Hagel as Sec.Def., Brennan to head CIA

[The Good Reverend Roger]

You People just have no understanding of theater.

[tyrannosaurus vex]

You People just have no understanding of theater.

Actually I'm tired of the theater. Everything they do is just another step in the elaborate "Let's boogie over the edge of the fucking cliff" dance. They don't even hide it anymore. Even Fox News talks about political posturing and calculation. It is now common knowledge that the shit they do in order to look like they're doing something while actually doing nothing, is all part of the plan.

[Cain]

Michael Scheuer has been ruining Brennan's "tough on terrorism" credentials:

1996: When, in December, 1995, the Agency set up a unit to dismantle al-Qaeda and capture or help the U.S. military kill Osama bin Laden, one of that unit's first actions was to ask Mr. Brennan—who was then what George Tenet has described as "CIA's senior officer on the Arabian Peninsula"—to secure from the Saudi intelligence service some very basic information and documents about bin Laden. The Saudis did not respond, and so the bin Laden unit sent frequent messages to Mr. Brennan asking him to secure the data. When we finally received a response from Mr. Brennan, it was to tell us that he would no longer pass the bin Laden unit's requests to the Saudis because they were annoyed by them. DCI George Tenet backed Mr. Brennan's decision, and when I resigned from CIA in November 2004, the Saudis had not delivered the requested data.

Comment: I speak on this from firsthand experience, as I was the chief of the bin Laden unit at the time. The messages from Mr. Brennan refusing to push the Saudis on bin Laden are in the archives of several government agencies, but, more important, they are in the archive of the 9/11 Commission. (NB: I know the documents are there because I supplied them to the Commission.)  In the latter archive, the messages have been fully redacted to protect the CIA sources and methods and so ought to be easily available to the Senators and to the media via a Freedom of Information request.

2) May, 1998: For most of the year between May, 1997, and May, 1998, the bin Laden unit—with fine support from too few other Intelligence Community agencies—prepared an operation to capture Osama bin Laden using CIA assets. During the preparatory work, none of the bin Laden's unit's bin-Laden-specific information requests to the Saudis were answered, and given Mr. Brennan's above-noted attitude, the unit was not ever sure the requests were passed to the Saudi intelligence service. Just before the capture operation was to be attempted, Mr. Brennan convinced Wyche Fowler—then U.S. ambassador in Riyadh—and DCI George Tenet that the U.S. government should cancel the capture operation. Although the Saudis had yet to lift a finger to assist U.S. efforts to counter bin Laden and al-Qaeda, and because it is the merest commonsense to know that Afghans never obey orders from any foreigner, Mr. Brennan, Ambassador Fowler, and DCI Tenet all assured then-National Security Adviser, Mr. Sandy Berger, that the capture operation should be canceled. Mr. Berger cancelled the operation, only to demand—through his assistant for terrorism Richard Clarke—that the operation immediately be restarted 75 days later when bin Laden's al-Qaeda destroyed the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Tanzania.

Comment: I also speak on this issue from first-hand experience, as I was the chief of the bin Laden unit at the time, and also traveled in early May 1998, with DCI Tenet and the then-chief of CIA's Near East Division to hear Mr. Brennan explain why this ludicrous reliance on the thoroughly unhelpful and often obstructive Saudis was a better way to protect Americans than by using CIA's capabilities.

My gut feeling: the Saudis were still using Al-Qaeda in this period, and since Brennan is close to the Saudis like few others, he wasn't willing to "discomfort" them when it came to Bin Laden's capture.

This may also explain why he is so gung-ho on the drone issue - dead men tell no tales, especially about former CIA Station Chiefs who maybe were too close to the country they were spying on, and working for their ends rather than in the interests of the American state.

[Roly Poly Oly-Garch]

Republicans have delayed the vote confirming Hagel as SecDef, out of spite.

Not spite at anything in particular, you understand.  Just generalized spite.

All the left wing media is keen to point out that this is the first filibuster of a cabinet nominee in, oh, saaaay, EVER.

They're supposedly using this as an opportunity to get information on Benghazi (something which he had nothing whatsoever to do with) and also to see if he does truly have ties to an organization known as "Friends of Hamas" (an organization that is almost surely made up in its entirety).

[Roly Poly Oly-Garch]

This is a decent article on Brennan's confirmation hearings. I was a bit disappointed by Senator Wyden's unwillingness to press the issue, when his questions got side-stepped. But Diane Feinstein was over the top, pretty much making the case against Al-Awlaki post-mortem...as if whether or not the fucker was a bad guy was the issue at hand:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2013/02/john-brennans-cia-director-hearings-and-the-so-called-americans.html

FEINSTEIN: See, that's the problem. When people hear "American," they think someone who's upstanding. And this man was not upstanding by a long shot.

BRENNAN: Yes.

FEINSTEIN: And maybe you cannot discuss it here, but I've read enough to know that he was a real problem.

She went on in the portions of it I listened to to lay out some of the evidence against him. As the article points out, she never once mentioned his son...and this is an oft repeated huge "doy", but one which bears repeating, can you imagine the same exchange between Feinstein and a GW appointee?

[Cain]

Republicans have delayed the vote confirming Hagel as SecDef, out of spite.

Not spite at anything in particular, you understand.  Just generalized spite.

All the left wing media is keen to point out that this is the first filibuster of a cabinet nominee in, oh, saaaay, EVER.

They're supposedly using this as an opportunity to get information on Benghazi (something which he had nothing whatsoever to do with) and also to see if he does truly have ties to an organization known as "Friends of Hamas" (an organization that is almost surely made up in its entirety).

And also, for the story to make sense, you would have to believe:

a) there are people dumb enough to name themselves "Friends of Hamas" out there,
b) that people are dumb enough to donate to a group named "Friends of Hamas", and
c) that Hagel is dumb enough to accept a donation from a group with the name of "Friends of Hamas".

As for Feinstein...she's a reliable water carrier for the NSA and security state in general.  Not to mention financial services (her husband is an investment banker).

[Cain]

David Ignatius, the reporter whose mission brief reads "permamently embedded in the arse of a CIA operations officer", repeats the concerns about Brennan:

Obama's choice for CIA director is also telling. The White House warily managed Petraeus, letting him run the CIA but keeping him away from the media. In choosing Brennan, the president opted for a member of his inner circle with whom he did some of the hardest work of his presidency. Brennan was not a popular choice at the CIA, where some view him as having been too supportive of the Saudi government when he was station chief in Riyadh in the 1990s; these critics argue that Brennan didn't push the Saudis hard enough for intelligence about the rising threat of Osama bin Laden. But agency officials know, too, that the CIA prospers when its director is close to the president, which will certainly be the case with Brennan and Obama.

Also, see this:

CHAMBLISS: Mr. Brennan, the 9/11 commission report describes a canceled 1998 CIA operation to capture Osama bin Laden using tribal groups in Afghanistan. The former head of CIA's bin Laden unit told staff that you convinced Director Tenet to cancel that operation. He says that following a meeting you had in Riyadh with Director Tenet, the bin Laden unit chief and others that you cabled National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, saying the operation should be canceled in favor of a different approach, described by the 9/11 Commission as a, quote, "an all-out secret effort to persuade the Taliban to expel bin Laden." Now, as we know, bin Laden was not expelled. Three months later the bin Laden wrath was unleashed with the attack on our embassies. Did you advise senator — Director Tenet and National Security Adviser Berger against this operation? And if so, why?

BRENNAN: I had conversation with George Tenet at the time. But I must point out — out, Senator, that every single CIA manager — George Tenet, his deputy, the head of the director of operations at the time, and other individuals, the chief of the counterterrorism center — argued against that operation, as well, because it was no well-rounded in intelligence, and its chance of success were minimal — minimal. And it was likely that other individuals were going to be killed. And so when I was involved in those discussions, I provided the director and others my professional advice about whether or not I thought that that operation should go forward. I also was engaged in discussions with Saudi — the Saudi government at the time and encouraged certain actions to be taken so that we could put pressure on the Taliban as well as on bin Laden.

CHAMBLISS: So I'm taking it that your answer to my question is you did advise against — in favor of the cancellation of that operation?

BRENNAN: Based on what I had known at the time, I didn't think that it was a worthwhile operation and it didn't have a chance of success.

At that time, the Saudi Arabia was supporting Delta Oil's negotiations with the Taliban over pipeline routes, and trying to us the Taliban as a proxy in their ongoing cold war with Iran.  The Taliban were quashing Shiite groups seen as being aligned with Iran, flooding the Iranian streets with heroin and were hoped to act as a bridge for furthering Saudi interests in Central Asia.

Saudi policy on Afghanistan at the time was being handled by Prince Turki al-Faisal, the Intelligence Minister.

Did the Saudis tell Brennan to quash any operation that might undermine Sunni fundamentalism in Afghanistan?

[LMNO]

Well, it wouldn't be the first time the West attempted to use native-born militias to serve their purposes.

I'm fuzzy on the timeline - were the embassy attacks the first major Bin Laden-led attacks, or did he already have a reputation before that?

[Cain]

There was the Khobar Towers (attribution to Iran is face-saving bullshit) and he'd been seem moving in the same circles as Egyptian Islamic Jihad, who had a hand in several assassination plots against Mubarak, and with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the instigator of the 1993 WTC bombing.

[Cain]

Interesting, and a somewhat odd choice:

Vice President Joe Biden swears in CIA Director John Brennan in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, March 8, 2013. Members of Brennan's family stand with him. Brennan was sworn in with his hand on an original draft of the Constitution, dating from 1787, which has George Washington's personal handwriting and annotations on it.

As Marcy Wheeler notes:

That means, when Brennan vowed to protect and defend the Constitution, he was swearing on one that did not include the First, Fourth, Fifth, or Sixth Amendments — or any of the other Amendments now included in our Constitution. The Bill of Rights did not become part of our Constitution until 1791, 4 years after the Constitution that Brennan took his oath on.

I really don't mean to be an asshole about this. But these vows always carry a great deal of symbolism. And whether he meant to invoke this symbolism or not, the moment at which Brennan took over the CIA happened to exclude (in symbolic form, though presumably not legally) the key limits on governmental power that protect American citizens.

[Cain]

Huh:

A week earlier, a woman had been placed in charge of the CIA's clandestine service for the first time in the agency's history. She is a veteran officer with broad support inside the agency. But she also helped run the CIA's detention and interrogation program after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and signed off on the 2005 decision to destroy videotapes of prisoners being subjected to treatment critics have called torture...

[LMNO]

Perhaps we should just make it a known given value that pretty much everyone in the CIA past a certain pay grade has been involved in torturing people.

[Cain]

Apparently her promotion signals "diversity" within the CIA.

Not covering up and promotion for war crimes, "diversity".