has a long article on Leon Panetta, the new CIA Director. It’s definitely worth a read. Panetta is not a CIA insider, he’s a political operator with a good relationship with the president and is generally considered a good manager. Not long before the interview with Panetta, Dick Cheney gave a speech where he said this:

Cheney, speaking at the American Enterprise Institute, accused the new Administration of making “the American people less safe” by banning brutal C.I.A. interrogations of terrorism suspects that had been sanctioned by the Bush Administration. Ruling out such interrogations “is unwise in the extreme,” Cheney charged. “It is recklessness cloaked in righteousness.”

When Panetta was asked about the speech, he said that Cheney was trying to position himself in the case of another terrorist attack on the U.S.

Panetta, pouring a cup of coffee, responded to Cheney’s speech with surprising candor. “I think he smells some blood in the water on the national-security issue,” he told me. “It’s almost, a little bit, gallows politics. When you read behind it, it’s almost as if he’s wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point. I think that’s dangerous politics.”

I think it’s pretty amazing to hear a political appointee say something like that, even if it’s true.