Mark J. Penn, one of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s key and most controversial advisers, is leaving her campaign.

It may be too early for the post-mortems on the presidential campaign of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-NY.

But given her troubles of late, the pre-mortems are rolling in.

There’s enough blame to go around, but Mark Penn, Clinton’s chief strategist and pollster, is taking a lot of the hits.

No other foreign leader appreciated the importance of connections more than the late Benazir Bhutto.

The Pakistani opposition leader, assassinated Thursday in Rawalpindi, made regular trips to Washington, paid the D.C. lobbying firm Burson-Marsteller hundreds of thousands of dollars, and cultivated a long list of friends among American journalists and politicians.

While CEO Erik Prince has been the public face of Blackwater USA during recent weeks of intense government and media scrutiny, the often outspoken Cofer Black, company vice chairman, has kept out of the limelight.

Black, one of the nation's eminent authorities on combatting terrorism, is deeply involved in the network of Blackwater-related companies. He also serves as chairman of Total Intelligence Solutions and is CEO of Black Group, LLC.

With more than 30 years of service in the Central Intelligence Agency, Black is known as a superspy. He helped catch the international terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, better known as "Carlos the Jackal" and in 1999, was named head of the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center.