■"Bush's New Intelligence Czar: John Negroponte faces intrigue, subterfuge and shadowy fighters. And that's just in Washington," by Timothy L. Berger et. al, Time, 28 February 2005, p. 33.

■"Thrown to the Wolves: A haughty U.S. links arms with torturers," op-ed by Bob Herbert, New York Times, 25 February 2005, p. A23.

The "3-D jobs" are the ones filled mostly by migrant workers, and the term stands for dirty, dangerous and difficult. These words describe Negroponte's career: the man is willing to take very tough jobs and he always performs them with aplomb. Compare this guy to Colin Powell, media darling, who held high-profile jobs galore and basically accomplished nothing of lasting note in his career. Negroponte gets things done and doesn't draw attention to himself. His record speaks to why he gets being given such sensitive tasks.

Bush chose well for the National Intelligence Director. The first man to hold this job will go a long way to defining its essential rule set. CIA's Goss will report to him, and he'll share control over the 15 members of the Intelligence Community with a load of other cabinet secretaries, the biggest being, of course, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, whose department owns 80% of the IC's total budget.

But here's the real power to this position: he replaces the Director of Central Intelligence (Goss) as the daily briefer to the president.

Where I think Negroponte needs to work the process hardest and fastest is forcing the IC to define its emerging rule set on how we snatch and process terrorist suspects inside the Gap, especially in terms of how we choose to sometimes send them home to states there, like Syria, that we know will torture them. This is essentially the ground I covered in the Wired piece, and frankly, I'm becoming more enamored of the World Counter-Terrorism Organization I proposed in that article as more writers like Bob Herbert mount effective attacks on our policy of "extraordinary rendition" (sending suspects to known Gap torturing regimes). We have to come clean on this sort of stuff before we end up with some huge scandals. We have to build up the Core's rule set on this one. Negroponte needs to make this a priority.