In life, there are are few pieces of absolute strategic wisdom. One is never to get involved in a land war in Asia. Another is not to get into a dispute about facts with Glenn Greenwald. A third is not to miss the forest for the trees. While I may not set foot in Asia, I think I’m about to violate the other two rules.

Glenn has led the charge against John Brennan for being "an ardent supporter of torture." Without touching on Glenn’s evidence, I looked at the case made by an anti-Brennan coalition and found it to be dubious. Glenn cordially asked me if I’d take a look at his stronger case (my characterization) and so after the jump, I will.

In an email exchange with James Gordon Meek of the Daily News, Glenn puts aside Brennan’s stated opposition to waterboarding, so I think it’s reasonable to do so as well. He adds:

Since he says he opposes waterboarding and isn’t on record opposing anything else, one can reasonably assume that must include some combination of things like stress positions, forced nudity, hypothermia, sleep deprivation, exploitation of paranoias, extreme isolation, hanging by the wrists, threats, and other previously forbidden techniques authorized by the Bush administration.

And here I don’t know how reasonable that assumption is. Glenn bases what he says, in part, on Jane Mayer’s portrayal of Brennan in a 2007 New Yorker piece that cites him as a supporter of the dark side:

Without more transparency, the value of the C.I.A.’s interrogation and detention program is impossible to evaluate. Setting aside the moral, ethical, and legal issues, even supporters, such as John Brennan, acknowledge that much of the information that coercion produces is unreliable. As he put it, “All these methods produced useful information, but there was also a lot that was bogus.”

I agree with Glenn that Jane’s word is decisive here. Yet this reads like Brennan is a rather equivocal supporter if he’s a supporter. It’s not clear to me which methods Brennan is referring to. But I’ll further state that from a moral perspective, basing opposition to torture on efficacy is an enormous consequentialist dodge, since it implies that the only problem with, say, inflicting hypothermia on another human being is that it didn’t get you the information you were after. So it’s hard to argue that this statement of Brennan’s isn’t, at the least, problematic. But I want to set that aside for another couple paragraphs. 

Glenn’s next piece of evidence is a December 5, 2005 interview Brennan gave to the NewsHour. And here Brennan is an unequivocal and euphemistic advocate of rendition, which is a practice in which suspects are sent to other countries to be interrogated. I have neither an interest in nor a desire to defend this practice. On this point, I consider Glenn’s argument to be robust. It’s true that there’s a difference between rendition (assisting in the capture of a foreign national on foreign soil and remanding him to the custody of his government) and extraordinary rendition (giving a captive to a different government known to use torture). But Brennan doesn’t avail himself of any opportunity to distinguish his support of one from support of the other, so it would be apologism to defend him here. This really should disqualify you from being CIA director in an administration that says it wants to get the U.S. out of the Dark Side.

I don’t know whether it’s really right to continue on here, since I’ve basically conceded the argument. But I guess what I’d say is that while I’d no longer view Brennan as someone who should play a major role in the intelligence community, I still think we need more evidence before we can say that he’s an ardent supporter of torture. After all, if he was — despite what he says — part of the team that designed the torture policies, he ought to be held to account. That’s why I said in my first post that the best thing to do here is to start declassifying the history of this ugly episode. The more I think about it, the more compelling Scott Horton’s proposal of a truth and reconciliation commission for torture becomes.

That said, I want to equivocate a bit. A story that hasn’t really been told — Jane has come the closest and done the best work here by far — is internal CIA resistance to torture. Here I have at best a fragmentary and unconfirmed picture. But it makes me extremely wary of saying anyone at CIA besides George Tenet himself is directly responsible for torture. (This isn’t what Glenn is saying, to be clear — I’m here making a lateral point.) There were different periods on different issues where different people offered resistance for different reasons — mostly unsuccessfully. If this seems like an uncompelling point, it should: we don’t have sufficient evidence to color in the picture I’m sketching. This is why declassification and investigation is so key. There’s so much we don’t know, including who’s responsible for what specific methods and practices and who resisted. Did you notice that Brennan said his career suffered for opposing waterboarding? Hmm, I’ve never heard that before; and would like to be able to adjudicate the truth of that statement. 

Last thing. Take a look at this quote the AP’s Pam Hess got from the Federation of American Scientists’ Steve Aftergood, whom no one could call an apologist for torture:

"The drumbeat of criticism against [Brennan] was not overwhelming. But taking him at his word, it appears that he wanted to remove issues such as waterboarding from the confirmation debate, even if he was not directly responsible for them. This raises the bar rather high for any future nominee."

The first thing to say about that is good. You want a really high bar set against, you know, complicity with torture.

But the second thing to say is that it wouldn’t surprise me if people in CIA who are otherwise pretty on board with Obama look at this Brennan episode and take away from it that even people who are mostly considered kosher on torture will be unacceptable to the new administration. To be very clear, I don’t believe that should be for a second a compelling or overriding consideration in the Brennan case. But there aren’t a lot of progressive attempts at outreach to the intelligence community, particularly on the operations side, and that really is a liability for our side. Obama has done a good job so far of building bridges to the uniformed military, and his closeness with Brennan sent the prima facie signal that the intelligence community wasn’t going to have a destructive outsider like Porter Goss placed at its helm. It’s not hard to see others within the intelligence community looking at the Brennan case and saying, "Did I oppose this-or-that torture program loudly enough; and if I didn’t, will I have a place in this administration?"

That’s not even a quarterway as important as ending torture, and it’s not even halfway as important as having someone at the top of the intelligence community who sends the message that the dark side is over. But it’s something that really ought to be a progressive goal, and one unfortunate consequence of the Brennan affair is that goal could be set back. Again, not as important as ending torture. Or ending this endlessly handwring-y post.