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So much for John Brennan, the former CIA official who wasn’t actually an advocate of torture but who was pilloried for being so in the blogosphere. The Associated Press reports he’s taken himself out of the running to be Obama’s CIA director or director of national intelligence in a letter to the president-elect:
“The fact that I was not involved in the decisionmaking process for any of these controversial policies and actions has been ignored,” he wrote, in a letter obtained by The Associated Press.
First Read has the whole letter, which includes this line: “It has been immaterial to the critics that I have been a strong opponent of many of the policies of the Bush Administration, such as the preemptive war in Iraq and coercive interrogation tactics, to include waterboarding.”
Crossposted to The Streak.
Update: Thanks to commenter Laura Doty for correcting me that the anti-Brennan coalition letter was a coalition of psychologists, not psychiatrists.
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Brennan called rendition “an absolutely vital tool” that was “very successful” in producing evidence (12/5/05 interview on the News Hour), going on to describe how sending, say an Egyptian citizen back to Egypt where “they have family members and others that they can bring in, in fact, to be part of the whole interrogation,” would be a practical and effective thing to do. But Egypt has a long history of torturing its citizens–in fact, I believe the CIA was instrumental in training the Egyptian secret police in the 50s. I don’t think Brennan is as clean as he purports himself to be, his latterly comments re: waterboarding and his admirable opposition to the invasion of Iraq, notwithstanding.
The letter you reference, by the way, was written by psychologists, not psychiatrists (although there may be a few MD signatories). Most are people who’ve been working very hard to get the American Psychological Association to forbid its members from participating in interrogations involving torture.
we’ve had ..what ?? reports of 108 people who have died while in our custody .. and some 40 of them classified as homocides .. prisoners in our care who were beaten-to-death as a failed interrogation ..
shame .. that’s a total moral failure on our part ..and NOT doing something about it in a real way will be an even larger moral failure ..
spence .. your article in the WI is very informative ..and it may be the man is being tarred unfairly .. but .. one can’t remain standing in .. or walking through .. a pile of shit for any length of time without taking on the smell .. imo ..honorable people would walk away from what they object to strongly .. not remain a part of it .. to quote Locke: “all evil needs to triumph is that good men do nothing” ??
Pilloried by progressives and blogospherites? Guilt by association? Condemned without a hearing?
Fed to a cranky mob who seemingly can’t even wait for the inauguration of their candidate before resuming their bilious, mewling spew.
Spencer – Your normal good sense seems to have abandoned you. As Jkat
says above, Brennan was there, and he didn’t leave (others did). It may
not be entirely fair to the man, but he’s identified with the past and
the country needs to have a line drawn that indicates clearly that the
Bush era was an aberration.
Also, Brennan surely isn’t the only person qualified for a high position
in intelligence.
Gates, who supervised goddess only knows how many renditions in his short tenure at Defense, gets to stay, though.
Changiness.
Dude, nobody is suggesting the practice of rendition won’t stay. How is any more problematic for Gates than it is for Obama ?
Remember, before all the books detailing the Bush admin’s defense of rendition, we had Richard Clarke’s, which detailed the Clinton admin’s defense of it. Gore, the Democrat’s proposed candidate to have held office on 9/11 was more enthusiastic about it than Clinton was.
The Democrat’s proposed candidate for when Bush leaves office hasn’t said shit about ending it either.
Just saying the word “change” and leaving it up to people to imagine what that means certainly has worked wonders, hasn’t it.