DNI responses to Senate questions declassified

Dennis Blair

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Don’t bother reading through the 40 pages (.pdf) of responses given last February by the US Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to questions by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. There’s not that much new information in it, and it turns out DNI Dennis C. Blair even resorted to plagiarizing part of an article on an alleged Russian attack on US satellites originally printed in Russian newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta, with no attribution. Instead, you can save time by taking a look at the observations made on the 40-page document by Steven Aftergood, editor of the Federation of American Scientists’ Secrecy News bulletin. It was, in fact, a Freedom of Information Act request by Aftergood that prompted the release of the document in the first place. Interesting tidbits of information in the document include Blair’s confirmation of the CIA’s new Economic Intelligence Brief (EIB). This daily report points to something of a shift in the US intelligence community’s analytical focus, and follows recent reports that the CIA is actively hiring fired investment bankers to work in its Directorate of Intelligence. Other interesting observations by DNI Blair include that Iran is “covertly supplying arms to Afghan insurgents while publicly posing as supportive of the Afghan government”, and that Lebanese group Hezbollah “remains the most technically capable terrorist group in the world”.