2004 Presidential Transition
Here's an editorial from the Denver Post about John Negroponte, President Bush's nominee for nomination as director of national intelligence [February 18, 2005, "New era underway in U.S. intel"]. They write: "Negroponte isn't a creation of the president, and so he will be all the more valuable to him. For four decades, he has served in a mix of assignments in eight countries and on three continents, from the Vietnam War peace talks to, currently, U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Now 65, the multilingual diplomat was deputy national security adviser in the Reagan administration. He also has worked with Democrats, serving as U.S. ambassador to the Philippines in the Clinton era. He has drawn controversy: While ambassador to Honduras in the 1980s, he helped carry out U.S. support of the contras, and was criticized for acquiescing in human rights abuses by CIA-trained Honduran death squads. As ambassador to the U.N., Negroponte sat next to then-CIA director George Tenet and behind former Secretary of State Colin Powell during Powell's ill-fated February 2003 presentation to the United Nations, in which Powell asserted with such certainty that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction."
The Rocky Mountain News editorial staff weighs in on John Negroponte [February 18, 2005, "New intel director's powers limited"]. From the opinion piece: "Asked about the real power of the job, Bush replied that 'people who control the money, people who have access to the president generally have a lot of influence.' There is a real difference, as intelligence bureaucrats undoubtedly were quick to note, between influence and actual authority. It does not appear that Negroponte will have much of the latter."
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