| Before turning to what Goodman said on Democracy Now!, it's worth quoting more from his Op-Ed, because it shows quite clearly that the issue here has nothing to do with the issue of bipartisanship. Quite the contrary, Goodman recommends that Obama should have turned to Brent Scowcroft, who among other things was the top Bush I advisor who publicly spoke out to warn against going to war in Iraq in August 2002, when very few Washington insiders of either party were willing to speak so bluntly. If Obama wants to work with Republicans, he ought to try working with the best of them, in order to help strengthen their hands against the yahoos and double-dealers. And, of course, he ought to be working with folks who aren't batshit crazy, downright evil, or both.
Goodman:
Numerous independent reviews of the intelligence community in the past several years, including retired Gen. Brent Scowcroft's review for the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, concluded that it was necessary to weaken the Pentagon's control over budgetary and data collection requirements. Mr. Scowcroft also recommended placing three of the key technical and analytic collection agencies under the authority of the director of national intelligence and not the Pentagon.
Unfortunately, the congressional intelligence committees have been negligent in proposing reforms for the community or reversing the Pentagon's corporate control over the process. The next president should encourage strengthening the oversight mission of the intelligence committees and the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.
Instead of placing the transition process under a seasoned professional such as Mr. Scowcroft, the Obama team has turned to discredited cronies of the Tenet era. Mr. Brennan, as chief of staff and deputy executive director under Mr. Tenet, was involved in decisions to conduct torture and abuse of suspected terrorists and to render suspected individuals to foreign intelligence services that conducted their own torture and abuse. Mr. Brennan had risen through the analytic ranks and should have known that analytic standards were being ignored in Mr. Tenet's CIA. He was also an active defender of the illegal program of warrantless eavesdropping, implemented at the National Security Agency under the leadership of Mr. Hayden, then director of NSA.
Choosing someone like Scowcroft instead of these shameful characters would be all upside so far as I can see.
On Democrtacy Now!, this morning, Goodman elaborated :
MELVIN GOODMAN: John Brennan was deputy executive secretary to George Tenet during the worst violations during the CIA period in the run-up to the Iraq war, so he sat there at Tenet's knee when they passed judgment on torture and abuse, on extraordinary renditions, on black sites, on secret prisons. He was part of all of that decision making.
Jami Miscik was the Deputy Director for Intelligence during the run-up to the Iraq war. So she went along with the phony intelligence estimate of October 2002, the phony white paper that was prepared by Paul Pillar in October 2002. She helped with the drafting of the speech that Colin Powell gave to the United Nations-[inaudible] 2003, which made the phony case for war to the international community.
So, when George Tenet said, "slam dunk, we can provide all the intelligence you need," [inaudible] to the President in December of 2002, it was people like Jami Miscik and John Brennan who were part of the team who provided that phony intelligence. So what I think people at the CIA are worried about-and I've talked to many of them over the weekend-is that there will never be any accountability for these violations and some of the unconscionable acts committed at the CIA, which essentially amount to war crimes, when you're talking about torture and abuse and secret prisons. So, where are we, in terms of change? This sounds like more continuity.
Last week, Glenn Greenwald also remarked on Brennan's unsuitability:
It's just a fact that there are all sorts of people close to Obama who have enabled those Bush policies and who are mobilizing now and attempting to ensure that nothing meaningful occurs in these areas. 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. It would be foolish in the extreme to ignore that and to just adopt the attitude that we should all wait quietly with our hands politely folded for the new President to unveil his decisions before deciding that we should speak up or do anything.
Over the weekend, Andrew Sullivan pointed to a contrary characterization by James Gordon Meek of the Counterrorism blog, and on Sunday, Greenwald responded with supporting evidence. Both Greenwald and Democracy Now both referred back to Brennan's December 5, 2005 appearance on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer. Greenwald's excerpt is a little longer, and comes with helpful bolding:
Then there is Brennan's December 5, 2005 appearance on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, in which he vehemently defended the Bush administration's use of rendition -- one of the key tools to subject detainees to torture:
JOHN BRENNAN: I think over the past decade it has picked up some speed because of the nature of the terrorist threat right now but essentially it's a practice the United States and other countries have used to transport suspected terrorists from a country, usually where they're captured to another country, either their country of origin or a country where they can be questioned, detained or brought to justice. . . .
MARGARET WARNER: So was Secretary Rice correct today when she called it a vital tool in combating terrorism?
JOHN BRENNAN: I think it's 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. And I can say without a doubt that it has been very successful as far as producing intelligence that has saved lives.
MARGARET WARNER: So is it -- are you saying both in two ways -- both in getting terrorists off the streets and also in the interrogation?
JOHN BRENNAN: Yes. The rendition is the practice or the process of rendering somebody from one place to another place. It is moving them and the U.S. Government will frequently facilitate that movement from one country to another. . . .
Also I think it's rather arrogant to think we're the only country that respects human rights. I think that we have a lot of assurances from these countries that we hand over terrorists to that they will, in fact, respect human rights.
And there are different ways to gain those assurances. But also let's say an individual goes to Egypt because they're an Egyptian citizen and the Egyptians then have a longer history in terms of dealing with them, and they have family members and others that they can bring in, in fact, to be part of the whole interrogation process.
But Democracy Now! has Goodman's response:
AMY GOODMAN: That's John Brennan, who heads up the transition team on intelligence. Mel Goodman?
MELVIN GOODMAN: Well, John Brennan is being completely dishonest there. All of the operational people I've talked to know that the people who were turned over to the Arab intelligence services-and remember, this is Egypt, this is Syria, this is Jordan, this is Saudi Arabia-that all of these foreign intelligence services commit torture and abuse. Now, if any of these suspects had anything to say to us that was of any utility, we would have kept them. We would have controlled these people. They would have become our sources and our assets. When we turned them over, we were turning over people who we felt had very little to offer, and we were turning over them to them, to the Arab liaison services for torture and abuse.
John Brennan has defended the warrantless eavesdropping. John Brennan has basically defended all of the violations that were committed at the CIA in the run-up to the war and in the postwar period. So the signal this sends to CIA employees who tried to get it right-and there were a few who tried to get it right-is the worst kind of signal. And if this is Obama's judgment about a national security team, it's very reminiscent of what Bill Clinton did in 1993, when he appointed people such as Jim Woolsey and Les Aspin and Warren Christopher and Tony Lake to the national security positions, and all of them had to be removed before the first term was over. So this is very disquieting, what we're learning now.
Not to mention the following reminder:
AMY GOODMAN: In fact, NPR attributed Obama's reversal on FISA and telecom immunity to the fact that he was relying on the advice of John Brennan, an emphatic supporter of these policies.
MELVIN GOODMAN: Well, then you have to wonder who he's relying on, in terms of advice, to keep Bob Gates at the Pentagon, which I think is another example of continuity and not change. You mean to tell me that there are no Democrats who are qualified to become the Secretary of Defense? Bob Gates has supported all of the policies that Obama said he was going to look at very carefully and seemed to oppose: expansion of NATO, bringing Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, deployment of missiles in Poland, deployment of radars in the Czech Republic, the continued acquisition of a national missile defense, which is the most expensive item in the Pentagon's procurement project, an item that we've spent over $500 billion on in the last forty years. This is-again, this is not change; this is continuity.
Let me re-emphasize: as Mel Goodman's reference to Brent Scowcroft makes clear, this is not an issue of partisanship vs. bi-partisanship. It's an issue of genuine change vs. more of the same horrorshow that the American people just voted decisively to end. Although good men and women have been abandoning the GOP in droves this part year, there are still a few not-totally-batshit-psychos left in the GOP to pall around with. Obama should look some of them up.
I can't put it any simpler than this: it's the Constitution, stupid! |
