While I have great respect for President-Elect Barack Obama, and think very highly of his judgment and his intelligence, there are many reasons to be very disturbed about the reports that he's considering John Brennan to head the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
I urge all of us to learn about John Brennan and then ask Barack Obama to appoint someone else to head the CIA. Brennan has a very dubious and questionable background and both Andrew Sullivan on the right, and Glenn Greenwald on the left have objected strongly to his possible appointment.
Obama needs to know that there are certain appointments that are absolutely not acceptable to the base of people that elected them. This is one of them.
We have to urge President-Elect Obama to not appoint John Brennan to head the CIA. This would be a real disappointment to we, his supporters, and a bad sign to the rest of the world that wants a real change from the Bush years in our nation's intelligence apparatus. I don't understand why this man would even be considered for such a job after his dubious past.
Brennan was one of those that enabled the Bush invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Brennan is a longtime CIA official and former head of the National Counterterrorism Center. He was also recently described by Glenn Greenwald as "an ardent supporter of torture and one of the most emphatic advocates of FISA expansions and telecom immunity."
While claiming to oppose waterboarding, labeling it "inconsistent with American values" and "something that should be prohibited," Brennan has simultaneously praised the results achieved by "enhanced interrogation" techniques. "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 hard-core terrorists," Brennan said in a 2007 interview. "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 death of 3,000 innocents."
Brennan has described the CIA's extraordinary rendition program -- the government-run kidnap-and-torture program enacted under Clinton -- as an absolutely vital tool. "I have been intimately familiar now over the past decade with the cases of rendition that the U.S. Government has been involved in," he said in a December 2005 interview. "And I can say without a doubt that it has been very successful as far as producing intelligence that has saved lives."
Brennan is currently the head of Analysis Corporation, a private intelligence company that was recently implicated in the breach of Obama and Sen. John McCain's passport records. He is also the current chairman of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA), a trade association of private intelligence contractors who have dramatically increased their role in sensitive U.S. national security operations. (Current Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell is former chairman of the INSA.)
I wrote a letter to Obama’s transition team a few minutes ago, asking him to not appoint Brennan to be CIA chief. These two articles were key in my thinking. Check them out:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.co...
I trust Obama’s judgment and I agree with the argument that you can’t have novices in critical cabinet or cabinet-level posts. And Obama will make the final choices on any critical big-picture items. He’ll also sanction overall policy directions. So it’s fine to have more establishment or conservative figures if that’s what is needed to make things run smoothly. (This was a big mistake made by both Clinton and Carter; they tended to rely on old friends and people with whom they connected personally, as opposed to people who knew the real turf upon which the game is played in DC and who could get things accomplished.)
But there are certain appointments that can’t be sanctioned, particularly when the appointment would make such a bad statement, symbolically, if nothing else. There simply must be someone else who understands the intelligence apparatus of this country who doesn’t have the highly questionable background of Brennan.