As turneresq reports, John Brennan--a top CIA aide to George Tenet during most of the Bush administration--has withdrawn his name from consideration for CIA director. Which is good news all around. Though Brennan pettily and disingenuously writes in his letter to Obama that he wasn't part of the "decisionmaking" in the agency's torture policies, he remained an apologist for it. As Harper's Scott Horton points out
he has a critical shortcoming: his completely ambiguous and inconsistent views about the CIA’s use of torture and torture by proxy as techniques. As a company man, Brennan was quick to justify and support what was done. As an "independent" analyst for broadcast journalists, he also provided support and cover for practices from waterboarding to the use of psychotropic drugs. As an adviser to the Obama campaign, Brennan experienced an unconvincing epiphany and came to reject President Bush’s "program" along the same lines as his boss. The timing and circumstances of Brennan’s conversion suggest that it was dictated by political expedience and not ethics.
Horton writes about a letter that 200 of the nation's leading psychologists wrote to Obama yesterday, protesting this nomination. Reviewing Brennan's statements, they wrote
In order to restore American credibility and the rule of law, our country needs a clear and decisive repudiation of the "dark side" at this crucial turning point in our history. We need officials to clearly and without ambivalence assert the rule of law. Mr. Brennan is not an appropriate choice to lead us in this direction. The country cannot afford to have him as director of our most important intelligence agencies.
As psychologists and other concerned Americans, we ask you to reject Mr. Brennan as Director of the CIA. His appointment would dishearten and alienate those who opposed torture under the Bush Administration. We ask you to appoint a Director who will truly represent "the change we need."
This is a stain on our nation that didn't need to bleed through into the new administration. Brennan only represented an association with the Bush administration policies that Obama has strenuously repudiated. Morally and politically, this is an extremely positive development. With the economic crisis that has to be immediately dealt with, Brennan is a distraction Obama didn't need to have, and his confirmation hearings would have been ugly, not only over the torture issue, but because Brennan was a full-throated supporter of telco amnesty and warrantless wiretapping.
Looking toward who Obama might pick, Jeff Stein, the national security editor at CQ, has an interesting suggestion:
Barack Obama should give serious consideration to finding another spy to take over now, someone who really knows the business. There are some good candidates inside and out.
Someone needs to shake the place to its foundation, critics say, to dislodge the cloak-dragging bureaucrats who have resisted more daring — and dangerous — operations to take down al Qaeda....
Stein goes on to argue that the bureaucrats who have run the agency, and allowed it to really lose its way on the terrorism front, have been manipulated and undercut by their own agents. He concludes:
Going after terrorists requires entirely different, and far more risky techniques than those of the Cold War, when the biggest vulnerability for a CIA case officer stationed in an American embassy was being unmasked by the KGB and PNG’d — declared persona non grata and sent home.
A logical alternative is recruiting young jihadis on the way up, which would put the CIA in the risky position of having a rising terrorist on its payroll, not to mention taking the heat if something goes wrong.
And it would take years to nurture someone into al Qaeda’s inner circles.
"In America we don’t think that way," Sullivan said. "No one wants to get on the ground in the CIA and do the job. It’s too hard."
It’s a complaint heard in many quarters, for a long time.
Who’s going to step up and turn things around?
It begins with the president-elect. Barack Obama is a student of history, as his deep reading of Lincoln shows. And he’s often talked about people taking responsibility for their actions.
It’s way past time for CIA to do the same.
It's an intriguing argument, but not one I necessarily adopt. The CIA director needs to have both a deep understanding of how intelligence works, but also needs to have enough separation from and clout over operating agents to not be buffaloed by them, as Stein argues Tenet was. Putting a spook in charge of the spooks could lead to an even more rogue operation than we've seen in the Bush administration. We need as complete a break with the past eight years as possible, so it's excellent news that Brennan is out. But I'm not at all sure that taking someone from inside the agency now is the way to go.