You know why my day sucked yesterday? Because I got absolutely nowhere figuring out what "significant actions" CIA didn’t brief Congress about from 2001 to last May. I was so pissed off I felt sick about it and ended up skipping out on some plans — Rory, dude, I apologize, but I would have been terrible company yesterday — and instead hung out with my dog and sulked.

Luckily there are some outlines of this stuff emerging from other, more efficient reporters, and I compile the Knowns in this Windy post. Here’s my (minimal) value added:

[E]very CIA director is caught between three conflicting pressures: pleasing the administration; pleasing Congress; and pleasing his agency. The successful ones keep the plates spinning and find the time to focus on, like, keeping the agency collecting and analyzing vital intelligence. The unsuccessful ones tip too far in one direction or another. If Panetta really is out to make sure that the House Democrats retain confidence in him by needlessly revealing a sensitive program, then he’s kissed his credibility inside the agency goodbye. Would a longtime bureaucratic player like Panetta really do that? Would a longtime CIA veteran like Deputy Director Steve Kappes let him? I don’t know the answers, I’m just setting up the questions. Alternatively: could it be that Panetta thinks that if he doesn’t start going to Congress with accounts of mistakenly withheld programs, the public pressure to investigate the agency even further will intensify, and so he might view this disclosure as a necessary ante in order to spare the agency a deeper scrutiny?

 Anyway, hopefully I’ll have more on this later today. Jesus, yesterday sucked.