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President Obama To Replace Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair
For several weeks President Obama has been holding serious conversations about whether to ask Blair to step down and has interviewed candidates to replace him. After a discussion this afternoon between the president and Blair in the Oval Office about the best way forward, Blair offered to resign and the president said he would accept, sources told ABC News. Multiple administration sources tell ABC News that Blair's tenure internally has been a rocky one. On the heels of a number of intelligence failures involving the Fort Hood shooter, failed Christmas Day bomber Umar Farouq Abdulmuttalab, and questions about failed Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad, it was no longer clear that Blair -- tasked with coordinating the 16 intelligence agencies and ensuring that they cooperate and share information -- still had the full and complete confidence of the president, sources say. The news will not come as a surprise to those in the intelligence community. For months, Blair has turf battles while the White House made it clear that it had more confidence in others, such as counterterrorism and homeland security adviser John Brennan, taking the lead both publicly and privately. Last November, the White House sided with CIA director Leon Panetta when Blair attempted, against Panetta's wishes, to pick the chief U.S. intelligence officer in each country, a job that traditionally has gone to the CIA station chief. At other points, Blair seemed simply out of the loop. In hearings looking into failed Christmas Day bomber Abdulmuttalab, Blair seemed unaware that the High-Value interrogation Group was not yet operational. He later walked back his statement. Just this week -- after a scathing report on intelligence failures and Abdulmuttalab by the Senate Intelligence Committee -- Blair acknowledged in a statement that "institutional and technological barriers remain that prevent seamless sharing of information." The Senate Committee report was a strong message of disapproval of the job being done by Blair and the National Counterterrorism Center. Blair also noted some improvements to the National Counterterrorism Center, which he supervises, which now has a unit "to thoroughly and exhaustively pursue terrorist threat threads, including identifying appropriate follow-up actions by other intelligence and law enforcement organizations." Posted by: tipper 2010-05-21 |
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