Gates offers strong support to Clapper

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on Sunday strongly backed the
nomination of James Clapper as the new Director of National
Intelligence.

Seeking to ease congressional concern over the nomination, Gates called
Clapper “the consummate intelligence professional who has the respect
of virtually everybody in the community.”

“The President could
not have found a better person, a more experienced person, or with a
better temperament to do this job and actually make it work, than Jim
Clapper,” Gates told reporters en route from Singapore to Baku, Azerbaijan.

Sen.
Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who heads the Senate Intelligence panel,
expressed concern about naming a military officer to the job. Clapper
serves as the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. 

“It will be important that any nominee is not beholden to the
Pentagon’s interests and can, as needed, provide balance to civilian
and military interests in carrying out the nation’s intelligence
missions,” Feinstein said in a statement last week. 

Meanwhile,
the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence panel called Clapper
the “wrong person” for the job and said that Clapper is not forthcoming
with information to the committees with jurisdiction over intelligence
matters. 

Gates on Sunday stressed that Clapper would be a good conduit
between the civilian agencies and the military and that he has a
“strong, long record” of adhering to congressional oversight and
cooperating with congressional committees. The misunderstandings, Gates
said, come in part from jurisdictional issues between the armed
services and intelligence panels in Congress. 

“I have never heard a single complaint from the armed services committees
about Jim’s forthcomingness,” Gates said. “I think some of what you see is the
jurisdictional conflict between the intelligence committees and the
armed services committees in terms of who gets briefed on what.”