By Laura Rozen, The Envoy @ Yahoo News, March 31, 2011, 9:30pm

Last Thursday March 24th, President Barack Obama, just back from a five-day trip to Latin America, convened his national security team for a White House meeting on Libya. The meeting came five days into the U.S.'s air strikes targeting Libyan air defenses and military sites. [....]

The Thursday meeting appeared as a sort of afterthought in the publicly announced March 24 schedule for the president: "Also in the afternoon, the President will meet with his national security team to review our efforts in Libya." But the confab stretched from the afternoon into evening--and by the time it wound down, CIA Director Leon Panetta had offered to send CIA personnel covertly to work on the ground in Libya.

"Once again, we were the only ones at the table who stepped up," Panetta later described the Agency's role, according to a source who requested anonymity because of the sensitive subject matter. [....]