Does John Brennan Know Too Much for Obama to Fire Him?
It's difficult to cross man with details on every secret drone strike you've authorized—especially the legally dubious ones.
When
John Brennan assured the country that the CIA hadn't improperly monitored the Senate team that compiled a report on Bush-era torture, he fed us false information. That much is clear from Thursday's news that "the C.I.A. secretly monitored a congressional committee charged with supervising its activities." Either the CIA director was lying or he was unaware of grave missteps at the agency he leads. There are already calls for his resignation or firing from Senator Mark Udall, Trevor Timm, Dan Froomkin, and Andrew Sullivan, plus a New York Times editorial airing his ouster as a possibility.
President Obama could surprise the country by axing his former counterterrorism adviser, explaining that under Brennan's management, employees broke laws and undermined the separation of powers core to our democracy. Obama may well make a good-faith effort to act in the national interest. But it's impossible to believe that he won't be aware of the following: No U.S. official knows more than Brennan about Obama's many drone killings. Some of the killings were solidly grounded in international law. And others may have violated the Fifth Amendment, international law, or the laws of war.
In the past, Brennan has been willing to lie about those drone strikes to hide ugly realities. For example, he stated in the summer of 2011 that there had been zero collateral deaths from covert U.S. drone strikes in the previous year, an absurd claim that has been decisively debunked. What if he grew more forthright, either in public statements or by anonymously leaking information?
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/08/does-john-brennan-know-too-much-to-be-fired-by-barack-obama/375431/
In December 2005, he described President Bush’s rendition program as “an absolutely vital tool” on PBS. And when the Associated Press revealed in 2011, in a Pulitzer Prize–winning series of articles, that the New York City Police Department had orchestrated an intensive spying campaign directed at Muslims, without any basis for suspicion of criminal, much less terrorist, activity,
Brennan defended the NYPD for striking the right balance between civil liberties and national security.*
John Brennan Was Number Two at the Bush/Cheney CIA During Renditions, Enhanced Interrogations, and the Iraq War
John Brennan, was a Bush/Cheney man at the top level of the intelligence agency during the post 9/11 period. BuzzFlash at Truthout doesn't usually resort to quoting Wikipedia, but it has a good summary of his service for Bush/Cheney and the get-along-to-go-along George Tenet at the CIA:
In 1999 he was appointed chief of staff to George Tenet, then-Director of the CIA. Brennan became deputy executive director of the CIA in March 2001. He was director of the newly created Terrorist Threat Integration Center from 2003 to 2004, an office that sifted through and compiled information for President Bush's daily top secret intelligence briefings and employed the services of analysts from a dozen U.S. agencies and entities. One of the controversies in his career involves the distribution of intelligence to the Bush White House that helped lead to an "Orange Terror Alert", over Christmas 2003. The intelligence, which purported to list terror targets, was highly controversial within the CIA and was later discredited. An Obama administration official does not dispute that Brennan distributed the intelligence during the Bush era but said Brennan passed it along because that was his job. His last post within the Intelligence Community was as director of the National Counterterrorism Center in 2004 and 2005, which incorporated information on terrorist activities across U.S. agencies.
Remember, this was at a time that Cheney, as vice president, was taking unprecedented trips to CIA headquarters in Virginia to muscle the intelligence officers there to create facts to fit the propaganda justification for invading Iraq. There is no indication that Brennan objected or tried to keep the agency independent of the coercion.
More than that, Brennan was a cheerleader for torture and rendition, as Glenn Greenwald noted back in 2008, when he expressed concern about Brennan's role as a national security advisor in the Obama White House:
It simply is noteworthy of comment and cause for concern — though far from conclusive about what Obama will do — that Obama’s transition chief for intelligence policy, John Brennan, was an ardent supporter of torture and one of the most emphatic advocates of FISA expansions and telecom immunity.
http://truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/john-brennan-was-number-two-at-the-bush-cheney-cia-during-renditions-enhanced-interrogations-and-the-iraq-war/17820-john-brennan-was-number-two-at-the-bush-cheney-cia-during-renditions-enhanced-interrogations-and-the-iraq-war
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