Here’s this week’s wrap-up: A step forward, a step back; another step forward, another step back.

• CIA drone operators lack the “superb intel” needed to prevent civilian casualties, but are firing their weapons anyway, causing them to kill ten times as many civilians as suspected terrorists.
• CIA Director Panetta, however, continues to lie and/or propagandize about the drones’ accuracy and “minimal collateral damage.”
• Despite their indiscriminate and inhumane nature, the U.S. has doubled the rate of drone strikes and is killing more people per attack in 2009 compared to 2008, which has caused the death toll from these weapons so far in 2009 to exceed the death toll for all of 2008.

10 page CIA Report released today documents Congressional Torture Briefings

Obama has had a hard time finding a prospective CIA chief who isn’t tainted by either involvement in Bush’s torture regime or who backed Bush’s illicit wiretapping. He was compelled to reject California Congressmember Jane Harman because of her approval of the latter. However, the person he did approve, Leon Panetta, has roused the ire of Harman’s powerful friend Dianne Feinstein, who complains that we need an “intelligence professional” heading the CIA — even though Feinstein ignored the input of several intelligence professionals in her haste to rubber-stamp Bush’s planned invasion of Iraq.