MR. LEON PANETTA.

It looked like the CIA Director Leon Panetta was doing the right thing to resist the reopening of cases involving the agency's employees in the past, particularly during the period between 2001 through 2008. According to many reports, he has been urging Attorney General Eric Holder to accept the fact that the matter has already been dealt with by (the) Justice Department officials, who reviewed it (IG's Report) several years ago. They found that certain prosecutions were unnecessary, and although, only just one solitary case was justifiably deserving of prosecution.

Director Leon Panetta has every right and obligation to protect his department and to safeguard its interests. He has stressed that an ongoing criminal investigation would be a grave interruption into CIA operations everywhere; and it would be a serious distraction in the affairs of the agency; a luxury he could not afford. His agency was world wide, and deserved to have operatives who would not entertain any fears in performing their duties diligently, wherever they might find themselves. Their sacrifices must be recognized and rewarded instead.

What Mr. Eric Holder was actually doing was driving a wedge between the White House and the CIA, and therefore causing a split in the administration. His decision to appoint a special prosecutor should not have come at the wrong time, when the country was mulling over a Health Care reform, and did not realistically know where to go with it.

It (decision) was creating an amalgam of difficulties for Mr. Panetta, personally, and for the department he headed; as well as for the Justice Department itself. It was presumably the Attorney General's foray into politics. In other words, his motivation for a new probe was political, because that was what it looked like; and as such, many fingers were pointing to people at the "left" of the Democratic Party as being the joint source of the fracas that was unfolding between the two departments in Washington D.C.

There was no doubt, however, that the WH was endeavoring to sift through all the commotion, and to come up with the rightful solution to resolve the existing tension brought on by Mr. Holder's move to "address the problem of America's bad image abroad". After all, that was what the whole thing boiled down to, according to those who knew him.

The idea of the two departments being at loggerheads with each other was more than distressful, awfully unconventional and unproductive. In fact, it would seem more closely to being counterproductive, in the face of an enormous economic recovery, an embattled health care reform, and the recent slipping of the President's approval ratings, among other things.

More important issues that the country was grappling with at the present moment must rather be on the government's priority list; such as the huge trade deficit and an ever increasing National debt, both of which were forebodingly stirring future posterity straight in the eye.

The argument between the two factions here was not even an ideological one, where an attorney general was attempting to snatch a case, involving an individual or a group, from the "powerful jaws" of the CIA, for equitable reasons; it was just tomfoolery on the part of a Justice Department acting to bring rancor within the (Obama) administration; and it was high time for President Obama to act to steady the course of his government.

P.S. "Trade Deficit with China Continues to Expand: Why?", Article, 2009. Retrieved 09/05/09. Website: http://seekingalpha.com/article/155931-trade-deficit-with-china-continues-to-expand-why
P.P.S. The Blog had computer problems yesterday, Saturday.