For a staggering lack of self-awareness, CIA chief John Brennan takes the cake:
“I certainly believe having the public’s trust makes all of our jobs much easier and better,” Brennan said on a panel at an intelligence conference, where he was joined by his colleagues at the helms of the National Security Agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency.
But ahead of an impending clash with the Senate intelligence committee, which is due to release a public version of a report into CIA torture in the coming weeks, Brennan rejected “the narratives I see floating around the media.”
The 'narratives floating around the media'?
I imagine that Brennan means the revelations of CIA spying on Americans and involvement in torture. Or perhaps he's talking about the CIA spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee and then lying about it when caught?
Brennan has been locked in a heated dispute with his Senate overseers that escalated dramatically after agency officials breached a network firewall set up to allow committee investigators access to CIA documents relevant to their inquiry. The committee chairwoman, Democrat Dianne Feinstein of California, said on the Senate floor on 11 March that the CIA “just went and searched the committee’s computers.”
After initially denying the breach during a public appearance that day at the Council on Foreign Relations, Brennan apologized for it in July once the CIA’s inspector general determined CIA officials had improperly accessed Senate staffer emails and conducted keyword searches on some of them.
Gee, if only America would just, you know,
trust the spooks and not ask inconvenient questions and just generally stop being turds floating around the punchbowl (as Brennan might put it):
The Senate report, expected to be partially declassified this month, is said to have found post-9/11 CIA torture to be more brutal and less effective than it portrayed to the Bush administration and the Senate oversight committee. Many committee Republicans and the agency itself have already rejected the report’s findings as inaccurate.
GOP power-groupies and the agency itself can see no problems. Color me shocked.
Alongside Brennan, Adm Michael Rogers, the new NSA director, said he wanted to bolster public confidence in his agency that has been battered by the widespread digital and phone records surveillance revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Damn that Snowden: knowledge is a terrible thing and not to be entrusted to ordinary Americans.
Basically, the spook-masters are giving us the reverse of the classic 'it's-not-you-it's-me' breakup line: it's not them...it's us. We have trust issues. We get too emotional.
But we can still be friends, amirite? As long as we keep handing them billions of dollars and stop asking dumb questions like a bunch of commies.
What Talleyrand is supposed to have said of the restored Bourbons is applicable to the spook community: “They had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.”