Biden Says Bush Gave Al Qaeda Recruiting Tool

Same paper, 2 days after. Does Biden even know what Obama talks about?

LANGLEY, Va. — Visiting the Central Intelligence Agency to swear in Leon E. Panetta as the agency’s 19th director, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said Thursday that the Bush administration’s detention and interrogation policies “gave Al Qaeda a powerful recruiting tool.”

Considering the setting — the C.I.A. lobby where several hundred agency employees greeted the vice president with cheers — Mr. Biden’s remarks implied a tough judgment on parts of the agency’s record under the previous administration. He stood in front of a marble memorial wall, where 89 stars represent C.I.A. officers who have died in the line of duty.

Mr. Biden spoke of executive orders that President Obama issued on his second full day in office to close the Guantánamo Bay detention camp in Cuba, require the C.I.A. to use the same noncoercive interrogation methods as the military and report all detainees to the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Mr. Obama also ordered the closing of the secret overseas detention program for Al Qaeda that the C.I.A. created after the 2001 terrorist attacks.

Mr. Biden said the new president’s actions “reverse the policies that in my view and the view of many in this agency caused America to fall short of its founding principles and which gave Al Qaeda a powerful recruiting tool.”

Such remarks were standard fare for both Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden on the campaign trail, and they did not appear to dampen the enthusiastic reception from C.I.A. employees.

Mr. Biden said he was proud to be one of the C.I.A.’s “leading customers” and added that while there were 16 American intelligence agencies, “this agency remains America’s premier national security agency, and we deeply appreciate the risks and the sacrifices that so many in the past and in the present continue to take for this country.”

Mr. Panetta, 70, a former California congressman and White House chief of staff who has never before worked for an intelligence agency, also made glancing references to the recent history of the C.I.A., which was blamed for mistaken assessments of Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs in the months before the Iraq war.

Mr. Panetta said the agency under his leadership would seek to “provide the very best intelligence, independent judgments, not influenced by the politics of the situation but truly real, objective information that can be presented to the president and the policy makers of this country.”

He also said he wanted to “re-establish a relationship” with Congress, whose members often complained in the Bush years about not being adequately consulted or informed about intelligence matters.

The new C.I.A. director promised to work closely with Dennis C. Blair, a retired admiral and the new director of national intelligence. Since 2004 legislation created the director’s post to oversee all American intelligence activities, relations have sometimes been strained between C.I.A. officials and those at the director’s office.

Mr. Biden was introduced by Stephen R. Kappes, an agency veteran who is staying on as deputy director, a decision that has reassured some agency employees in light of Mr. Panetta’s lack of intelligence experience.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/20/us/politics/20intel.html?ref=politics