The More Things Change, the More They Stay Real Strange

Looks like it's more of the shell game from the people that gave you Dick Nixon and secret wars in Cambodia and Colombia.

The White House has decided to reject classified recommendations by a presidential commission that would have given the Pentagon greater authority to conduct covert action, senior government officials said Monday.

The decision is a victory for the Central Intelligence Agency, which has long been the principal architect and instrument of the secretive operations. The agency has been struggling to retain its authority in the power structure headed by John D. Negroponte, the new director of national intelligence, especially as the Pentagon has pressed for a greater role in intelligence operations.

The White House will also designate the C.I.A. as the main manager of the government's human spying operations, even those conducted by the Pentagon and the F.B.I., the officials said...

The decision marks the second time in a year that the White House has rejected a high-level recommendation to transfer some C.I.A. powers to the Pentagon. The Sept. 11 commission recommended that the agency's special paramilitary unit be transferred to the Pentagon, but the White House decided in November to maintain that capacity at the C.I.A., while also moving to strengthen the Pentagon's paramilitary capacities.

Under Mr. Negroponte, who took office in April as part of the biggest intelligence overhaul in four decades, the C.I.A. no longer has the pre-eminence it commanded for decades. The director of central intelligence, Porter J. Goss, no longer regularly attends either the daily morning briefings for President Bush or regular meetings of Mr. Bush's principal foreign policy advisers.

But in addressing the commission's recommendations, the White House appears to have decided to maintain the C.I.A.'s predominance in both covert action and human spying, the areas in which the agency has most rigorously defended its turf.

Under law, covert actions may be carried out only with presidential authorization and Congressional notification, and those operations are devised so that American government involvement is disguised and meant never to be acknowledged.

Poor Porter Goss, shut out of a tedious morning meeting with the Clueless-in-Chief.

Porter Goss, veteran of the Bay of Pigs, the Kennedy assasinations, the Congressional support of Reagan's secret wars, and the NeoCon takeover of Congress.

The man who overtly left the CIA agency for Congress, claiming it was "too gun shy".

Sounds more like a blank check and plausible deniability to me.