On the heels of an open letter from a group of psychiatrists advocating against the potential nomination of John Brennan to head the CIA, Spencer Ackerman pushes back, pointing out that the group has taken several of the quotes it uses out of context:
The psychiatric coalition is implying that Brennan means to preserve the Bush torture regime. What he means — and what you often hear from longtime officials across the national-security apparatus — is that there are downsides to ripping everything up impulsively: people don’t know what the rules are. And that’s hardly a problem for Barack Obama alone: something that really, really bothered CIA about the so-called Dark Side is that operatives didn’t know if they’d be prosecuted for doing things that the Bush administration wanted. I suppose you could rejoinder that we don’t want someone who loses the moral forest for the bureaucratic trees. But if there’s going to be someone to get the CIA out of the torture business, it’ll probably need to be someone who understands the internal culture of the agency.Ackerman's done a lot of great work on national security stuff, and so I take his word for it that Brennan doesn't seem to have been a central player in establishing interrogation policy. But as Glenn Greenwald pointed out, Mayer did identify Brennan as a supporter of enhanced interrogation in an article for The New Yorker, in which Brennan argued, somewhat ambivalently, that "[a]ll these methods produced useful information, but there was also a lot that was bogus." Greenwald also points to a 2005 Newshour interview where Brennan defended extraordinary rendition as having "saved lives." So while the group of psychiatrists made their case poorly by taking things out of context, they're ultimately right in identifying Brennan as someone who has defended "enhanced interrogation" in the past.Finally, I’ve done a fair amount of reporting over the years into the intelligence community and torture. And Brennan’s name has simply not come up in any significant way. I just did a quick refresher into some of the best investigative reporting on the subject — Jane Mayer’s “The Dark Side,” Ron Suskind’s “The One Percent Doctrine,” Bart Gellman’s “Angler,” and Jim Risen’s “State of War” — and Brennan isn’t linked to torture in any of them. Neither does George Tenet’s memoir portray Brennan as having anything to do with interrogation policy.
That said, I think there has been a tendency in liberal circles to completely ignore the boss' line on this. Obama has said he is against torture, his likely AG Eric Holder nominee is against torture, and likely National Security Adviser Gen. Jim Jones is against torture. Some of us also tend to ignore the possibility that Brennan was picked for reasons other than his past defense of some of our more reprehensible policies. Reading this interview, it starts to become clear why Obama has taken a shine to Brennan:
I think that what we need in our quiver are many different types of arrows. We certainly need to have a military arrow. We need to have an intelligence one. But we need to have a diplomatic one. We need to have foreign aid. There needs to be a comprehensive set of approaches. A lot of these issues, including counterterrorism, cannot be solved with kinetic force.I am a strong proponent of trying to focus more of our efforts on the upstream phenomenon of terrorism. I make the analogy to pollution. We learned that pollutants kill us when they get into the water we drink or the fish we eat or the air we breathe. But I think we also learned that we have to go upstream to identify and eliminate those sources of pollution. Terrorism is a tactic, and we have to be more focused upstream. Since 9/11, understandably we've focused downstream, on those terrorists who might be in our midst or trying to kill us, the operators. I think there needs to be much more attention paid to those upstream factors and conditions that spawn terrorists.
As Ackerman previously reported for TAP, one of the central tenets of Obama foreign policy doctrine is "draining the swamp," eliminating the social causes of terrorism, not simply eliminating the terrorists themselves through military means. Brennan would seem to agree, at least in principle, with designing a foreign policy "to fix the conditions of misery that breed anti-Americanism and prevent liberty, justice, and prosperity from taking root." Viewed in this context, Obama's affinity for Brennan seems more understandable. The problem is that implementing the Obama Doctrine is impossible as long as the dark side is how we do business, and it's not clear that Brennan himself as realized that.
--A. Serwer
