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Bush will appear with Negroponte and former National Security Agency Director Mike McConnell, a retired Navy vice admiral, who will be tapped as his replacement. Negroponte will move over to the State Department to be deputy to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Mr. Negroponte had been brought to the intelligence job to help restore credibility and effectiveness to agencies whose reputations were badly damaged by failures related to the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, and mistaken prewar assessments of Iraq’s illicit weapons. He has maintained a low public profile but provides Mr. Bush with a briefing most mornings. President Bush has hailed the establishment of the intelligence post as an essential step in helping prevent another terrorist attack. On paper, the director of national intelligence outranks the deputy secretary of state, raising questions about why the White House would seek — and...

ntelligence czar to leave post, go to State: NBC Wed Jan 3, 2007 7:30 PM ET WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, will leave his post to take a senior position at the State Department, NBC news reported on Wednesday. Negroponte was the first U.S. intelligence czar

Cuban President Fidel Castro is very ill and close to death, U.S. Intelligence chief John Negroponte said in an interview published on Friday. "Everything we see indicates it will not be much longer ... months, not years," Negroponte told The Washington Post. The Cuban leader, 80, has not appeared in public since he underwent emergency intestinal surgery and temporarily handed over the presidency to his younger brother, Raul Castro, on July 31.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.S. National Intelligence Director John Negroponte met Friday with Iraq's prime minister in the second visit this week by a top U.S. official. The unannounced meeting comes amid spiraling violence that included seven American deaths and the discovery of 56 bodies in the Iraqi capital bearing signs of torture. The bodies found scattered around Baghdad were of Iraqi men between 20 and 45 years old, and all were apparent victims of sectarian death squads, police said Friday.All wore civilian clothes and had been bound at the wrists and ankles, police Lt. Mohammed Khayon said. He said the...

Analysts can add and edit content on government's classified Web site WASHINGTON - The U.S. intelligence community Tuesday unveiled its own secretive version of Wikipedia, saying the popular online encyclopedia format known for its openness is key to the future of American espionage. The office of U.S. intelligence czar John Negroponte announced Intellipedia, which allows intelligence analysts and other officials to collaboratively add and edit content on the government's classified Intelink Web much like its more famous namesake on the World Wide Web.

The director of National Intelligence's chief concerns about the future can be summed up with a word and a stat: petabytes and 15 percent. The National Security Agency, one of 16 intelligence agencies under DNI John Negroponte, estimates by next year, the Internet will carry 647 petabytes of data each day. "That's 647 followed by 15 zeros," says Negroponte, "and by way of comparison, the holdings of the entire Library of Congress (130 million items, including 30 million books that occupy 530 miles of book shelves) represent only 0.02 petabytes." The Internet is also the jihadis' network. "At Internet cafes,"...

<p>WASHINGTON (AP) House Democrats ask for rare closed session to discuss intelligence on terrorism.</p>

Preview and Analysis of the Weekend Talk Shows for 9/16 & 9/17/06The President is up dramatically in the polls.  Unemployment is down, inflation is under control, growth is continuing at a robust but sustainable rate and gas prices are falling dramatically.  So what's the topic this week?  Yep.  George Bush and the Republicans are in trouble.  Read on.Meet the Press continues their Senate debate series with Virginia's Republican Senator George Allen and his Democrat challenger former Reagan Secretary of the Navy James Webb.  When they set this up for this week I think they were planning on "macaca" being the...

Turf war keeping lid on evidence of WMD in Iraq? By KATHLEEN PARKER If you thought Democrats and Republicans were politically divided over the war in Iraq, you haven't seen anything yet. The real battle apparently is being waged under the radar between the White House, the intelligence community and Congress. ADVERTISEMENT At the center of the current skirmish is a newly unclassified document released last Wednesday that seems to confirm evidence of WMD in Saddam's Iraq, including both degraded and possibly lethal chemical agents. According to the document, coalition forces have recovered some 500 weapons munitions since 2003 that...

Surprise is what intelligence is intended to prevent, but on Sept. 11, 2001, our nation was surprised, and the results were tragic. Now the fifth anniversary of those horrific events raises anew the question: Is our nation's intelligence community better prepared to keep America safe? The answer is yes. U.S. intelligence has made major advances since that Sept. 11. First and foremost, we better understand, and are aligned to meet, the threat of transnational terror. Although our enemy is constantly changing and remains deadly, our collectors and analysts are carefully tracking the evolution of al-Qaeda and its ideological allies. Today,...

Sept. 11, 2006 issue - Bush administration policymakers and their congressional backers may get some unwelcome news from a new analysis on Iraq that the office of intelligence czar John Negroponte will soon produce. In late July, leading Senate Democrats asked Negroponte to come up with a new Iraq National Intelligence Estimate, or NIE, a secret study that is supposed to reflect the views of all 16 U.S. intel agencies. The most recent Iraq NIE, produced two years ago, was generally pessimistic about the future of the country. In a letter to Negroponte, the Senate Dems asked for U.S. analysts'...

<p>WASHINGTON — The office of Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte announced Friday that it will soon begin drafting an updated National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq.</p> <p>The declaration came amid indications this week that the threat to Iraq from foreign terrorist groups such as al Qaeda is receding.</p>

WASHINGTON - Sweeping reforms to the nation's intelligence system after the 9/11 attacks have done little to improve information-sharing or generate a greater sense of urgency among U.S. intelligence agencies, a House report concluded Thursday. The report by the House Select Intelligence Committee also gave National Intelligence Director John Negroponte a tepid review after 15 months on the job, noting he "is trying to do a little of everything, which slows down improvements in key areas." In their 41-page review of how the nation's 16 intelligence agencies have adjusted since Congress overhauled the system in December 2004, lawmakers found a...

<p>It didn’t take long to start pooh-poohing the significance of eliminating Zarqawi. MSNBC/al-Reuters headline: ‘Zarqawi more myth than Man.’ And of course, the hate-America crowd hinted the ‘timing’ was peculiar (Bush needed a boost in the polls). Zarqawi was a very important man in the terror network and welcomed by the radical Shiite regime in Tehran. he was more than a leader of one faction in a religious war; he promoted religious conflict as a tactic to destabilize Iraq and drive out the Coalition. He and his Iranian backers/masters promoted all kinds of internal Iraqi conflict: Kurds against Arabs, Turkamen against Kurds, anything that worked. The terror masters put aside their differences and made a war plan in which Sunni and Shia, Syrian and Saudi, Iranian and Iraqi cooperated against their common satanic enemy, the United States. Another important fact emerged from the accounts of the attack on Zarqawi: we killed two women in the same house. because they were his key intelligence officers in the jihadist terror organizations, despite endless citations from the Koran demanding their subservience. Theywere important components of the terror headquarters. And second, when our soldiers enter terrorists’ quarters and kill women in the ensuing firefight, it is highly probable the women may be terrorists also. Zarqawi played on a global scale. Reports from Canada recount contacts between the ‘home-grown’ terrorists arrested by the Mounties and Zarqawi: ‘Mississauga News,’ June 7: ‘The arrest of 17 suspects...is said to be the latest stage in dismantling a terrorist network that’s linked to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi...’).and seem linked to FBI arrests in Atlanta and others in Sarajevo, England, and Denmark. The public announcement a few months ago that Zarqawi was no longer the head of al Qaeda in Iraq, that henceforth the Iraqi Sunni ‘community’ would run the terror war there stated Zarqawi would devote his efforts to the international jihad.</p>

Stephen Kappes: The Wrong Man at CIA by Kenneth R. TimmermanPosted May 31, 2006Before Gen. Michael Hayden settles in as director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Congress needs to ask hard questions of the man he has said he wants to appoint as deputy director of the CIA: former operations chief Stephen R. Kappes. Kappes is a former Marine who elicits strong praise from former operations officers such as Gary Berntsen, who worked under him for two years. Hayden also heaped praise on Kappes. "When I did the Rolodex check around the community about Steve … they’re almost universally positive,"...

Two groups are expected to protest St. Johnsbury Academy graduation speaker John Negroponte Monday morning, including a Vermont activist who served jail time for a 2001 demonstration at Fort Benning in Georgia. Negroponte is the U.S. Director of Intelligence and the father of a graduating student. On Friday, activist Palmer Legare issued an "action alert" in the name of the Vermont School of the Americas Watch, a group working to close the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security, formerly the School of America, and change foreign policy in Latin America through non-violent resistance and congressional lobbying. The alert demands the Academy...

......... Regrettably, reform at the CIA is now dead. The only real chance opened immediately after 9/11 and closed when President Bush decided to retain the services of George Tenet, who always remained close and sympathetic to the operations directorate. Ms. Harman, many other prominent Democrats, and the anti-Bush press have put another nail into the clandestine service's coffin by rallying around an organization that desperately needs to be radically deconstructed. However tepidly or lazily Mr. Goss approached his work, he and his abrasive minions ought to be complimented for at least firing somebody. Given the history of the CIA,...

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Steve Kappes, a recently retired CIA insider, has been offered the No. 2 slot at the spy agency, sources told CNN, to reassure the CIA operations community about Gen. Michael Hayden's appointment as director as well as ease concerns about that nominee's military ties. The decision to tap Kappes is also seen as a move aimed at members of the powerful Senate Intelligence Committee who have raised doubts about Hayden. Kappes was a civilian operations officer who reportedly was forced out of the CIA by Porter Goss' associates after Goss became director in 2004. Intelligence analysts and...

PRESIDENT BUSH'S nomination of Gen. Michael V. Hayden as CIA director represents, above all, an attempt to push forward badly needed reforms of the intelligence community -- changes not made by the agency's outgoing chief, Porter J. Goss. For that reason, among others, Gen. Hayden's nomination deserves a careful and fair review by Congress. While he is a four-star Air Force general, he is also one of the most experienced and well-regarded managers in the intelligence community, credited with reorienting the mammoth National Security Agency after the end of the Cold War. As deputy to the new director of national...