“I think he’s exactly what our country needs more of. I think he’s what the Senate needs more of — courageous, independent thinking,” Hagel said. “That’s what the job is about. You are supposed to use your judgment.”

Hagel’s endorsement comes just shortly after New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg also intervened from outside the state and the Democratic Party to give Sestak a boost, and Sestak will doubtless be happy to point to both nods when courting Pennsylvania’s independent voters.

The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza, however, doesn’t think Hagel’s endorsement will help Sestak as much as it will help himself, calling it a “me for me” endorsement:

Hagel has made no secret of his interest in serving in the Obama Administration and was mentioned as a possible successor to National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair when he resigned in May. (Hagel currently serves as the co-chairman of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board.)

And, with Defense Secretary Robert Gates making clear last week that he would like to step down in 2011, the timing of Hagel’s Sestak endorsement has to be more than coincidental. (Hagel was mentioned as a possible Secretary of Defense in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 election but the President chose to keep Gates on.)

I’ll proffer a third, rather obvious explanation as well. Hagel, a moderate Republican, never got on well with the ultra-right, Club for Growth element of his party. Pat Toomey is a former president of the Club and is now one of its biggest beneficiaries. If Hagel wants to demonstrate his bipartisan credentials by sticking it to a Republican, Pat Toomey represents the best — and sweetest — option for revenge.

It’s not clear why that communication didn’t occur. As Fisher writes, President Obama has stated that he believes the Director of National Intelligence — his principal intelligence adviser — needs to head the community. But in practice, he hasn’t taken any measures to strengthen the office’s statutory authorities, leading me to think that the White House doesn’t see any political upside in a major intelligence overhaul barely five years after the last one. The major advocate for such an overhaul is Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. And she probably wants to see the PIAB report in full.

If you scour MSN CareerBuilder — in employee searches as in other endeavors, the agency casts a wide net — you’ll find the NSA advertising its need for a new top lawyer. Potential candidates will “Interpret all statutes, Presidential Directives, and Executive and Legislative Branch Regulations, and provide legal advice and counsel to the Director and Senior Leadership Team with respect to the authorities for NSA/CSS cryptologic activities and the conditions and restrictions thereon.” So it’s not just James Clapper, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, who may get a new senior intelligence job shortly.

What this means for NSA operations is unclear. Just last week, Director Keith Alexander gave a rare speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies that underscored the centrality of lawyers to the agency’s wide-ranging surveillance operations. “Every action that we take,” Alexander said, “we have legal reviews of it all the way up and down.” I’m awaiting formal comment from NSA on the vacancy and the circumstances behind it; presumably it has an acting general counsel in place.

And this is a delicate time for NSA to be without a senior legal adviser. Last month, the military officially created the first-ever military command to operate in cyberspace, U.S. Cyber Command, and it’s co-located with the NSA at Fort Meade in Maryland. (Alexander is also Cyber Command’s first leader.) In April, the former director of national intelligence, Dennis Blair, conceded that the legal and policy authorities distinguishing Cyber Command from the intelligence community have yet to be fleshed out.

“The absence of a general counsel introduces a shade of uncertainty into the process which needs to be correct,” said Steve Aftergood, an intelligence policy expert at the Federation of American Scientists. “NSA operations are law-intensive activities. They don’t make a move without clearing it with their legal people.”

Speaking of Blair’s replacement, Feinstein doesn’t come out and say it, but her statement gives a cold shoulder to James Clapper, the Pentagon’s intelligence chief and Blair’s deputy for Defense intelligence, who’s reportedly the leading candidate for the job. “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 the statement.

No one agency, particularly the Department of Defense, should control the flow of intelligence to the President. The majority of the intelligence budget is already executed by the Department of Defense, and it will always have a strong influence over the Intelligence Community’s operation. That should be balanced, however, by the need for the community to provide strategic intelligence beyond what is necessary for the warfighter.

On the one hand, Feinstein also opposed Leon Panetta’s appointment as CIA director until she got an assurance — in the form of Steve Kappes staying on as deputy director (he recently announced his retirement) — that Panetta wouldn’t jeopardize her prerogatives. On the other, Feinstein didn’t announce any opposition before Panetta’s nomination was announced.

Many of the murmurings I’ve heard from intelligence veterans have concerned the untenability of the DNI position, an intended fix to the old CIA-centric intelligence leadership that’s created an odd hybrid of management over 16 agencies without correlative budgetary authority and a perhaps naive distance from active intelligence operations. If people on TV are upset that a series of failed-but-attempted domestic terrorist attacks have happened on “Blair’s watch,” as I’ve heard more than one cable pundit say over the past 18 hours, they’re misunderstanding the DNI. S/he’s not supposed to prevent those attempts from happening. S/he’s supposed to organize, structure and resource the intelligence community so relevant agencies can prevent those attempts from happening. That’s why the Senate intelligence committee report that found a disorganized National Counterterrorism Center — something the DNI is responsible for — was damaging. What the DNI should also be doing is focusing the intelligence community around answering why these domestic terror attempts are happening, particularly using American citizens as operatives.

If that operational distance sounds untenable, that might be because five years of unhappy experience since the 9/11 Commission sought greater intelligence consolidation is prompting a re-think in intelligence circles. When I asked a veteran career intelligence officer with experience in various intel agencies what he made of Blair’s departure, the response I got back started with “Good!” Like several intelligence officers who serve out in the dangerous parts of the world, the prospect of an increasingly top-heavy bureaucracy distanced from field concerns is an unpleasant one.

“Blair’s biggest move was to try to grab turf from CIA over station chiefs, instead of doing serious work like developing a plan to better integrate [intelligence community] bureaucracies, where joint-minded personnel and promotion policies could create positive change. But that’s hard work and not sexy,” the intelligence officer emailed. “The current system creates bureaucrats whose focus is building their empire — more bodies, more money — all in the name of national security. His position was created to fix the intelligence bureaucratic failures, but growing bureaucracies to fix bureaucracies is a losing bet.”

In fairness to Blair, you can find an effort at “joint-minded personnel and promotion policies” — or, at the least, a commitment to the idea of them — in his August 2009 National Intelligence Strategy (PDF).

But don’t expect either the Obama administration or Congress to have any appetite for root-and-branch restructuring of the DNI position. That would be a major structural reform five years after the last major structural reform, and the national agenda is already too clogged to tolerate such a thing. Instead, expect the confirmation hearings of whoever ultimately replaces Blair to be a colloquy on what statutory changes are necessary to make the Office of the Director of National Intelligence a more coherent structure.

Whether that’s ultimately a laudable goal is up for debate. In 2007, a former senior intelligence analyst, Robert Hutchings, testified to Congress that the creation of the DNI itself reflected what he called a “Coordination Myth” about intelligence. That myth, he said, was

that it is somehow possible to “coordinate” the work of hundreds of thousands of people across dozens of agencies operating in nearly every country of the world. Anyone who has worked in complex organizations knows, or should know, that it is possible to coordinate only a few select activities and that there are always tradeoffs, because every time you coordinate some activities you are simultaneously weakening coordination among others. To cite just one example, the creation of the National Counterterrorism Center may have enhanced interagency coordination among terrorist operators, which is a good thing, but it has surely weakened coordination between them and the country and regional experts. The net result is that the Intelligence Community is probably stronger in tactical counter- terrorist coordination but is surely weaker in strategic counterterrorism. While we are looking for the next car bomb, we may be missing the next generation of terrorist threats.

Anyone observing the current debates over drone strikes, increased radicalization and their relationship surely recognizes the current relevance of Hutchings’ fear. When I asked him what he thought about the next DNI, he quipped, “Please quash those burgeoning rumors that I will be tapped.”

Assuming the report pans out — and I doubt it wouldn’t — it’s telling that President Obama will have fired an intelligence chief after several low-grade attempted terrorist attacks failed but President Bush didn’t fire his after a major domestic terrorist attack succeeded.

Alexander will remain in his old job, head of the National Security Agency. Now to figure out where the legal and policy boundaries between CYBERCOM and the intelligence community actually are.

Imagine that the military finds its information networks under attack. An investigation determines that the culprit of the attack is using civilian servers in a friendly country to penetrate CYBERCOM’s defense. What to do? And who gets to do it?

My understanding is that there’s an ongoing debate within the Defense Department and the CIA about whose responsibility is to take out those servers, as well as who actually possesses the authority to do so. These are probably not going to be the sorts of things that the U.S. government is going to take credit for doing — in other words, those will be covert actions. And “blurring” the uniformed military into the realm of covert action is murky territory. The 1991 Intelligence Authorization Act also suggests that if it’s covert, the CIA gets to do it.

So I asked Adm. Dennis Blair, the nation’s top intelligence officer, at today’s commemoration of the creation of his job five years ago, if U.S. Cyber Command and the intelligence community had established clear divisions of legal and policy authority or responsibility. “It’s a really dynamic area,” Blair replied. “Technology has developed far faster than [the] legal or policy framework.” So, in short, not yet. Blair added, “We’ll do what we have to to get it done.”

Kate Martin, the director of the Center for National Security Studies, observed that even outside of CYBERCOM, whose mandate remains rather unclear, there’s an “ongoing controversy about what kinds of military activities in the context of armed conflict with al-Qaeda are governed by the [legal] covert-activities requirement. That’s not even resolved, outside of the realm of cyberattacks.” Inside that realm, there are any number of questions about specific circumstances that would impact whether CYBERCOM is entering new territory. For instance, launching a direct attack on an enemy’s information network is a pretty traditional feature of warfare — you’re trying to disrupt his ability to command and control his forces. But what if elements of his offensive capability bounce around the world, through systems and virtual avenues controlled by parties that don’t have any stake in a given conflict? What if there isn’t a state of war declared?

In the case of taking out someone else’s servers, Martin mused, “It wouldn’t necessarily be a covert action, because you could argue that it’s closer to the military taking out a traditional supply line, and not using lethal force to do so.” So CYBERCOM might be in the clear there under existing authorities, even if Alexander told Congress that’s not the direction he wants to chart for the command. Or it might not be!

A spokesman for the CIA didn’t respond to a request for clarification. And I was unable to buttonhole Alexander at the ceremony today, although I saw him talking for a bit to CIA Director Leon Panetta and that naturally got my mind racing with speculation.

Two weeks ago, anonymous administration officials had said an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, living in Yemen and producing scores of incitement-filled sermons about the alleged Islamic imperative to kill Americans, could be targeted for assassination. The legal basis for such a thing has not been disclosed. So in a brief press Q-and-A with Blair, I asked what legal authorization he had for targeting an American citizen like Awlaki. Blair replied broadly that his authorization came from the law and the Constitution, pledged the intelligence community would “follow all rules” given to it by the “executive branch [and] the congressional branch” and then ended the press conference. There were more cupcakes.

I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the CIA and the Justice Department two weeks ago to find out the actual legal basis claimed by the Obama administration for targeting an American citizen for death without any provision of due process.

Anwar al-Awlaki is an American citizen, born in New Mexico, and now residing in Yemen, where he repeatedly issues exhortations to murder his fellow Americans. Any court would find him guilty of incitement. He has nebulous connections to al-Qaeda. What a court would say about those connections is uncertain, but courts have tended to give the government the benefit of the doubt in terrorism cases since at least 9/11. But al-Awlaki’s American citizenship entitles him to due process of law should the government seek to deprive him of life, liberty or property. When I asked Karen Greenberg of NYU’s Center on Law and Security whether al-Awlaki could be lawfully assassinated last month, she scoffed, “They can’t do this with al-Awlaki. He is an American citizen, born in New Mexico. They can’t take away his citizenship.”

The Obama administration begs to differ, according to Reuters, The Washington Post and The New York Times. Anonymous administration officials cite secret evidence to say that al-Awlaki’s connections to al-Qaeda affiliates have passed from the incitement phase into the operations phase, and so the CIA has marked him for death. Nowhere in those pieces does the Obama administration explain the legal basis for revoking al-Awlaki’s most basic constitutional right. As I wrote in my piece last month, not even John Yoo made a claim that radical while serving under the Bush administration:

In June 2002, John Yoo, then a lawyer for the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, assessed that U.S. citizenship was no obstacle to the government detaining a suspected terrorist and providing him with a trial before a military commission. “[T]he President’s authority to detain an enemy combatant is not diminished by a claim, or even a showing, of American citizenship,” Yoo wrote. But even Yoo did not consider the more radical claim of stripping American citizenship from a suspected terrorist for the purpose of legally killing him; and President Obama formally annulled Yoo’s memorandum in an executive order within days of taking office.

The administration may very well be making the correct evaluation of the threat al-Awlaki poses. But if citizenship means anything, it means that a citizen can’t be killed because the government uses secret evidence to say he or she is an intolerable threat. Al-Awlaki is certainly exploiting his American citizenship. But CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano told the Post’s Greg Miller, “This agency conducts its counterterrorism operations in strict accord with the law.” We at least have the right to know the legal basis the Obama administration reached to order the extra-judicial killing of an American citizen, and so I’ll be spending my morning filling out FOIAs.