With his slice of the $75 billion annual intelligence budget, top U.S. spymaster Adm. Dennis Blair today issued a thick report saying that a "deeper and broader understanding of threats and opportunities" is "necessary to ensure [success]."

We wish him luck.  After all, if understanding what's going on in the world can't be bought for $75 billion a year, what good is U.S. intelligence?

The fact is, there are plenty of bright people laboring away in the analytical bowels of the CIA, Pentagon, etc.  But what gets to the President too often is hyped and biased, according to another new report on U.S. intelligence, this one from the Brookings Institute.

President-elect Obama's selection of former congressman and White House official Leon E. Panetta to run the CIA is likely to give Republicans fresh ammunition to reopen questions about the Clinton administration's counterterrorism policies.

Critics have long maintained that Clinton was uninterested in intelligence issues and slow to come to grips with the threat of Islamist terrorism, even after the first attack on the World Trade Center, in 1993.

Panetta was budget director and later chief of staff during the first Clinton term.

In an interview three months after the 9/11 attacks, Panetta said that senior Clinton aides viewed terrorism as just one of many pressing global problems.

"Clinton was aware of the threat and sometimes he would mention it," Panetta told the New York Times. But the "big issues" in the president's first term, he said, were "Russia, Eastern bloc, Middle East peace, human rights, rogue nations and then terrorism."

"When it came to terrorism, Clinton administration officials continued the policy of their predecessors, who had viewed it primarily as a crime to be solved and prosecuted by law enforcement agencies," the Times said.

Information gathered through grand jury investigations by the Justice Department after the 1993 bombing pointed to overseas, but the information was not shared with the CIA because of the "wall" that existed then between intelligence and law enforcement operations.

As for Afghanistan, the CIA virtually abandoned the region in 1989 after defeating the Red Army, and the Clinton administration (and Congress) did nothing to reverse that policy, leaving the spy agency with few sources to follow the emergence of al Qaeda.

Another Clinton aide back then, George Stephanopoulos, said he believed the 1993 attack did not gain more attention because, in the end, it "wasn't a successful bombing."

"It wasn't the kind of thing where you walked into a staff meeting and people asked, what are we doing today in the war against terrorism?" he added.

It wasn't until a truck bomb tore into the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, killing 168 people, that plans to reorganize the government's counterterrorism efforts were revived, Panetta said.

If Oklahoma City could be hit, a terrorist attack could "happen at the White House,"  Panetta said.

Two months after the bombing, the Times reported, "Mr. Clinton ordered the government to intensify the fight against terrorism. The order did not give agencies involved in the fight more money, nor did it end the bureaucratic turf battles among them."

Three years later, Clinton responded to the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa with cruise missile strikes on Sudan and Afghanistan, moves that drew caustic comments from Republican presidential aspirant George W. Bush   during the 2000 campaign.

Panetta was appointed chief of staff to Clinton in 1994, and served in that position until 1997.

In 1996 he was handed the duty of informing then-CIA Director John M. Deutch that his appointment would not be renewed in the second administration.

He was a Democratic congressman from California's 17th district from 1977 to 1993.

Panetta was also a member of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, which recommended a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops.

He is firmly on the record against the use of torture to interrogate terrorist suspects.

"We cannot and we must not use torture under any circumstances. We are better than that," Panetta wrote in The Washington Monthly last spring.

Lawrence Di Rita, former spokesman for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, escalated his attack today on a CIA officer's charge that Pentagon dithering wasted a chance to wipe out top al Qaeda figures in northern Iraq back in 2002.

In my original story, published late last night, I quoted Di Rita's objection to the allegation by Charles "Sam" Faddis, who led a CIA team into northern Iraq following the 9/11 attacks, that  the Pentagon's "endless planning and delays" foiled a chance to wipe out a band of al Qaeda leaders who were fleeing American bombs in Afghanistan.

After reading that piece online, Di Rita had this further comment:

The FBI has blocked two of its veteran counterterrorism agents from going public with accusations that the CIA deliberately withheld crucial intelligence before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

FBI Special Agents Mark Rossini and Douglas Miller have asked for permission to appear in an upcoming public television documentary, scheduled to air in January, on pre-9/11 rivalries between the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency.

The program is a spin-off from The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America, by acclaimed investigative reporter James Bamford, due out in a matter of days.

The FBI denied Rossini and Miller permission to participate in the book or the PBS "NOVA" documentary, which is also being written and produced by Bamford, on grounds that the FBI "doesn't want to stir up old conflicts with the CIA," according to multiple reliable sources.

Rob Richer, the CIA's Near East Division chief in 2003, and John Maguire, who oversaw the agency's Iraq Operations Group, are on the record confirming the existence of a fake, backdated letter purported to have been written by Saddam Hussein's intelligence chief linking Iraq to the 9/11 attacks and Niger uranium.

The allegations -- angrily dismisssed by the White House and  former CIA Director George Tenet -- are contained in The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism, by Ron Suskind, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former reporter for the Wall Street Journal.

Suskind also quotes Alan Foley, the head of WMD analysis for the CIA at the time, as saying, "It is, in my opinion, true that the administration, for whatever reason, was determined to have a showdown with Iraq that predated this whole WMD stuff."

The authors of an authoritative book on the Niger uranium affair, meanwhile, were skeptical of Suskind's charges.  

"I find it hard to believe that CIA would ceate such a forgery just to please the White House," said former Newsday reporter Knut Royce, another Pulitzer winner and co-author of The Italian Letter: How the Bush Administration Used a Fake Letter to Build the Case for War,  

"I don't find it hard to believe that the White House asked for it." 

His co-author, former Washington Post editor Peter Eisner, said, "What would be better is proof of the forged letter, allegedly produced by the CIA. How can Suskind show that this is true? We don't know."

For more details go here.