Angel
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Join date : 2010-05-08
 |  Subject: Intel post becomes 'wicked problem' for W.H.  Sun May 23, 2010 11:07 pm | |
| Prominent political figures and intelligence veterans aren’t exactly leaping at the opportunity to replace Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence who was ousted by President Barack Obama last week after losing a series of fights with the CIA and presiding over an intelligence system that failed to detect beforehand three significant terror strikes.
Intelligence analysts say the next DNI will inherit a job with a big mandate — overseeing a sprawling U.S. intelligence bureaucracy largely suspicious and resentful of him — but little real power to carry out reforms, and a position first in line to take the inevitable political heat.
The difficulties the Obama administration has run into in filling the post are rekindling questions about whether anyone can successfully do the job as it is currently constructed — doubts that now extend to some of the earliest and loudest voices for creating the new role five years ago.
“The position is extremely difficult and may be unmanageable,” said Lee Hamilton, the former Democratic congressman from Indiana and co-chair of the 9/11 panel that recommended the new post. “Four DNIs in five years when you appoint the new person, for one of the most important jobs in government? That turnover has to be worrisome. We’ve had three very good people appointed to the post and they’ve all come away dissatisfied…. In large part, they stepped aside or came away dissatisfied because of a lack of authority to get done what they think needs to be done.”
“The job hasn’t been going very well,” said Fran Townsend, a former homeland security adviser to President George W. Bush. “Either you give the DNI the authority he needs or change the job so it focuses more on strategy, and then you don’t need the authority.”
Some say the problems encountered by Blair, and predecessors John Negroponte and Mike McConnell, are rooted in an incomplete and watered-down series of reforms Congress passed in 2004 after the 9/11 Commission blamed a lack of coordination and information-sharing among agencies for failing to head off those attacks.
“This is yet another indication of how not-well-thought-out the reorganization in 2004 was, and we’ve had various manifestations of that. The tribulations of Denny Blair are simply the latest ones,” said Paul Pillar, a former top CIA official now a professor at Georgetown. “More and more people are now willing to question whether [the creation of the post] was an improvement or not.”
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