Friday, January 9, 2009


WASHINGTON — Retired admiral Dennis Blair worked the intelligence business from a lot of angles — military commander, White House staffer, CIA official — and now he's in line for a job requiring all those perspectives.

As President-elect Barack Obama's presumptive choice for director of national intelligence (DNI), Blair will have to manage and coordinate a sprawling, 16-agency bureaucracy that serves many customers with many needs.


Blair's selection was confirmed by two senior Democratic officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss the pick publicly before an official announcement, which could come Friday.


Blair brings a broad mix of insider credentials, but his official links to the intelligence world largely ceased when he retired from the military in mid-2002. So he has no significant ties to controversial Bush administration intelligence policies — such as offshore detentions, renditions and harsh interrogation of terror suspects — that Obama has criticized and promised to revamp.


Blair's "a very logical choice," says John Lehman, former Navy secretary under President Reagan and a member of the commission that recommended creating the DNI job in its 2004 report on the 9/11 terror attacks.


Blair held staff posts with the White House National Security Council and the Pentagon Joint Chiefs of Staff, and he spent a year as associate CIA director for military support.


He also got hands-on intelligence experience running the U.S. Pacific Command. There, he led operations in which military and CIA personnel worked against regional terror groups, such as Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines.


Blair's work with the full range of intelligence agencies will help him "eliminate the turf battles," says James Thompson, former Illinois governor and another 9/11 commissioner.


In 2003, Blair became president of the Institute for Defense Analyses, a federally backed national security research group. The Pentagon inspector general reported in 2006 that Blair violated conflict-of-interest standards by not disqualifying himself from studies on the F-22 fighter while on boards of two contractors with ties to the program. The report also found, though, he had "no impact" on the studies' results. - usatoday



The head of US national intelligence. Imagine what such a person must know! If there were aliens on Earth, for example, or if the black triangle UFO are ours, they'd know... right?  Roswell, the Apollo moon landings, the face on Mars, weather weapons, underground bases, the tunnel network under the US, secret governments, cancer cures, AIDS, the 9/11 attacks, the Anthrax attacks, undersea bases, hidden human history ... I assume Blair will know the truth about all of this soon ... if he doesn't already. Perhaps there really isn't as much to know about such things as many people imagine, but I wonder.

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