Obama picks Leon Panetta to head CIA

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Postby ninakat » Mon Jan 05, 2009 9:35 pm

kurish wrote:EDIT: For the record, it appears that Ford Ord is, among other things, an urban combat training center. (I'm not clear how long it's been used for that, however.) Not really here or there, I guess, but still interesting...


FWIW, Fort Ord was apparently closed in 1994. Plus:

    Panetta and his wife founded the Leon & Sylvia Panetta Institute for Public Policy in December 1998, where they serve as the Institute's directors. The Institute is located at California State University, Monterey Bay. Panetta was instrumental in creating CSU Monterey by converting Fort Ord, where he was chief of operations and planning of the intelligence section when he was in the army, into the university.

    link
on edit: there's this too, which seems curious (emphasis mine):

    An annual "Secrets of Fort Ord" tour is given, beginning from the campus of CSUMB. Locations are reached by bus, and the tour takes approximately two hours. Though much of the fort appears abandoned, "tourists" learn otherwise upon seeing the buildings in full use with soldiers in training within the broken down buildings. Much of the tour takes place beyond public reach, behind closed off limits. Some places are only viewable from the outside, though, such as the former prison, recently used for paintballing and now housing a concrete works and other industry.

    link
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Postby thurnundtaxis » Mon Jan 05, 2009 9:47 pm

Anecdotal posting by "realitycheck" from the Life After the Oil Crash discussion board, HERE.

I have met Panetta. He's a great guy.

But he's not heading up the CIA because he's a great guy.
Down the road from his house is a domestic surveillence center.
Down from his old office is the Defense Language Institute, the Naval Post Graduate School and MIIS(a nice school where future agents get legitimate degrees).
He has been playing nice with the powers that be for a long time.



(P.S.The first lawyer to make charges stick to Rove was suicided off the top of a hotel 5 minutes drive from Panetta's old office. Point is he knows his way around his own sandbox.)
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Postby kurish » Mon Jan 05, 2009 10:17 pm

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Postby ninakat » Mon Jan 05, 2009 10:31 pm

thurnundtaxis, thanks for that -- interesting stuff.

But I went to the LATOC link you provided and noticed another posting above the one you referenced -- with a link to something very interesting:

    OT- Well, At Least It Isn't Allen Dulles

    Though it might as well be, Panetta being Cheney's cover man in the
    EOB Bunker the morning of 9/11, witnessing this, per Peter Dale Scott:

    "What are the causes of the very strange discrepencies involving ***
    Cheney's whereabouts from 9:25 to 9:55 the morning of the attacks?
    Cheney has just flat out lied about where he was and what he was
    doing. He tells the 9/11 Commission that he did not enter the security
    bunker/command post just off the EOB until 9:50. Yet several witnesses
    swore that he was inside the bunker(including Leon Panetta) as early
    as 9:25, repeatedly going off to make phone calls in the tunnel which
    leads from the bunker to the EOB, on secured, untraceable phones. Why
    lie about this? Who was he talking to and about what?

    "Even stranger is the testimony of an Air Force Lieutenant who kept
    asking Cheney the same question over and over: "Do the orders still
    stand? Do the orders still stand?" Eventually, Cheney got angry and
    responded: "Have you heard anything different?!"

    "What were the orders? The assumption is that they were orders to
    shoot down incoming planes. Yet, this query had already been asked at
    least once before the plane plowed into the Pentagon. And if they were
    the logical shoot-down orders, why would the Lt. keep asking for
    confirmation? Were they in fact STAND DOWN orders?"

So I looked around the web a bit more, and found the above again, with almost the identical wording, on an amazon.com reviews page for the Peter Dale Scott book "The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America". Presumably, the wording was transcribed right out of the book. {on edit: Both versions of this have the identical phrase "inside the bunker(including Leon Panetta)" where there's a notable space missing before the first parenthesis. So this had to be copied and pasted from the same source.}

Does anybody here have the book? If so, can you verify what Peter Dale Scott supposedly states about Panetta being a witness to Cheney's whereabouts?

Hugh, come back -- you may have been correct after all. If so, it sure makes this appointment that much more interesting. Why would Panetta have been there? Did he have any public connection to the Bush Administration in September 2001? I would have assumed he would have been gone by then, not hanging around the White House when 9/11 happened.
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Postby ninakat » Mon Jan 05, 2009 10:46 pm

Although, it could also be that the source of the info about Panetta was copied and pasted from the amazon.com review, which would explain why the missing space before the parenthesis was the same, and that the reviewer on amazon simply made the same mistake -- perhaps he meant Mineta, not Panetta. Then that mistake got spread through the internets, and voila, a big bad rumor was born! :lol:

Anyway, if someone has the Peter Dale Scott book, that should clear up the confusion....
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Postby chiggerbit » Mon Jan 05, 2009 11:04 pm

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Postby chiggerbit » Mon Jan 05, 2009 11:21 pm

Panetta was originally a Republican, eventually switching to the "Democrats". Just seeing his name there with the other names of the Iraq Study Group gives me the creeps:

Baker (Co-chair) Huh!
Hamilton (Co-chair)--the ususal fixer from the "Democratic" Party
Eagleburger
Jordan
Meese (remmber this crook from Reagan days?)
O'Connor
Panetta
Perry
Robb (LBJ's son-in-law?)
Simpson
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Postby thurnundtaxis » Mon Jan 05, 2009 11:23 pm

Here's a full article on Panetta and Fort Ord from Loren Coleman's blogThe Copycat Effect


Monday, January 05, 2009

Panetta's CIA Think Tank?

Has Leon Panetta been connected to intelligence activities for years? Are the media overlooking the visible hints?

Panetta is President-elect Barack Obama's nominee for the Director of the Center of Intelligence Agency. People are acting shocked.

But is Panetta closely linked to having perhaps set up a military-intelligence university think tank in California?

Panetta's visible biography is well-known.

His seemingly military-related experience seems thin (but don't be fooled). In 1964, Panetta joined the United States Army as a Second Lieutenant. There he received the Army Commendation Medal, and was discharged in 1966 as a Captain. He was a Congressman from 1976-1993. While a member of Congress, he was Vice Chairman of the Caucus of Vietnam-Era Veterans in Congress, but he does not seem to be credited as being a member of any intelligence oversight subcommittees. On July 17, 1994, Panetta was appointed White House Chief of Staff by Clinton, a position he held until January 20, 1997. In 2006, he was part of the Iraq Study Group, also known as the Baker Commission.

No one denies that Leon Panetta is a member of the secretive Trilateral Commission. What other things has he done, quietly?

How well is it known that Panetta was involved in the planning and converting of the former military base of Fort Ord in California into "Panetta's University" and more?

Few realize that Panetta was instrumental in starting the California State University – Monterey Bay (CSUMB). Or that CSU Chancellor Munoz favored a different name for the location, the University of Fort Ord, which would have had the intriguing acronym, UFO.

But is what remains, around the edges at Fort Ord, a military secret of some import, thanks to Leon Panetta? What does the Panetta Institute really do? It certainly seems like it is often used as a CIA think-tank.

Interesting reading, furthermore, can by found in an article entitled "The Countdown to 9-11":

Let us get a firm grip on [what] we do know, so that when fresh facts arise we may be ready to fit them into their places.
~ Sherlock Holmes
The Devil’s Foot

Fort Ord takes its name for General Edward Otho Cresap Ord, whose military career spanned 1839 to 1881. Gen. E. O. C. Ord acquired for $40 the marble topped table, present when Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee met with Gen. U. S. Grant at Appomattox Court House. The small wooden table, not to be confused with Gen. Ord’s table, went to Gen. Sheridan for $20, who gave it to “boy wonder” Gen. George Armstrong Custer. Today, that table rests in the National Museum of American History, Washington, DC. Whereas the marble topped table resides in the Chicago Historical Society’s Civil War Room. Controversy over which table sat Grant, and which sat Lee continues––but it is certain one of the signatures to the surrender terms was signed on Gen. Ord’s table. No word yet as to the disposition of the desk upon which Bill Clinton signed-off on his political career.

Leon Panetta, however, has offices and archives his congressional record on Fort Ord. He received $1,400 per day as an educational consultant, $350,000 from incoming CSU Chancellor Charles B. Reed, for startup costs and salaries for the “bipartisan” Leon Panetta Institute for Public Policy, plus $50,000 in “materials” from Vermont gubernatorial hopeful, Peter P. Smith. According to the Otter Realm, CSUMB’s fledgling newspaper (sea otter: school mascot), the Panetta Institute also sought a permanent endowment of $10 million-dollars. Panetta to Otter Realm, “It is important for people to feel the reward of service.”



Little did the graduating seniors realize the event Panetta referenced at the first class graduation was a precursor. The incident he talked about had happened on September 11, 1994 (see the story of Frank Eugene Corder, pages ix-x in The Copycat Effect)!

In May 1997, CSUMB held its first commencement....Leon Panetta...gave the Seniors who stayed the course short shrift––but recounted the White House incident, in which a small plane crash-landed on the East Lawn during the predawn hours. Leon Panetta asked his startled staff, presumably by telephone, “Has anybody done anything yet?” Panetta pounded the podium. Without alluding to the specific protocols for such an event, his message to the gowned captives under the rent-a-tent: “Get it done.”



Today, California State University, Monterey Bay, is a small public university in the California State University system on the site of the former Fort Ord, on the Central Coast of California. CSUMB was founded in 1994 with a student enrollment of 654 students. As of 2007 the university had 4,080 students and 141 full-time faculty members.

In June 2006, Ed Salven, one of Ft. Ord's veterans from the Vietnam era, published a book, The Soldier Factory, chronicling his personal history as a soldier, and reflecting upon a return visit to the Fort in the late 1990s. Along with poetic reflections, the book includes color reproductions of paintings of soldiers that Salven found hung from barracks' windows as he explored the grounds, rendered by students from California State University, Monterey Bay.

An annual "Secrets of Fort Ord" tour is given, beginning from the campus of CSUMB. Locations are reached by bus, and the tour takes approximately two hours. Though much of the fort appears abandoned, "tourists" learn otherwise upon seeing the buildings in full use with soldiers in training within the broken down buildings. Much of the tour takes place beyond public reach, behind closed off limits. Some places are only viewable from the outside, though, such as the former prison, recently used for paintballing and now housing a concrete works and other industry.

A small portion of Ft. Ord remains under Army control and is now called the Presidio of Monterey Annex. It includes the Ord Military Community, California National Guard posts, the DoD Center, and the gunnery ranges.

The military still has a presence at Fort Ord, in the form of several California Army National Guard units, facilities administrated by the Presidio of Monterey, and the continued operation of the base PX and Commissary to cater for retirees who chose to settle in the area and are entitled to shop at such facilities. Management of the military housing has been outsourced to private firms, but the homes are still occupied by personnel stationed at the Presidio of Monterey and Naval Postgraduate School and retired military members. Ft. Ord's housing, PX, chapel, and Commissary are now called Ord Military Community.

What is really going on at Fort Ord? And how important was Panetta's involvement in the development of "his" university in keeping all of this out of the limelight?

Why should we be surprised that Leon Panetta is going to be the Director of the CIA?
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Postby §ê¢rꆧ » Mon Jan 05, 2009 11:26 pm

I have the book. I don't see Leon Panetta in the index.

Leon appears in many books, according to Google Books Beta. But I don't think it has indexed Peter Dale Scott's Road to 9/11. It knows about the book, but says 'No Preview Available'.

Most likely a slip of the mind. Somehow "Norman Mineta" became "Leon Paneta." But maybe not... although if Leon Panetta were actually in Scott's book, I would think he'd be in the index, as it appears pretty complete.
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Postby jingofever » Mon Jan 05, 2009 11:41 pm

Michael Ledeen likes the pick and offers up a strange comment:

And he's going to watch Obama's back at a place that's full of stilettos and a track record for attempted presidential assassination second to none. But Italians know all about political assassination; you may remember Julius Caesar. Or Aldo Moro.
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Postby JackRiddler » Mon Jan 05, 2009 11:52 pm

.

Absolutely no report ever has placed Panetta in the PEOC on 9/11. The parenthesis in the quoted passage from P.D. Scott is an insertion, as signaled by the lack of a space. Come on: Clinton's chief of staff with Cheney's entourage, Matalin and Lynne Cheney and Rice and Prosper and Addington and Mineta and the "young man," all together in the PEOC?! It's an insult to 9/11 researchers to think we wouldn't have been making hay out of this for the last seven years.

Note that the NYT is just a touch too sophisticated not to subtly acknowledge that the phrase "no intelligence experience" can never be taken as necessarily true:

Before his engagement with intelligence issues as White House chief of staff, his only explicit involvement was his stint from 1964 to 1966 in the U.S. Army, where he graduated from Army Intelligence School. He rose to captain and served as chief of operations of the intelligence section at Ford Ord, Calif.


Yeh.

I notice also the Times seems to favor a particularly unsavory element in the intel world, the privatized "CIA within the CIA" bastards. At Wash Post you get the mouthpieces of the bureaucratic CIA like Pincus and Milbank quoting current officials anonymously, whereas the last two cites I noticed at the Times (former home of Judy Miller, after all) were Buzzy Krongard (as former CIA, no mention of his Blackwater or 9/11 connects) and now this Grenier who runs Kroll. Icky-icky. Is his dumping on Panetta supposed to make me like him? (And how does he know Panetta has no experience? For all he knows, Panetta's status is for people with a higher clearance.)

The other thing that struck me in the various posts above was the characterization of DCI as a "subcabinet" position. Sort of true, if understood as subterranean cabinet, superceding the formal one.

---

Now, you know spookdom is a small world:

Panetta Institute selects Gov. Schwarzenegger for Jefferson-Lincoln Award

October 31, 2008

The Panetta Institute based at California State University-Monterey Bay announced today that California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has been selected to receive one of the Jefferson-Lincoln awards that will be presented at its annual gala dinner on November 8 at the Inn at Spanish Bay.

In addition to Schwarzenegger, the Institute will also present awards to U.S. Representative Jane Harman (D-CA), U.S. Representative Jim Saxton (R-NJ), and noted author and journalist, Ron Brownstein.

“The purpose of these awards is to honor those leaders who provide bipartisan and balanced public service and demonstrate independence of judgment and dedication to good governance in addressing our nation's core needs and interests,” said Leon E. Panetta, director of the Panetta Institute. “At a time of partisanship and gridlock, it is important to acknowledge the service of those who place issues over party and believe governing is more important than winning.” The honorees are selected by a national committee comprised of Mr. Panetta, former U.S. Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee, former U.S. Senator Nancy Kassebaum-Baker of Kansas, and former U.S. Representative Lee Hamilton of Indiana.

The gala dinner will take place on Saturday evening, November 8, 2008, at the Inn at Spanish Bay in Pebble Beach. “Sylvia and I are particularly pleased that the Governor will join us,” Panetta added. “The selection committee recognized his efforts to try and achieve bipartisan solutions in the environment, ocean protection, health care, infrastructure and the budget.”


A search reveals a bunch of organs quoting the independent Hamilton as being thrilled with him. So much incest.

Here's a set of reactions from frequently quoted spooksters including Zelikow and Feinstein:

http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/node/14914

.
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Postby chiggerbit » Tue Jan 06, 2009 12:12 am

A search reveals a bunch of organs quoting the independent Hamilton as being thrilled with him. So much incest.


Every time I see Hamilton's name the hair stands up on my back. GRRRRRR....
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Postby ninakat » Tue Jan 06, 2009 12:49 am

Thanks everybody above, for clearing up the Mineta/Panetta confusion. JackRiddler, no insult intended -- I'm hardly on the level of your knowledge about 9/11 (or even politics), although I certainly thought it very odd that Panetta would have been at the White House the morning of 9/11. Still, seeing two assertions (first Hugh's, which he did admit was a mistake) and another one (or two, depending) -- well, I just had to flesh it out here.

Now, back on topic.... lots of interesting info above to discuss once I have time to read and digest.
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Postby barracuda » Tue Jan 06, 2009 1:09 am

He served nine terms in the House as California's representative from the 16th District. It always gives ya a warm fuzzy to find that your elected representatives are lifetime spooks. Just like when they appointed Poppy DCI out of thin air - you discover in his dotage that he fucking ran Operation 40. The appointment colors every position and conversation he's ever had.
The most dangerous traps are the ones you set for yourself. - Phillip Marlowe
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Postby JackRiddler » Tue Jan 06, 2009 1:17 am

ninakat wrote:JackRiddler, no insult intended


And hardly one taken!

Just kidding around - who knows, next post may show that Panetta was indeed in the PEOC (he wasn't, but ya never know) and leave me suitably mortified.

;)

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