In 1980, a 25-year old graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin wrote a master’s thesis called “Human rights, a case study of Egypt.” In it, he argued that the aim of achieving and maintaining political stability justifies human rights violations by apprehensive governments— including crackdowns on unbridled journalists:
Since the press can play such an influential role in determining the perceptions of the masses, I am in favor of some degree of government censorship. Inflamatory [sic] articles can provoke mass opposition and possible violence.
Why should we care what a 25-year old grad student wrote over 30 years ago? Because that student grew up to be John Brennan—recently appointed director of the CIA. And because the theory he outlined in his master’s thesis seems to have shaped his attitude toward the exercise of power since then.
Four Months Make An Expert?
Brennan wrote the thesis, first made public by Charles C. Johnson, for an article in the Daily Caller (additional pages here), to earn a master’s degree in government with a concentration in Middle Eastern studies. The paper analyzed human rights in Egypt under the 1970s regime of Anwar Sadat — a regime Brennan experienced firsthand while studying at the American University in Cairo for four months (from September 1975 to January 1976).
Under Sadat, Egypt saw riots over the price of bread, a growing gap between the rich and the poor, high unemployment, widespread malnutrition, and other turmoil.
For the sake of stability, Brennan wrote, Sadat rightly introduced legislation to restrict assembly, strove to replace the judiciary in political trials with his own special prosecutor, and subjected the press to frequent, extensive censorship.
The powerful have long used emergencies or purported emergencies as excuses to seize power. In terms of Egypt’s dire conditions, Brennan wrote,
Sadat’s authoritarian approach to the democratic process has brought widespread criticism from his opponents. The motivation for this approach is obvious: in limiting personal liberties, Sadat has sought political order and stability in Egypt [...] Looking at the present policies of the Sadat administration, one gets the impression that democracy does not exist in Egypt. But if democracy is a process rather than a state, the democratic process may involve, at some point, the violation of personal liberties and procedural justice. Sadat’s undemocratic methods, therefore, may aim at the ultimate preservation of democracy rather than its demise.
We Had to Destroy Democracy to Save It
These Orwellian arguments should not be dismissed as the busywork of a college student hurrying to get a grade. The thesis is written in the same confident style —blunt sentences, few hedges — that he speaks with today. Back then, the graduate student clearly saw himself as a potential “decider,” like Sadat, tasked with picking whose human rights get violated in the purported best interest of “the State.”
A long career has made Brennan that decider.
There is some question as to when his career at the CIA really started. He tells a story that seems a little improbable: while riding a bus to Fordham University, where he earned a bachelor’s in political science between 1973 and 1977, he read “an ad in The New York Times and it said the CIA was looking for a few good people.” Overseas travel had aroused his wanderlust, he said, so he talked to a CIA recruiter.
A classmate of his from fourth grade to his undergraduate years recalls that Brennan spent the summer after freshman year with a cousin who worked for the Agency of International Development in Indonesia and that he visited Bahrain on the way home. Brennan was working at the US embassy in Indonesia and researching the politics of oil. “I wondered if he had even been recruited that early,” the classmate said. If true, Brennan would have written the thesis while a CIA recruit. It has also been speculated that the American University in Cairo is a site of CIA recruitment and training.
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Click here to read the full, hyperlinked piece at WhoWhatWhy.com