“60 Minutes” sat down for a wide ranging interview with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta:

The only thing I found irritating about this interview is how they portray the hunt for Osama bin Laden. They make it seem as if Panetta rode into town on a white horse and got Bin Laden. Panetta was the beneficiary of years of intelligence work, much of which took place under Bush. Panetta was just the guy who saw it to the finish line. That said, Panetta seems like a competent guy. A real straight shooter. He’s perhaps the best hire of Obama’s presidency.

Time magazine scored the first interview with CIA chief Leon Panetta since he oversaw the operation that killed Osama bin Laden. He speaks frankly about Pakistan and says what most of us assumed. They did not tell Pakistan about the mission to get bin Laden because they feared Pakistani intelligence would tip him off. The upside to all this is that we now have new leverage over Pakistan. They’re on the defensive now since Bin Laden was living openly a mere 1000 ft from an Army training facility. The idea that they didn’t know where he was is ludicrous.

Source: Associated Press
President Barack is shaking up his national security team by naming a new secretary of defense and director of the CIA. AP White House Correspondent Mark Smith reports.

In an effort to take Obama’s economic failures off the front page, democrats once again resurrected an issue that so far has also been a failure — CIA witch hunts.

CIA Director Leon Panetta supposedly told Congress about a CIA program last week that up until that point had been kept from Congress at the behest of Vice President Dick Cheney.

Liberals in Congress predictably ran to the press and pointed to Panetta’s disclosure as proof that the CIA lies to Congress, which means Nancy Pelosi was telling the truth when she made that accusation some weeks ago.

You can’t tell the media about a “secret” program they can’t know about, because like a child they’ll keep digging and begging until they find out the secret.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting today new details on the secret program that Panetta disclosed to Congress.

Apparently, the program involved the assassination of top Al-Qaeda leaders.

Amid the high alert following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a small CIA unit examined the potential for targeted assassinations of al Qaeda operatives, according to the three former officials. The Ford administration had banned assassinations in the response to investigations into intelligence abuses in the 1970s. Some officials who advocated the approach were seeking to build teams of CIA and military Special Forces commandos to emulate what the Israelis did after the Munich Olympics terrorist attacks, said another former intelligence official.

"It was straight out of the movies," one of the former intelligence officials said. "It was like: Let’s kill them all."

I hope liberal democrats are not hanging their hat on this one. If the left thinks Americans are going to be upset about a program to kill Al-Qaeda terrorists, they’re wildly mistaken.

Terrorists should be hunted down and killed. Not arrested, not brought back for Eric Holder to give rights to, but killed on the spot.

The most troubling aspect of this latest revelation is not that such a program was being discussed, but that such a program was not immediately implemented.

More troubling still, is the fact that Director Panetta’s knee-jerk reaction to learning of the program was to cancel it.

As usual, this latest CIA dust-up is more about politics than anything else. Like Eric Holder’s determination to prosecute the very people who’ve kept us safe, Democrats are determined to play politics with our national security.