Via Laura Rozen, here’s the link to an article in today’s New York Sun that suggests that John Negroponte has already agreed to let the DOD take covert operations from the CIA. This, and the other issues discussed in this article, is a pretty big deal. And it is far from what the Congress called for in the 2004 intel reorganization.

Here’s one passage from the article …

The pending appointment of General Michael Hayden as director of the Central Intelligence Agency will pave the way for the agency’s emasculation and for the Pentagon to assume full authority over paramilitary operations.

A senior intelligence community official yesterday said the director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, has indicated “he is willing to give up covert operations to the Pentagon.”

The source also pointed out that the Pentagon has requested increased budget authority to prepare for the acquisition of the CIA’s targeted military operations. The intelligence overhaul of 2004 envisioned that they would remain under the purview of the CIA.

The authority to commission and plan these secret military operations has been a point of contention since 2004 when Congress and the White House began reorganizing the intelligence community.

The proposed change would give the Pentagon unfettered authority to plan and conduct these operations without consulting an intelligence bureaucracy its civilian leaders have deemed hostile to the president’s war policy.

This contradicts what we just told you Steve Clemons is saying. And I’m not sufficiently plugged in to the story to tell you who’s right and who’s wrong. But this stuff is genuinely worrisome on a few different levels.

First, our whole intelligence infrastructure is being chopped apart and cobbled back together in ways that Congress never envisioned and doesn’t appear to be having a chance to sign off on. More immediately troubling is the fact that all our forward-leaning intelligence capacity is being taken over by the Pentagon when it’s still being run by Don Rumsfeld, a guy who just about everyone seems to agree now is a demonstrated failure at the job, someone who should already have been fired.

In this universe, as opposed to the alternative Bush loyalist universe, who’s screwed more stuff up recently, the political appointees at the Pentagon or the CIA? CIA’s far from perfect. But I don’t have much trouble answering the former. Yet we’re handing over a big chunk of the what the CIA does to those guys.

I don’t want to romanticize the intel community status quo ante. But you really have to wonder whether all these changes aren’t doing far more harm than good to our intel capacities and our national security. Again, particularly because Don Rumsfeld appears to be the one implementing what Congress mandated. Really, that sentence says it all.

Late Update: TPM Reader LG responds …

Re the DNI to turn over covert ops to DoD meme…keep in mind that there is a very big
difference between clandestine and covert ops. Covert ops (the paramilitary stuff) has almost always relied on heavy DoD suppport, training, funding, etc. with very little DoD oversight. The DO fair-haired
children do clandestine ops. I think it actually makes sense for the Pentagon to be running the covert
ops, especially since the Director of the CIA is no longer the DCI, just another Agency head that answers
to the DNI.

This is a decent point. But making the decisions without clear congressional authorization still seems like a big problem, and having Rumsfeld in charge of implementing them even bigger.

Reuters: “President Bush told a German newspaper his best moment in more than five years in office was catching a big perch in his own lake.”

bin Laden still at large; fish rolled up in rod-n-reel sting op.

Foggo out at CIA.

The government’s case against Rep. William Jefferson (D-LA) is looking stronger by the day. See the newly released court docs.

Here’s something that keeps popping into my head and popped with an extra burst with the news this morning that the latest Gallup poll — generally friendly to Bush — has him at an anemic 31% approval rating.

Given that pretty much all the polls now show the president mired in the mid- to low 30s, simple statistical probability would suggest that at one point in the not too distant future some poll will catch the president under 30% in the Dante-esque public opinion nether region of the 20s.

Mind you, I’m not saying that the president’s popularity will continue to fall into the 20s. The continuing descent is something like a mathematical limit. Each point lower digs deeper into the base of truly committed partisans and unquestioning hacks. So knocking off each new point on the way down requires ever greater displays of incompetence, failure and general infamy. And even for President Bush that’s a challenge. So, as I say, I’m not saying he’ll really get down into the 20s. I’m saying that if the president is consistently scoring like 32% or 33%, the margin of error built into the polls themselves should eventually spit out an outlier under 30%.

(By the way, if you’re a pollster or statistician and you know some reason why my logic is flawed, just keep it to yourself because it’ll really break my stride in writing this post.)

So, any predictions on when it will come or if it ever will? Is May the month when George W. Bush will cross that Stygian threshold on the path to presidential perdition? June? Never?

WaPo dips a toe into Foggo.

The latest from Rep. Bob Ney’s (R-OH) lawyer: “They are flat making it up.” That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.

At TPMCafe Bookclub this week, Fawaz Gerges is discussing his new book Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy, in which he follows “the journey of three generations of jihadists and narrate[s] their story in their own words.” Today Gerges is discussing his contention that we greatly overstate the religious or Islamic element of contemporary jihadism and overlook its essentially political character.

Bush to teach character to the elderly …

Those who don’t sign [for the Medicare drug benefit] up by May 15 will have to pay a penalty to enroll, although Bush repeatedly pointed out that there are exceptions for the poor. Many lawmakers want to extend the deadline, but Bush has opposed those calls.

“Deadlines are important,” Bush said. “Deadlines help people understand there is finality and people have to get after it.”

Bush.

In the past, when President Bush got a free ride for this or that form of wrong-doing, the answer was usually press craveness. Now, though, there’s so much scandal and criminality, maybe it’s just hard for most administration wrong-doing to make the cut, what with the Cunningham bribery investigation creeping into the CIA and DHS, Rove about to get indicted, etc.

All day I’ve been getting emails about this piece in the Dallas Business Journal about how HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson publicly admitted killing a major government services contract because the head of the company in question wasn’t a Bush supporter.

(Thinkprogress explains why this almost certainly violates federal law.)

Just as interesting was Jackson’s follow-on statement in which shows his understanding of how government contracting works: political supporters get contracts so they can pump a percentage of the profits back into the political party. Standard machine politics, at best. Organized bribery, at worst. And whatever you want to call it, the guiding principle of all contracting and government spending in the second Bush administration.

Said Jackson: “He didn’t get the contract. Why should I reward someone who doesn’t like the president, so they can use funds to try to campaign against the president? Logic says they don’t get the contract. That’s the way I believe.”