Is this what the 9/11 Commission had in mind? Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte, taking his daily massage, swim and cigar:

On many a workday lunchtime, the nominal boss of U.S. intelligence, John D. Negroponte, can be found at a private club in downtown Washington, getting a massage, taking a swim, and having lunch, followed by a good cigar and a perusal of the daily papers in the club’s library.

“He spends three hours there [every] Monday through Friday,” gripes a senior counterterrorism official, noting that the former ambassador has a security detail sitting outside all that time in chase cars. Others say they’ve seen the Director of National Intelligence at the University Club, a 100-year-old mansion-like redoubt of dark oak panels and high ceilings a few blocks from the White House, only “several” times a week.

When did all the top officials in the Bush administration get so much leisure time to quail hunt, get massages, go mountain biking, and relax at their landed retreats in St. Michaels, MD? These are the officials endlessly invoking the war on terror? Echoes of a Latin American dictatorship.

Jeff Stein's larger point in this piece should not be missed. Negroponte has the free time because Rumsfeld and Cambone are the ones running intelligence policy, with scarce oversight from anybody, either the White House intel czar, or Congress:

The Director of National Intelligence was forced to concede that the U.S. intelligence activities Feinstein was asking him about had “not risen to the level of my office.” In any event, they came “under the direction of the undersecretary of defense for intelligence” — a pipsqueak, relatively speaking.

Negroponte said he “understood” that the Pentagon was doing an internal review of spying programs because of a congressional uproar.

“But will you get the results of that review?” Feinstein asked.

“Yes,” promised Negroponte, dismissed like a schoolboy, “I will get those results.”

Washington’s conventional wisdom these days is that [the Office of the Director of National Intelligence] ODNI is a joke.

The main reason is that Negroponte’s group has little power over the Pentagon’s covert actions.

It’s not his fault. Congress set it up that way after Rumsfeld and company worked the rooms of the House and Senate office buildings.

A knowledgeable reader writes in response, "The real story is that [Negroponte] is doing exactly what they picked him for -- be a figurehead to please the families of the victims but stay out of the way of the Pentagon."

(Via Paul Kiel.)

Posted by Laura at March 6, 2006 12:25 PM