The Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, will resign tomorrow

  I have just read the news that tomorrow the Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, will tender his resignation to the president.

  Here is part of the statement released by Dennis Blair:

It is with deep regret that I informed the President today that I will step down as Director of National Intelligence effective Friday, May 28th,” Blair said. “I have had no greater honor or pleasure than to lead the remarkably talented and patriotic men and women of the Intelligence Community

  Here is part of a written statement released by Barack Obama:

record of service to the United States,” and said that “[d]uring his time as DNI, our intelligence community has performed admirably and effectively at a time of great challenges to our security, and I have valued his sense of purpose and patriotism

  This may be the “proper” thing to say– and he may be correct that Dennis Blair has a sense of purpose and patriotism– but I am not sure that it is correct. Barack Obama states that Dennis Blair “performed admirably,” but how admirably could he have performed if he was in charge of the evidence gathering that didn’t stop the Fort Hood terrorist attack? How admirably did he perform if the intelligence gathering agency had no idea that there was a plot afoot to blow up an airplane on Christmas day, or to set off a bomb in Times Square?

  Someone had to be held accountable for these attacks and it appears to me as if Dennis Blair will be the fall guy, I would have preferred to see Janet Napolitano take the fall but it looks as if it will be Dennis Blair instead. I don’t have a problem with this.

  There may be more to the story than just the three terrorist attacks that have occurred on United States soil since Barack Obama became president however. It sounds like Dennis Blair was on the short end of a few arguments between himself, the CIA, and Barack Obama.

  It sounds as of there is still a struggle between the different intelligence agencies on who has jurisdiction over what. This is disconcerting nine years after September 11th. We may still not have the proper structure in place to ensure that Americans remain safe.

The structure is not working the way it was intended. The Director of National Intelligence has a lot of responsibility in the law, but does not have adequate authority to carry out those responsibilities,” said Jeffrey Smith, a former CIA general counsel now with Arnold & Porter.

“The White House keeps wanting to deal directly with the CIA, and that causes conflicts,” Smith said. “We don’t have that relationship right, and that’s what’s caused most of the conflicts. There is ambiguity in the law and it manifests itself most often in operations, in part because those are the acts of the intelligence community that are of most interest to presidents, secretaries of state and so on.”

 “I think he needed stronger authorities, particularly in the management of the intelligence community, and in procurement of the big information gathering systems

    Republicans were quick to jump on this news, Kit Bond– the highest ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee– said:

DNI Blair deserves this nation’s thanks for his long service to our country. It must have been challenging to be forced on the sidelines by the Attorney General but still catch all the blame for failings

That Blair “would rather step down than continue to serve as America’s top intelligence officer is a disturbing sign of the stranglehold the Obama White House has placed on America’s intelligence agencies,”

  While Pete Hoekstra– the ranking Republican on the   House intelligence panel– said:

Clearly, and understandably, Director Blair was frustrated by the White House’s micromanagement and sidelining of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on national security issues

  I am not sure that the resignation of Dennis Blair had anything to do with the “politicization of national security” as Pete Hoekstra went on to claim. If anything the Obama administration has tried to downplay the fact that our nation’s security is at risk. He has tried to de-politicize national security by pretending that if we ignore the terrorists they will go away. That is obviously not going to happen.

   This leads me to believe that there is what may be an even bigger problem in our intelligence community– and that is the fact that we still have agencies which seem to be vying for the president’s approval instead of working together toward the same result– national security. We seem to have too many agencies looking for credit when thing go right while trying to defer blame when things go wrong.