Epstein Secrets

well, having first met when he was in charge of the CIA at the start of the Obama administration. In one of our early meetings at CIA headquarters in Langley, there had been a small bunch of grapes on his desk and I plucked a few in my mouth with obvious enjoyment. Now, at the Pentagon, he had a big bowlfu

e merit of being true: that Bibi was coming under pressure to shift our budgetary priorities away from defense toward social and economic issues. But Panetta understood that my request for a delay meant we were at least considering military action. He also realized that if we did launch an attack, it was i

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011891 / BARAK / 135 Yet especially with my main points of contact in the administration — first Bob Gates and then his successor, Leon Panetta, as Secretary of Defense —our broadly shared views, mutual respect, and the strength of the US-Israeli alliance outweighed any of that. Neither they,

significant numbers of US troops would begin arriving. As we weighed our final decision, I held a series of high-level meetings in Washington: with Panetta, national security adviser Tom Donilon, Hillary Clinton, and President Obama himself. Though not explicitly saying we were ready to attack, I left no

well, having first met when he was in charge of the CIA at the start of the Obama administration. In one of our early meetings at CIA headquarters in Langley, there had been a small bunch of grapes on his desk and I plucked a few in my mouth with obvious enjoyment. Now, at the Pentagon, he had a big bowlfu

e merit of being true: that Bibi was coming under pressure to shift our budgetary priorities away from defense toward social and economic issues. But Panetta understood that my request for a delay meant we were at least considering military action. He also realized that if we did launch an attack, it was i

HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028268 / BARAK / 135 Yet especially with my main points of contact in the administration - first Bob Gates and then his successor, Leon Panetta, as Secretary of Defense - our broadly shared views, mutual respect, and the strength of the US-Israeli alliance outweighed any of that. Neither they

n significant numbers of US troops would begin arriving. As we weighed our final decision, I held a series of high-level meetings in Washington: with Panetta, national security adviser Tom Donilon, Hillary Clinton, and President Obama himself. Though not explicitly saying we were ready to attack, I left no

of approving drone strikes effectively required him and 10 other lawyers at the agency to "murder" people from the CIA's counterterrorism center in Langley, Virginia. Most of the lawyers are either down the hall from the CIA director's office on the seventh floor — the "power floor," as it's known with

hat killed bin Laden, and U.S. officials boast of eliminating two more of Al Qaeda's top operatives in Pakistan in recent months. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has called drones "the only game in town," and President Obama recently dismissed concerns about civilian casualties, insisting that he is not orde

e family business. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020200 49 Chronology2: The Snowden Thriller The Intelligence World, 2006-2014 June2006-Feb 2007 CIA Trainee, Langley, Virginia March 2007- Feb 2009 CIA Communications officer. Geneva, Switzerland June 2009-Sept 2010 DELL/ NSA Security instructor, Yokoda. Japan

y bitter about the CIA, posting on Ars Technica on January 10, 2009, “Obama just appointed a fucking POLITICIAN to run the CIA!” (He was referring to Leon Panetta, President Clinton’s former chief of staff.) Snowden attributed the origins of his antipathy to US intelligence to his 2007-2009 experiences in the C

s to make nice with the CIA. On Saturday, January 21, in an event organized by Kushner, the president, in his first presidential act, paid a call on Langley to, in Bannon’s hopeful description, “play some politics.” In carefully prepared remarks in his first act as president, he would lay some of the famo

nald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney; Jimmy Carter’s Hamilton Jordan; Ronald Reagan’s James Baker; George H. W. Bush’s return of James Baker; Bill Clinton’s Leon Panetta, Erskine Bowles, and John Podesta; George W. Bush’s Andrew Card; and Barack Obama’s Rahm Emanuel and Bill Daley. Anyone studying the position would c