CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY DAN NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE MENDAPAT PENGARAH BARU

Obama telah melantik Leon Panetta sebagai Pengarah CIA menggantikan Hayden sebagai satu usaha untuk membersihkan imej CIA yang telah tercemar dengan peristiwa penyiksaan tahanan perang Afghanistan dan Iraq. Sementara itu Admiral bersara Dennis Blair telah dilantik menggantikan Michael McConnell sebagai Pengarah National Intelligence. Kedua-dua mereka bukan dari kalangan perisikan.

Spies from outside the fold

Jan. 9 - Obama nominated Leon Panetta as CIA director, and retired Admiral Dennis Blair to oversee all U.S. spy agencies as director of national intelligence.

Keeping Hayden as CIA director would be a controversial move because of the CIA's policies on the interrogation of terrorist suspects, although Hayden was not at the CIA when the most controversial tactic -- waterboarding -- was used on three CIA detainees.

Neither of the two men came up through the ranks of intelligence agencies. Their nominations reflect Obama's determination to restore a battered U.S. reputation.



Obama picks Leon Panetta to head CIA
AP/ yahoo news

WASHINGTON – Two Democratic officials say President-elect Barack Obama has chosen former Clinton White House chief of staff Leon Panetta to run the CIA. Panetta was a surprise pick for the post, with no experience in the intelligence world. An Obama transition official and another Democrat disclosed his nomination on a condition of anonymity since it was not yet public.

Panetta was director of the Office of Management and Budget and a longtime congressman from California.

He served on the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan panel that released a report at the end of 2006 with dozens of recommendations for the reversing course in the Iraq war.

Panetta currently directs with his wife Sylvia the Leon & Sylvia

Panetta Institute for Public Policy, based at California State University, Monterey Bay a university he helped establish on the site of the former U.S. Army base, Fort Ord.

Four-star Admiral Dennis Blair appointed as Director of National Intelligence (DNI)

The office was established by the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act and was formed in April 2005. It’s the president’s principal national security intelligence advisor; heads the nation’s 16 intelligence agencies; and oversees and directs the National Intelligence Program.
Before he retired from the Navy as a four-star Admiral in 2002, Blair served as the top U.S. military official in the Pacific. He's also served as the director of the Joint Staff in the Pentagon and in various capacities at the National Security Council and the CIA. Blair replaces Michael McConnell as the director of National Intelligence.

Now retired, Blair is a 34 year Navy veteran and currently holds the (former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman) John Shalikashvili Chair in National Security Studies at The National Bureau of Asian Research (NBR). Also the General of the Army Omar Bradley Chair of Strategic Leadership at Dickenson College and the US Army War College. He’s the immediate past president of the Institute for Defense Analyses, a US government Washington, DC think tank that calls itself “a non-profit corporation that administers three federally funded (R & D) centers to assist the (government) in national security issues.”

Blair was also an Oxford classmate of Bill Clinton and a Naval Academy classmate of Senator Jim Webb. If appointed, he’ll bring more militarist credentials to Obama’s war cabinet. In his various command assignments during the Bush administration, he was a point man in the “war on terrorism.” He’ll continue that role as the nation’s intelligence chief.

An obstacle in his way was in a Pentagon inspector general finding regarding DOD conflict-of-interest standards. Earlier he was involved with a study of a major military contract for the F-22 fighter while a board member of the company that makes it, Lockheed Martin. It occurred while Blair was president of the Institute for Defense Analyses. Whether this will derail him is an open question, but it highlights the pervasive Washington revolving-door and overall corrupted culture.