National Counterterrorism Center head Michael Leiter resigned yesterday. After all, we spent most of Wednesday morning, during Robert Mueller’s confirmation hearing for an unusual two-year extension, talking about the importance of continuity

There’s not all that much in this Bob Woodward piece on the raid to get Osama bin Laden that hasn’t already been reported generally elsewhere: just some details about the surveillance leading up to the raid (which I’ll discuss below) and a cute anecdote about how they measured bin Laden’s corpse to make sure it was taller than six feet.

It was naive of anyone to think that any executive branch would willingly give up their own power. Congress, thanks to Republican doddering, made the effort to put the slightest of brakes on that power temporarily. But they were promptly told that they endangered America, so that will be that.

When James Clapper testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee, he rejected one of the central criticisms in the WaPo’s Top Secret America series–that the redundancy in the Intelligence Community contributed to waste and intelligence failures.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that his first act as DNI is to add to the redundancy.

I’m thoroughly unsurprised by the news of Dennis Blair’s ouster. After all, it’s an impossible job that appears to serve one purpose: to provide a deck chair you can rearrange every two years as a scapegoat for our continuing inability to detect terrorists even with all the surveillance toys we’ve got.