CAN SANDY BERGER BE FAR BEHIND?:

The Intel Czar’s Picks: Not Too Intelligent? (Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff, 3/23/09, NEWSWEEK)

Add president Obama's national intelligence czar, Dennis Blair, to the list of embattled top-level appointees. Blair, a retired four-star Navy admiral who attended Oxford with Bill Clinton, courted controversy among pro-Israel and anti-China activists this month when he named Charles (Chas) Freeman, an outspoken former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, to chair the National Intelligence Council, a committee of the government's top intel analysts. After House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other pols complained to the White House, Freeman abruptly withdrew. Now both Republican and Democratic intel experts are raising questions about another Blair pick: John Deutch, a former CIA director once accused of major security lapses, who's been appointed to a temporary panel reviewing troubled, top-secret spy-satellite programs.

After Deutch resigned as CIA director in 1996, agency officials discovered he had stored hundreds of pages of classified files on his home computers, despite repeated warnings that they could be intercepted via the Internet. Because of the incident, Deutch was stripped of his high-level security clearances, and a criminal probe into the matter culminated in January 2001, when the ex-spy chief agreed to plead guilty to misdemeanor charges of mishandling classified material. (The next day, Clinton, in one of his final acts as president, pardoned him.) Given Deutch's history, congressional officials want to know why Blair placed him on a panel so sensitive that its work should require an ultra-top-secret security clearance known as SI/TK (Special Intelligence/Talent-Keyhole). "The decision to grant [Deutch] a security clearance again is an affront," GOP Sen. Kit Bond, the vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told NEWSWEEK, adding that it "should be reversed immediately."

Okay, I get why Jon Stewart is so mad at economic reporters for biffing the credit story, and not warning Americans that there were potential problems. But why isn't he just as mad at himself, and the rest of the political press, for biffing the Obama story, and not warning that he was unqualified for the job?

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 15, 2009 8:19 AM