News networks are reporting that Leon Panetta, former congressman and White House chief of staff, will be President-elect Barack Obama's CIA Director.

Given his background, Mr. Panetta is a somewhat unusual choice to lead the C.I.A., an agency that has been unwelcoming to previous directors perceived as outsiders, such as Stansfield M. Turner and John M. Deutch. But his selection points up the difficulty Mr. Obama had in finding a C.I.A. director with no connection to controversial counterterrorism programs of the Bush era.

Incoming Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) is not happy with this choice.

"My position has consistently been that I believe the Agency is best-served by having an intelligence professional in charge at this time."

An aide to outgoing intel committee chairman Sen. Jay Rockefeller echoed Feinstein: he "has tremendous respect for Leon Panetta [but] he believes the CIA director should go to someone who has significant intelligence experience and someone from outside the political world of Washington D.C."

Panetta is an even-tempered and highly regarded Washington player--kind of a Mr. Fixit in a nice suit. He is also a zero-tolerance critic of the use of torture, and he considers waterboarding--a tactic used by the CIA--to be torture.

Feinstein voted to give the attorney general and the director of national intelligence the power to approve international surveillance of the communications of Americans entirely within the executive branch, rather than through the special intelligence court established by FISA. Many privacy advocates have decried this law and Senator Feinstein's vote in favor of it.^[21] In February 2008, Feinstein joined Republicans in the Senate in voting "Nay" to strike the provisions providing immunity from civil liability to electronic communication service providers for certain assistance provided to the Government