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Why POTUS at the CIA?

By John Batchelor on April 20, 2009 at 10:30 PM in CIA, President Barack Obama, Torture

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The POTUS visit to the CIA HQ this news cycle is mysterious. The case is presented that the White House decision to release the so-called Torture Memos, over the counsel of former DCIs (left, Mike Hayden of the Bush administration) and even the present DCI, Leon Panetta, has caused a rift that the POTUS seeks to heal. This is the facile argument. The POTUS does not need to visit Langley, Virginia to make the CIA like him. The POTUS does not need to go to the CIA at all.

There is a super spook administrator, the DNI, Dennis Blair, whose job description includes supervising and corraling the seventeen or so institutions that make up US intelligence gathering.

Bypassing the merits and demerits of the Obama adminstration squabble over the Torture Memos, why is the POTUS not delegating the embassy duty to Blair? My best guess is that the White House is anxious that it made a political decision for short-term gain, the memos, and later realized that it had created a fresh problem that didn’t exist before.  This would explain the defensiveness in the faces of David Axelrod and Rahm Emmanuel as they took to the Sunday coffee hours on TV to explain, explain, explain.    

The problem? The spooks don’t trust the Obama administration. This was a big issue for the Carter administration. There are anecdotes of fist-fights at the DoD and CIA over Carter policies of what at the time were called timid, even defeatist, thinking. Too early for the Obama administration to worry about defeatism. But still. The POTUS visit is not the conduct of a confident administration.