John Brennan, Good Riddance [Tony Lake -- Update]
By Larry Johnson on November 26, 2008 at 11:00 AM in Current Affairs
UPDATE: I am willing to bet the Obama folks are not real thrilled with Tony Lake today. I have learned that Mr. Lake, who served as Bill Clinton’s first National Security Advisor and was a failed nominee to head the CIA, is responsible for introducing John Brennan, Jamie Miscik, and John McLaughlin to the Obama inner circle.
Brennan and Miscik both worked with Lake during the latter’s tenure at the White House. As I reported earlier with respect to Miscik, I am told by sources with firsthand knowledge that she had a role in recommending the bombing of the aspirin factory in Sudan in August 1998 in the aftermath of the bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
Brennan, Miscik, and McLaughlin are symbols of the failures of intelligence analysis during the Bush Admnistration. They are not the symbols that an Obama team should be saddled with if it wants to hone its image for competence an judiciousness in intelligence matters. End UPDATE.
Let’s give the Barack Obama transition team its due. They are studiously steering clear of trying to replicate the Bush Administration. I am particularly cheered by the demise of John Brennan for any senior position in the Obama Administration. I guess I am one of those “lefty” bloggers whose clamoring (see here) persuaded Brennan and the Obama team that a confirmation process would be ugly. We also featured a post by Mel Goodman who shared my view that Brennan was part of the intel team that helped enable the Bush Administration’s fiasco in Iraq.
Brennan did a preemptive strike yesterday with this disingenuous missive:
withdrawalletter
Brennan’s biggest disqualifier in my view was his inclination to pander to the policymakers. As I pointed out in an earlier article he quickly ascended the career ladder because of his performance as a briefer of George W. Bush. He was part of the George Tenet “be-a-buddy-of-the-president” club. As such he did not speak truth to power. He told the powerful what they wanted to hear.
And he was sloppy and careless. The errors in the Patterns of Global Terrorism report for 2003 were a direct consequence of his shop failing to include almost two months of data. When your job is to count terrorism events how in the world do you allow that kind of miscue?
Here is what we need as head of the CIA. First, you want someone who is financially independent. You do not want someone in that chair who needs the job or believes it is the best job they have ever had. George Tenet used the job as a springboard to become a millionaire. Along the way he told the President about the “slam dunk” case for going to war in Iraq.
Second, you need someone who can tell the President bad news and present intelligence that undermines an administration’s pet policy priorities. Brennan’s claim in his letter that he opposed the most despicable Bush policies–e.g., preemptive war in Iraq and coercive interrogation policies–is a joke. Brennan was part of Tenet’s crew. Brennan strongly defended Tenet’s tenure at CIA. And Brennan was a deputy of Tenet’s when the decisions about coercive interrogation were made. Let’s recall that Brennan came to Tenet’s defense when I, along with several former intelligence officers, called on Tenet to return his medal of freedom and donate a portion of the proceeds from his book to the families who lost a loved one in Iraq. So much for Brennan’s “opposition” to Bush policies.
Brennan, in my view, is a quintessential bureaucratic creature of Washington. He was an enabler of George W. Bush. He was not the most important player in this regard but he was a senior cog in the bureaucracy who, if he had spoken out at the time, could have made a difference. Brennan is not a bad person, he is a weak person. And we do not need a weak person running any facet of the intelligence community. The chief intelligence officers need to be men and women who are above politics. We do not need partisans. We need people committed to telling the truth even if it means political suicide.
by Ronald Scott
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