Panetta: Cheney 'Almost Wishing' for Another Attack

An article in the current issue of The New Yorker opens with CIA Director Leon Panetta reacting to Vice President Dick Cheney's speech this spring at the American Enterprise Institute, in which Cheney defended the Bush administration's aggressive approach to the war on terror.

Moments after Cheney's speech on May 21, Panetta said to the magazine's Jane Mayer, "I think he smells some blood in the water on the national-security issue. 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."

Other ground covered by Mayer's piece:

*Panetta's close relationship with White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, dating back to the Clinton White House days, when Panetta reinstated Emanuel from an earlier demotion. Panetta says of Emanuel, "I thought he had a lot of street smarts and good political sense."

*Monica Lewinsky was Panetta's intern in the West Wing. After the Lewinsky scandal, Panetta saw Bill Clinton as "as a man with no personal discipline," according to a Panetta associate.

*The CIA's ongoing recovery from the intelligence failure leading up to the Iraq war. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) says now, "I am absolutely determined to reform the process of gathering and analyzing intelligence."

*The state of the internal and external debate on the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" on suspected terrorists, techniques engineered by the CIA and CIA contractors. And finally...

*Panetta's difficult charge of earning the trust of the agency's personnel, while trying to change the way they've always done business. A D.C. veteran says: "An agency like that can turn on a director. That's the challenge: he's got to both lead it and reform it."