It's probably too late now -- but get Thomas Friedman away from today's Washington Post! The Post's Walter Pincus and Joby Warrick outline a new report, "Global Trends 2025" where intelligence professionals forecast an America losing its political, economic and cultural clout. ...

Yesterday I blogged about the Bush administration's re-write of executive order 12333, which governs how the executive branch's 16 intelligence agencies work together. The re-write, announced yesterday, gives broad policy-making power to the Director of National Intelligence, a post created only four years ago. Apparently nobody bothered to ask Congress ...

Quick -- name the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies. Let’s hope Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, can. McConnell, who already has power over personnel at the 16 agencies, may soon get the power of the purse through a presidential order. 

The Wall Street Journal’s Siobhan ...

A Congressional Research Service study warns that national security agencies created during the Bush administration—like the Department of Homeland Security and Office of National Intelligence—are not properly preparing for the next administration. The study finds that the agencies are focused too much on the administrative side of the transition instead ...

A key part of government’s post-9/11 restructuring was the creation of a National Intelligence Board. Borne out of CIA and FBI inability to share information that could have thwarted the terrorist attacks, the 16-member board includes the leaders of all key intelligence and security agencies, including the CIA and ...

Walter Pincus's report in the Washington Post and Mark Mazzetti's in the New York Times on the testimony of Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence provide an interesting snapshot of the issues facing the nation's intelligence coordination center.  The testimony, added to by CIA chief Gen. Michael Hayden, covered everything from the Iranian nuclear threat to Pakistan's instability to the threat of terrorism (cyberterrorism as well as the better-known kind) in the U.S.

The National Intelligence Estimate released in December 2007 stating that Iran had halted efforts to  build nuclear weapons emerged following a multi-year internal battle between the White House and career civil servants in the intelligence sector, according to Jay Solomon and Siobhan Gorman of the Wall Street Journal.  The report ...

Three opinion pieces in the Washington Post point out three plagues – ossified organizational behavior, lack of personal responsibility, and the dominance of outside contractors – underlying America's intelligence problems today.