For the better part of the past decade, John Brennan has served Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama in a high-level intelligence capacity, most recently as Obama’s chief counter-terrorism adviser.
But hold on to your hat. According to the latest breathless Reuters “exclusive,” it seems that Brennan, while serving under the hated Bush, had “detailed contemporaneous knowledge” of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques, i.e. waterboarding.
Brennan is now Obama’s nominee to head the Central Intelligence Agency. But this same charge sank his first bid for the job, during Obama’s first term, when anything associated with Bush automatically made you anathema.
Give me a break. Of course Brennan knew about waterboarding. If he didn’t, he wasn’t doing his job as director of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center and, later, acting director of the National Counter-Terrorism Center.
In the dark days after 9/11, “by any means necessary” wasn’t just an activist political slogan but the “never again” philosophy of the US government (as well as the NYPD). If we had to scare the daylights out of a few senior jihadis — including Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 attacks — in order to save lives and, ultimately, get Osama bin Laden, so what?
Yet some on the left still won’t let go of the so-called “higher moral ground,” deeming techniques such as waterboarding as beyond the pale of civilized society. Indeed, a backlash against a waterboarding scene in the outstanding new movie, “Zero Dark Thirty,” may have cost director Kathryn Bigelow an Oscar nomination this year.
Well, as the poet Robert Frost once famously observed, “a liberal is a man too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel.”
But which would the left rather have? Osama sleeping with the fishes or more dead Americans? There are plenty of reasons to oppose Brennan’s appointment, but waterboarding isn’t one of them. (For the record, he claims he was against enhanced interrogation all along and was just part of the information chain.)
As an Arabic speaker and former CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia, Brennan’s entirely too sympathetic to the Arab side, and his reputation as a do-anything guy eager to serve his various political masters in exchange for career advancement gives many within the Intelligence Community pause about his intellectual independence and integrity.
Also troubling is his tendency to shoot from the lip. For example, by trying to grab credit for a joint British-Saudi intel operation in Yemen last year that disrupted a second underwear bomber plot (which the US apparently had little or nothing to do with), he was exposing an operation that might have done more good work if left in the dark.
But if the left is going to target Brennan, it should be over his current job as overseer of Obama’s expanded killer-drones program — a program that lefties loudly abhorred when it was Bush’s baby. Since Obama took office, some 300 drone strikes have killed about 2,500 people.
Within the administration, there’s an ongoing debate about whether officials ought to have wide latitude in choosing the drones’ targets; the Pentagon and the CIA are all for it, while Brennan is said by some to be urging restraint. But the fact remains that a handful of public officials, operating in secret, are striking targets inside countries with whom we are not formally at war.
You’d think the “anti-war” crowd would have a problem with that. But aside from the occasional complaints of the ACLU . . . crickets.
So which is it to be? Nobody’s been killed by waterboarding, which has provided valuable information in the shadow war on terrorists. And yet thousands have been killed by drone strikes, many if not most of them collateral damage.
If the drone strikes are, as Brennan has argued, “legal, ethical and wise” (although other countries beg to differ), then why wasn’t waterboarding?
A little intellectual consistency is called for. But that’s the last thing political partisans on either side care about.