Panetta was installed at the CIA to ensure that the agency would not start generating leaks to the press designed to damage Obama the way it did with GWB.

That’s a difficult task already, and he could never expect to succeed at it were he and Obama to allow the CIA to become Nancy Pelosi’s pinata. So now he has to push back.

Many people in the CIA must by now know a lot of gritty details about how Obama has adopted one GWB policy after another behind a thin verbal veneer of ‘Change’. That plus their demonstrated ability to leak to the press and get away with it adds up to a pretty effective threat.