Word: programe
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Nevertheless, many CIA watchers take the opposite view. Panetta's handling of the secret program was "the one bright lining in this whole business," says Amy Zegart, a national security expert and professor of public policy at UCLA. By immediately shutting down the program, he "signaled that he has turned a new page at the CIA," she adds...
Another official familiar with the matter says Panetta "understood the political context in which this whole thing unfolded, and recognized that there would be heat on this - even if the program never amounted to much. When something's not adequately briefed to Congress, unlike a fine wine, it doesn't get better with...
...argue that Panetta's tendency to look through a political lens is a weakness. "He's a decent guy, but I think he doesn't fully understand the intelligence business, and that hurts," says a former high-ranking operations official. An intel veteran, he argues, would have recognized the program for what it was - little more than an idea - and not rushed to inform Congress. But others, like Zegart, say Panetta's political chops may have saved the agency from even greater criticism. In any case, she says, "we don't know the counterfactual: How much worse would it have...
That charge cannot be entirely dismissed as a conspiracy theory, for allegations of a U.S. covert program to destabilize Iran are hardly confined to paranoid mullahs. Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett, former National Security Council officials in the Bush Administration, wrote in May that "the Obama Administration has done nothing to cancel or repudiate an ostensibly covert but well-publicized program, begun in President George W. Bush's second term, to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to destabilize the Islamic Republic...
...Among the more innovative schemes is a program started by the business-to-business website Alibaba.com, which connects Chinese manufacturers with overseas customers. Last year the company's founder, Jack Ma, began to worry about the souring economy and its impact on Alibaba's 32 million members. "He told his lieutenants to all go out and figure out how to help our customers because there's a bad time coming," says John W. Spelich, Alibaba's vice president for international corporate affairs...