Word: pentagonal
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...truth.' "U.S. military contractors now employ 10,675 émigrés from Communist countries who have been cleared by security agencies or are in the process of being cleared. Among those are 121 Soviet émigrés with top-secret clearance, giving them access to information that the Pentagon says can cause "exceptionally grave damage to national security...
Since beating out five senior rivals last January to become chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Wisconsin's Les Aspin has walked a tightrope on defense issues. A knowledgeable critic of Pentagon spending, he nevertheless angered many fellow Democrats by supporting the MX missile. Last week Aspin challenged his party, saying that the time has come to stop playing "the Doctor No of the defense debate." Democrats, he said, ought to start coming up with alternatives to weapons they do not like, instead of merely voicing criticism...
...serious turf battles in the U.S. intelligence community. One sign of trouble on the horizon: the Defense Department's intelligence chief, Stephen Cambone, is having aides draft a previously undisclosed "charter" for his office that would consolidate his power as the DNI's main point of contact for the Pentagon's myriad intelligence agencies, which consume some 80% of the estimated $40 billion U.S. intelligence budget. The detailed charter appears to extend Cambone's authority over such Pentagon intel units as the eavesdropping National Security Agency and the satellite-snooping National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and potentially over the military...
With Negroponte's confirmation hearings scheduled for this week, Pentagon defenders say that Cambone's office is required to have a charter and that it is doing some streamlining to help the DNI. "I think it's wise," Senate Armed Services Committee chairman John Warner says of the charter. "That's not going to limit [Negroponte] if he wants to call someone else" at one of the Pentagon's many intel shops...
...critics wonder why the charter wasn't written long ago-- Cambone took the job in March 2003--and say the Pentagon appears to be circling its wagons to ensure that it doesn't lose any power. Says the senior intelligence official: "I don't know how much this is Rumsfeld wanting one dog to kick within the Pentagon or Rumsfeld wanting to undercut...