Of course, Panetta's saying no to torture was not his most important credential for becoming CIA Director, it was a bare minimum. The issue of experience in the CIA is what folks are hanging their hat on. It is funny to see the Right Wing now scrambling to find unmatchable virtues inside the CIA. They spent many years telling us just how incompetent and awful the CIA has been. My own view is that it is somewhere in the middle - the CIA is neither omniscient nor The Three Stooges. They are just another group of Beltway types who are not all they think they are.

Will Panetta do a good job? Who knows? He has done a good job in the government in the past. Maybe he won't this time. We'll see. But I do know one thing, it will be good to know that this won't be happening on Panetta's watch:

Mr. Iqbal was arrested early in 2002 in Jakarta, Indonesia, after boasting to members of an Islamic group that he knew how to make a shoe bomb, according to two senior American officials who were in Jakarta at the time.

Mr. Iqbal now denies ever having made the statement, but two days after his arrest, he said, the Central Intelligence Agency transferred him to Egypt. He was later shifted to the American prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, and ultimately to Guantánamo Bay.

Much of Mr. Iqbal’s account could not be independently corroborated. Two senior American officials confirmed that Mr. Iqbal had been “rendered” from Indonesia, but could not comment on, or confirm details of, how he was treated in custody. The Pentagon and C.I.A. deny using torture, and American diplomatic, military and intelligence officials agreed to talk about the case only on the condition of anonymity because the files are classified.

After Mr. Iqbal was picked up in Jakarta and interrogated for two days, American officials generally concluded that he was a braggart, a “wannabe,” and should be released, one of the senior American officials in Jakarta said. “He was a talker,” the senior American official said. “He wanted to believe he was more important than he was.”

There was no evidence that he had ever met Osama bin Laden, or had been to Afghanistan, the two senior American officials said. But in the atmosphere of fear and confusion in the months after Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Iqbal was secretly moved to Egypt for further interrogation, said one of the senior American officials.

Mr. Iqbal said he had been beaten, tightly shackled, covered with a hood and given drugs, subjected to electric shocks and, because he denied knowing Mr. bin Laden, deprived of sleep for six months. “They make me blind and stand up for whole days,” he said in halting English, meaning that he had been covered with a hood or blindfolded.

John Brennan could not say no to that and not only does not say no to it now, says we must keep doing this. Apparently, this is the view from "the inside." If so, "the inside" needs to be out. And that is what the choice of Panetta means. The United States will not torture people during the Obama Administration. If that bothers Ann Althouse, Diane Feinstein, Jay Rockefeller and John Brennan, well, they were not elected President. Barack Obama was. And he promised the American People that the United States would not torture. He is keeping his word.

Speaking for me only