The man President Barack Obama selected to lead the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies through a promised shift in priorities and practices is getting his first test in Congress.
Retired Adm. Dennis Blair was to testify Thursday before the Senate Intelligence Committee on his nomination to become the national intelligence director, heading a spy community whose relationship with Congress has frayed under eight years of the Bush administration.
Blair, a former head of the U.S. Pacific Command, would oversee a budget of nearly $50 billion and a work force of nearly 100,000 that has seen its reputation tarnished by allegations of torture, bungled intelligence on Iraq and secret eavesdropping on American phone and computer lines. Obama has pledged to reverse that.
Blair, a 34-year Navy veteran who spent a year at the CIA, won high marks for countering terrorism in southeast Asia after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. He worked closely with foreign partners in crafting offensives that crippled the Jemaah Islamiyah terror faction in Indonesia and the Abu Sayyaf group in the Philippines.
Blair is expected to get a swift confirmation, but is likely to face questions about the role he played 10 years ago in U.S. efforts to rein in the Indonesian military as it brutally cracked down on civilians in East Timor.
He also will probably be asked about a Pentagon conflict of interest investigation two years ago.
In 2006, Blair resigned from his top position at the Pentagon-funded Institute for Defense Analyses after the Senate Armed Services Committee raised concerns that after leaving the Navy he became the institute's president while serving on the boards of two defense contractors that worked on the F-22 fighter jet.
At the institute, he participated in two reviews of the F-22 rather than disqualifying himself. However, the November 2006 report found that Blair took no action to influence the outcome of either of the two studies.
Rather than resign from the defense contractors' boards, he resigned as both president and trustee of the institute.
By PAMELA HESS
Associated Press Writer
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