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What maneuver is this to escape accountability by new Congress? To fill the gap left by Bolton at the U.N. or perhaps he needs this position to clean personal history files: death squads in Central America and as U.S. Ambassador to Iraq …

Negroponte To Become Condi’s No. 2

WASHINGTON D.C. (CBS/AP) – Former NSA Director Admiral Mike McConnell is expected to take Negroponte’s place, reports CBS News national security correspondent David Martin.

McConnell served as director of the National Security Agency under former President George H.W. Bush and President Bill Clinton. Before that he served in the Gulf War as an intelligence officer to General Colin Powell.

In an interview with C-SPAN last month, Negroponte indicated that he wanted to stay on through the Bush administration.

Yet his answer to the question — will he “stay with it for a while?” — didn’t close to door to a new assignment. Since last summer, it has been said he was interested in the vacancy at the State Department.

“In my own mind at least, I visualize staying with it through the end of this administration and, then I think, probably that’ll be about the right time to pack it in,” he told C-SPAN.

It’s called a clean sweep:

  • Bush nominates Hayden (ex-NSA) as CIA chief
  • Ex-CIA chief Robert Gates to lead the Pentagon
  • NSA Director Admiral Mike McConnell is expected to take Negroponte’s place
  • Negroponte To Become Condi’s No. 2 at the State Department

    Fixing the missing piece of the unified intelligence puzzle: State Department

    BIO: John Dimitrie Negroponte – Creating a unified and efficient intelligence apparatus will be a major challenge given the turf wars that proliferated during Bush’s first term. These interagency disputes ranged from the creation of new intelligence operations tightly controlled by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (and other ideological allies among the civilian leadership at the Pentagon, including Stephen Cambone, Paul Wolfowitz, and Douglas Feith), to the sidelining of the State Department and the CIA by the Pentagon, White House, and Vice President’s Office …

    Negroponte’s deputy will be Lieutenant General Michael Hayden, who directs the Pentagon’s National Security Agency—which is dedicated to satellite and other high-tech espionage. The Pentagon controls 80% of the U.S. government’s intelligence budget, which is estimated to exceed $40 billion annually.

    Negroponte to State: What’s Going On? ◊ by BooMan

    My little hamster wheel has been spinning white hot ever since I read that John Negroponte is leaving his position as Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to take a position as Deputy Secretary of State. This is some really, really strange stuff. There are some very deep politics beneath this.

    John D. Negroponte was a member of the U.S. Delegation to the Paris Peace Talks (1968-69) with Henry Kissinger and served on the NSC Staff (1970-73)

    Here, then, is the emerging story of what Nixon called “peace with honor” but was, in fact, neither. This story of diplomatic deception and public betrayal has come to the light only because of the release of documents and tapes that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger sought to bury for as long as possible. Prior to these declassifications, we knew only what Nixon or Kissinger wanted us to know about the making of war and shaping of the so-called honorable peace in Vietnam.

    "But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."