Who is John Brennan?

A month has passed since Obama’s announcement that John Brennan was his pick to take over the CIA after the outing of David Petraeus during which there has been more news reported on Lance Armstrong’s doping confession on the Oprah show than on the nominee who will head a powerful agency few Americans understand.

I had heard so little about the guy on the MSM that I had to Google his name to see what was out there on the Internet. Plenty, it turns out. Brennan has made statements and speeches that are, on the surface, sympathetic to Islamic jihadism and, in my opinion, sufficiently out of the mainstream to have justified a tougher examination than Senate intelligence committee chaired by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) seemed willing to give him. This is the guy who has been running the war on terrorism as a White House adviser and will supposedly continue that role as the CIA chief. So, why is what is known about him being kept quiet?

A little background.

Brennan has a 25-year record in the CIA, rising through the ranks from a Middle East analyst to become the intelligence briefer of President Clinton and then a member of the executive suite as Deputy Executive Director of the CIA. When his boss and mentor, George Tenet, left the agency in 2004, Brennan followed the next year to take a higher-paying private sector job in intelligence. He got behind Obama’s 2008 campaign, which was supposed to make him a shoo-in for the top CIA post in the first Obama administration. But sullied by having served in the administration of the hated George Bush, the Lefties would hear of it, and Brennan was forced to ask Obama to withdraw his name. Nevertheless, a grateful Obama found a place for him in the White House as Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism.

Early in his career, Brennan served in the Middle East – Saudi Arabia and Egypt – where he supposedly became fluent in Arabic, although one observer called his fluency “rusty.” Nevertheless his language skills were sufficient to allow him to mix and mingle with the locals, especially young sometimes radical college students eager to exercise their influence in the world. More than a few people say he converted to Islam during his assignment in the Middle East, although there is no way to prove – or disprove – that assertion. His pro-Arabic sympathies and his anti-Israel antipathies are less subtle.

In a number of his speeches Brennan embraces Obama’s commitment (no doubt reinforced by Brennan himself) to expunge words like “jihadist” and “war on terror” from the public lexicon. Brennan asserts that

[Terrorists] are not jihadists, for jihad is a holy struggle, an effort to purify for a legitimate purpose, and there is nothing … holy or pure or legitimate or Islamic about murdering innocent men, women and children. [The US] is not waging a war against terrorism because terrorism is but a tactic that will never be defeated, any more than a tactics of war will.

Brennan has also said,

… the President does not describe this as a ‘global war’ …. It plays into the misleading and dangerous notion that the US … is somehow in conflict with the rest of the world. It risks setting our nation apart from the world, rather than emphasizing the interests we share. Worse, it risks reinforcing the idea that the US is somehow at war with Islam itself. And this is why President Obama has confronted this perception directly and forcefully in his speeches to Muslim audiences, declaring that America is not and never will be at war with Islam.

Brennan often recycles the hackneyed and vapid assertion that “violent extremists” are victims of “political, economic and social forces” and that

… there is no denying that when children have no hope for an education, when young people have no hope for a job and feel disconnected from the modern world, when governments fail to provide for the basic needs of their people, then people become more susceptible to ideologies of violence and death.

This is unadulterated horse hockey. Look at the 9/11 attackers and the terrorists leaders scattered among the Islamic groups committing mayhem around the world, especially to Jews and Americans in the Middle East, and you see children of privilege, college-educated fanatics with advanced degrees in medicine, law, and science. They aren’t ignorant, disconnected lunatics who aren’t equipped intellectually and socially to get their dark deeds done. They are smart, well-connected, and well-financed political and religious zealots who are trapped in an 8^th century Islamic time warp.

Brennan’s views on Hezbollah should have been especially worth probing if Senator Feinstein’s committee had any inclination to do what it was elected to do – and that applies equally to Republicans and Democrats.

Describing that Hezbollah had emerged from a terrorist organization sponsored by Iran to one that has members in the Lebanese Parliament, Brennan has said,

Hezbollah is a very interesting organization … there is certainly the elements of Hezbollah that are truly a concern to us what they’re doing. And what we need to do is to find ways to diminish their influence within the organization and to try to build up the more moderate elements.

How can the word “moderate” be used in the same sentence with Hezbollah, which along with Hamas, wages almost continual war against Israel? And as for killing Americans, Hezbollah is second only to al-Qaida. Yet Brennan claims Hezbollah has “evolved.” It certainly has. Now it is able to recruit the professional class into its ranks.

… within Hezbollah, there's still a terrorist core. And hopefully those elements within the Shia community in Lebanon and within Hezbollah at large – they're going to continue to look at that extremist terrorist core as being something that is anathema to what, in fact, they're trying to accomplish in terms of their aspirations about being part of the political process in Lebanon. And so, quite frankly, I'm pleased to see that a lot of Hezbollah individuals are in fact renouncing that type of terrorism and violence and are trying to participate in the political process in a very legitimate fashion.

Tell it to the Israelis.

In last week’s hearing several Senators asked Brennan about the so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EITs) which the CIA used when the Bush administration – aka the Dark Side – was first learning how to fight the war on terror. Let’s admit that terrorists who willingly kill 3,000 people are probably not going to divulge a lot of useful information in a chat over a cup of coffee. So I’m on record in saying that bad guys need a little incentive to cough up their evil plans and knowledge. EITs involve sleep deprivation, uninterrupted loud noise, (remember how Panama’s Manuel Noriega was persuaded to surrender?), heat, standing or squatting for long periods – hardly the tools of the Spanish Inquisition. Yet, these enhanced techniques were sufficient to loosen the tongues of most of the evil doers. Waterboarding was used on just three holdouts.

Waterboarding involves strapping someone to a board with his feet above his head and covering his face with cellophane or a towel onto which water is poured. It creates the sense that the person is drowning even though no water enters his nose or mouth. Panic is almost instantaneous. Anyone who administers this technique must first endure it himself to know firsthand what it is like. The average time of tolerance is 14 seconds. It seems to me that 14 seconds of panic is worth whatever information you can get from an avowed enemy of this country – especially if he knows there will be another session if he lies.

Waterboarding isn’t torture. Torture inflicts bodily pain or damage. Waterboarding doesn’t. Reporters have volunteered to undergo waterboarding to understand its affect. No sensible reporter would subject himself to painful torture to write a story about it.

In a 2007 interview, Brennan defended enhanced interrogation saying.

There [has] been a lot of information that has come out from these interrogation procedures that the agency has in fact used against the real hardcore terrorists. It has saved lives. And let’s not forget, these are hardened terrorists who have been responsible for 9/11, who have shown no remorse at all for the deaths of 3,000 innocents.

In the same interview, however, Brennan was critical of the use of waterboarding because “inconsistent with American values” and “something that should be prohibited.”

Really?

My son is a police officer and carries standard issue pepper spray and a taser stun gun. Each officer has to be pepper-sprayed and “tasered” before carrying these devices. The pepper spray or taser experience is far worst in terms of pain or discomfort than 14 seconds of waterboarding and their use is usually sufficient to incapacitate a bad guy in order to avoid having to shoot him. I wonder if Brennan thinks pepper spray and trasers are inconsistent with American values (since they are used on Americans, not terrorists) and should be prohibited.

The entire line of reasoning concerning how uncivilized one may be when dealing with someone who is a killer is insane.

Brennan's being on record for repudiating EITs wasn’t sufficient for the Lefties on the Senate Intelligence Committee, however, who sent their staffs to generate a 6,000 page report on the ineffectiveness of EITs. Only Democrats were involved in this project, and the end product was summarized in a 350-page report which Brennan was asked to read before his hearing.

Asked by Feinstein what he now thought about the EITs instituted by the hated Bush CIA, Brennan said;

I must tell you, Senator, that reading this report from the committee raises serious questions about the information that I was given at the time and the impression I had at that time. Now I have to determine what, based on that information as well as what CIA says, what the truth is.

Huh? Brennan was asked to comment on a partisan report whose conclusion was foreknown but the Senate committee did not asked him if the CIA program saved lives. If lives were saved, why aren’t we still using these techniques? Is valuable information being missed which could cost American lives in the future because we are too civilized to realize what kind of an enemy we are dealing with – one who is willing to kill himself in order to kill others?

It seems oddly paradoxical that the high-minded Obama administration, which put waterboarding off limits and would dearly love to close the Gitmo prison, has no compunction about vaporizing a target in a sovereign country that has not given permission to fly in its air space.

The extent of Obama’s drone program architected by – none other than – John Brennan and its “kill list” is just coming to light, even though drones have been used for assassination for years. So here’s my question: If you catch a bad guy you can’t waterboard him … you gotta’ be nice to him … but you can blow him into eternity, which is a lot worse than waterboarding, and you get no intelligence from him? How does that work?

We’re told that the collateral damage in loss of life from drones is in “single digits” each year according to the Obama administration. Well, that’s comforting. But non-governmental groups, who are probably wrong, say that up to 15% or the 2,500 to 3,000 killed by drones are non-combatants. I’m not saying collaterals are innocent or else they wouldn’t be hanging out with terrorists, but they weren’t the target. They were in the wrong place. Too bad the lot of them weren’t captured. Then we couldn’t do anything to them. Too uncivilized, you know.

 

On Christmas Day 2009 Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab made news by setting his underwear on fire in a botched attempt to blow up an airplane in flight. Three years later a similar incident was thwarted by another underwear bomber. Trying to get credit for being part of a British and Saudi intelligence operation which only marginally involved the US, Brennan blew the cover of an underground mole who tipped off authorities that a non-metallic device would be worn. Brennan made the information known to former intelligence operatives who were appearing on TV news programs as experts. Although he referred to the mole indirectly by saying there was “inside control” no former intelligence agent could miss a clue that large. As a child I recall World War II posters warning “Loose lips sink ships.” Who knows what else the mole would have learned if Brennan hadn’t blown his cover in order to grandstand.

We now know that when Obama was running for reelection Brennan and others disclosed the identity of Seal Team 6 to Hollywood movie makers who were producing a film that would be released fortuitously when it would do the Obama campaign the most good. The administration had stonewalled efforts by others who wanted Osama bin Laden death photos, claiming secrecy, security, and the usual run-arounds. Only after nine months and a federal lawsuit was Judicial Watch able to get their request released under the Freedom of Information Act from the Defense Department and CIA. Documents revealed that Brennan, the president’s counter-terrorism adviser, had briefed the film-makers on the Osama raid.

I guess secrets become un-secret only if it serves a political end.

Colleagues who formerly worked with Brennan describe a man who will say whatever his bosses want to hear in order to advance his own career. He is, by his own actions, a man who will blow covers and reveal secreted information to hype his self-importance and put politics above principle to curry the favor of his boss. Is this the kind of guy we want running our intelligence operations?

It is incomprehensible to think that Brennan was not in the loop as the US Benghazi mission was under attack and the ambassador and security detail were calling for help. For a person so inclined to terminate targets with drones, why weren’t they used here? Normally not camera shy, Brennan was MIA after this tragedy. Yet not one question in the confirmation hearing probed what he knew about the Benghazi fiasco.

And the cockamamie yarn about a anti-Islam video setting off a spontaneous riot? Susan Rice didn’t think that up on her own, nor did Hillary. Brennan’s fingerprints are all over it, although that can’t be proved. But his role as the president’s counterterrorism adviser would have put his name on the list of the first people to be called when the Benghazi mission came under attack. Since Obama had decreed al-Qaeda out of existence to improve his reelection, a cover story had to concocted to protect King Canute.

Thankfully Lindsay Graham has a hold on the Brennan and Hagel confirmations until the White House releases information about the Benghazi debacle.

For his second term, Obama is installing second string players in the selection of Kerry, Hagel, and Brennan. Not one of the three is an independent thinker – just what Obama wants because he is going to run their agencies from the White House. But drone targeting and kill lists are a lot of power to put in an agency whose mission is to gather intelligence. Its growing paramilitary role is typical bureaucratic mission creep – and dangerous at that. CIA should be confined to intelligence and let Defense do the killing. But the committee didn’t probe that issue either.

There are many questions about the suitability of John Brennan to head the CIA. Too bad the Senate Intelligence Committee didn’t see the need to ask them.