Former CIA Director John Brennan Whitewashes History in Shameless
Self-serving Memoir
By Jeremy Kuzmarov - November 22, 2020
John Brennan is dogged by protesters for his role in the drone war during
his confirmation hearing as CIA Director. [Source: pri.org]
During the Vietnam War era, peace activists compared American war planners
like Robert S. McNamara and Henry Kissinger to Albert Speer, Hitler's
Minister of War Production and Armaments who stood out for his lack of
ideological zeal in supporting the Nazi cause. What motivated Speer, rather,
was a cold and calculating careerism which was combined with a lack of
regard for his country's victims.
Former CIA Director (2013-2017) John Brennan's new memoir, Undaunted: My
Fight Against America's Enemies, at Home and Abroad (New York: Celadon
Books, 2020) reveals a man who displays some of the same qualities as
Speer-and other American contemporaries.
Particularly striking is the pride that he takes in helping to coordinate
better bureaucratic procedure for carrying out drone strikes, which
terrorized whole communities.
A Yemeni boy walks past a mural depicting a U.S. drone and reading "Why did
you kill my family." (December 13, 2013) [Source: pri.org]
The London Observer editorialized in April 1944 that it was Speer's lack of
"psychological ballast and the ease with which he handles the terrifying
technical and organizational machinery of our age," which made this "slight
type go extremely far nowadays. This is their age; the Hitlers and Himmlers
we may get rid of, but the Speers, whatever happens to this particular
special man, will long be with us."
Brennan's name could be substituted for Speer's if we consider the ease with
which he has handled the terrifying technical and organizational machinery
of the drone war, along with a mass surveillance apparatus that is
unprecedented in human history.
[Source: celadonbooks.com]
In his memoir, of course, Brennan, presents what he is doing as helping to
win the fight against America's enemies-including especially Islamic
terrorists and the big bad Russians.
He wants us to believe that he and Obama helped develop a rational and
reasonably humane approach to target selection for the drones by adopting a
bureaucratic system of four Cs-conditions, circumstances, criteria and
considerations-which would reduce or eliminate the number of civilian
casualties.
While civilians were "tragically killed in some strikes," Brennan claims
that, because of the new system, the number was far fewer than the "wildly
exaggerated" and "unsubstantiated claims that were circulating in media
accounts."
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, however, reported between 384 and
807 civilians killed in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen during Obama's
presidency, which was above many initial media estimates, and between 65 and
101 civilians killed in Afghanistan in just one year, 2016, when the Bureau
began counting those deaths.
People gather at a seminary destroyed in a 2013 U.S. drone strike in Hangu,
Pakistan. While it is difficult to estimate the overall total casualties
from U.S. drone strikes since 9/11, according to the Bureau of Investigative
Journalism, the U.S. has conducted 14,040 drone strikes causing 8,858 to
16.901 casualties in half-a-dozen countries including Yemen, Somalia,
Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. Brennan is widely known as the chief
architect of the U.S. drone program.
A report by Stanford and NYU law professors called "Living Under Drones"
quoted a charity director who stated that an entire region [Waziristan on
the Af-Pak frontier] was being
terrorized by the constant threat of death from the skies.kids are too
terrified to go to school, adults are afraid to attend weddings, funerals,
business meetings or anything that involves gathering in groups. [Many] wake
up screaming in the middle of the night because they are hallucinating about
drones.
During testimony on Capitol Hill on October 29, 2013, Nabila Rehman holds up
a picture she drew depicting the drone strike on her village. Nabila and her
brother Zubair were both wounded and lost their 67-year old grandmother, the
local midwife, when a drone struck a field near their Pakistani village on
the sunny morning of 24 October 2012. Her brother, 13-year-old Zubair, told
Congress "I no longer love blue skies. In fact, I now prefer grey skies. The
drones do not fly when the skies are grey." [Source: independent.co.uk and
atlantic.com]
These comments show Brennan to be delusional in his belief that the
bureaucratic procedures helped mitigate the human costs of the strikes,
which can be compared with Speer's misconceived beliefs about bureaucratic
efficiency in Nazi Germany.
Poster with victims of drone killings that Brennan helped coordinate.
[Source: pri.org]
Brennan was very much like Speer also in his yearning for access to power at
any cost. He drops names in his memoir like a star-struck teenager who has
just visited the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
The grounds of the White House in his description are "awe inspiring,"
evoking in him "deep and, at times, emotional patriotic pride," when he
would "walk back and forth in the snowfall on West Executive Avenue," seeing
"the power and majesty of the U.S. government revealed with each office
light."
Brennan's purpose, as this passage makes clear, is to dutifully serve the
powerful who run the majestic government and advance his country's interest
without thought or regard for those who might be adversely affected in doing
so.
Brennan has certain similarities in his personality disposition to Albert
Speer, the Minister of War Production and Armaments under Adolf Hitler, who
is here featured on trial at Nuremburg. [Source: dw.com]
This worldview appears to have been forged growing up in Hudson County, New
Jersey in the 1950s and 1960s, when young Brennan fantasized about becoming
a spy after reading historical accounts of the American revolutionary and
civil and world wars. While attending Fordham University in the early 1970s,
Brennan travelled to Indonesia to write a research paper on oil and
politics.
This topic would have exposed him to the massive human rights abuses that
resulted from the CIA-backed campaign to destroy Indonesia's Communist Party
(PKI), which had wanted to nationalize Indonesia's oil industry.[1] Brennan,
however, was not aroused by this great injustice, but rather by a fourth of
July party at the U.S. embassy in Jakarta, which made him feel that he had
"become part of a family that was dedicated to bringing America's ideals,
values, resources and capabilities to the rest of the world."[2]
When spending a year as an exchange student at the American University in
Cairo, Brennan said, he was charmed by Cairo and its people and learned that
Egyptians resented U.S. support to Israel, believing it responsible for
Israeli occupation of Arab and Palestinian lands seized in 1967.
Characteristic of a bureaucratic functionary, Brennan refused to say,
however, if he thinks that the latter was true.
He goes on to suggest that "most Egyptians greatly admired Americans and
viewed the God-fearing United States as a vital bulwark against the
expansionist designs of an atheistic Soviet Union," which made them okay in
his view. Brennan makes a further point of showing his strong ties to Israel
when he says that he felt "very much at home" in the modern and cosmopolitan
city of Tel Aviv, which he visited after his time in Egypt.
Brennan joined the CIA in the late 1970s, while pursuing graduate study at
the University of Texas. His wife, Kathy, was unhappy about his graduate
student routine and low salary and encouraged him to sign up. John was happy
to oblige, though initially thought that the agency might reject him because
he had voted for Communist Party candidate Gus Hall in 1976-not out of any
conviction or support for the Communist Party, but rather because he was fed
up with partisan politics.
Brennan's initiation into the CIA culture came during a training course he
took at "the farm" where the instructor, whom he identified only as Jack,
told the new agents that it was important to get signed receipts from new
"assets" so that there was a record with which they could be blackmailed and
threatened with exposure if they ever wanted to terminate their relationship
with the CIA. When Brennan questioned this method, Jack responded that "you
need to be tough if you want to be a case officer." He would take this
latter lesson to heart.
Brennan's exploits running the drone war earned him the nickname "the
assassination czar" and "grim Irishman." He also forged close alliances with
the security services of some of the planet's most brutal regimes.
Brennan holds the Saudi King Abdullah in particularly high esteem, calling
him a mensch (Yiddish term for a man who does good deeds) even though he
oversaw the rounding up of peaceful dissidents, public flogging of liberal
bloggers, and detention of thousands of workers in inhumane jails.
President Obama watches as John Brennan greets the new King of Saudi Arabia,
Salman bin Abdul Aziz, January 27, 2015. [Source: wsj.com]
After serving as a political officer at the U.S. embassy in Saudi Arabia in
the 1980s, Brennan worked with the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center (CTC),
which was established by the Reagan administration to intercept and sabotage
terrorists' supplies, carry out surveillance, disrupt their finances and
kidnap suspects and return them to the United States, in a forerunner to the
modern rendition program.[3]
According to Brennan, one of the CTCs major accomplishments was the "piecing
together fragmentary evidence to prove that Libya was the perpetrator of the
terrorist bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988."
Independent investigations, however, have determined that the perpetrator of
the crime was likely Iran in retaliation for the shooting down of an Iranian
civilian airliner by the U.S.S. Vincennes a year before.[4]
When the first Persian Gulf War broke out in 1991, Brennan says that he had
to explain to his son that "the man in charge of Iraq [Saddam Hussein] is a
bad man, who hurt a lot of people and has taken over another country." While
there is some truth to these statements, Iraq's conflict with the U.S. was
more complicated and rooted in the U.S. drive for control of Middle-Eastern
oil. The kind of juvenile understanding he imbues in his son is promoted by
Brennan throughout his memoir.
Left out completely is Brennan's tenure in the mid-2000s as president and
CEO of The Analysis Corporation (TAC), a defense contractor which helped
develop intelligence analysis and terrorist watchlists.
After Brennan left TAC to become an adviser to the Obama campaign, a TAC
employee was accused of improperly looking at the passport files of
presidential candidates, including Obama.
This incident has raised suspicion that Brennan was involved in trying to
cover up Obama's personal history and rumored employment with the CIA.[5]
Brennan as Director of CIA under the Obama-Biden Administration
In a packed CIA headquarters lobby, then Vice-President Biden welcomed
Brennan as new CIA director: "It's absolutely terrific to have John, who is
a friend and colleague of many years, back here to lead what I consider to
be the crown jewel of the Intelligence Community-and that's the Central
Intelligence Agency." (April 12, 2013) [Source: cia.gov]
Brennan sheds very little light, generally, on his close relationship with
Obama, which according to The New York Times, was as close a bond between a
president and CIA Director as there has been in American history.
Brennan and Obama were so close that Obama found himself "finishing
Brennan's sentences," according to one historical account. [Source: cnn.com]
He does though make an interesting admission regarding Cuba when he writes
that the "goal of normalized relations as envisioned by President Obama" was
that Cuba's "repressive security practices, political oppression and
socialist economy would fade from view." [Italics added.] The normalization
policy by implication was not altruistic, but designed as part of the U.S.'s
long-standing program of regime change.
Brennan's own counter-revolutionary outlook is exemplified in his anger
that, at a ceremony marking the opening of the new U.S. embassy in Havana,
Alejandro Castro would extoll the heroism of his father Raul, and Uncle
Fidel, during the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion.
Brennan is further upset that Alejandro presented him with an inscribed copy
of his book, The Price of Power, which he dismisses as a "289-page screed"
detailing the "intemperance, and vice of the United States towards Cuba and
other worldwide victims of American imperialism."
Saudi officials are more to Brennan's liking despite their support for
Islamic terrorism and the criminal invasion of Yemen, which was carried out
with high-tech U.S. weapons. Brennan in Undaunted recounts an interesting
conversation in which Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) boasted about
"finishing off the Houthis [rebels in Yemen] in a couple of months," though
sheds no new light otherwise on the U.S.-Saudi relationship and war.
Brennan meets with Egyptian dictator Fatah al-Sisi who cooperated with the
U.S. in the War on Terror. Tens of thousands of people have been killed or
tortured during his rule. [Source: theintercept.com]
Befitting his position, Brennan is further evasive about the massive covert
operation he helped oversee to arm the Free Syrian Army and other jihadi
groups in an effort to topple the nationalist government of Bashir al-Assad.
He does repeat, though, politically charged claims about Assad's use of
chemical weapons that have never been verified.[6]
Brennan's deceptiveness extends to his suggestion that Anwar al-Awlaki, a
Yemeni cleric and U.S. citizen assassinated in a drone strike, was behind
the mass shooting at Fort Hood Texas by Nidal Malik Hasan that killed
thirteen U.S. soldiers. Al-Awlaki was found to have exchanged emails with
Hasan who had worshipped at his mosque in suburban Virginia, but an FBI
inquiry into Awlaki's criminal culpability in the shooting was dropped, and
the FBI concluded Hasan had acted alone.[7]
In a chapter entitled "A Tortured Senate Report," Brennan dismisses as
partisan a Senate report that exposed CIA torture methods under the
rendition program during the Bush era.
The Report follows staffer Daniel Jones and the Senate Intelligence
Committee as they investigate the CIA's use of torture after 9/11-a
discovery process slammed by Brennan in his memoir.
Senator Dianne Feinstein (D- Calif.) subsequently accused Brennan and the
CIA of engaging in "illegal and unconstitutional breaches" by searching the
computers and spying on Senate Select Committee on Intelligence staffers who
had helped compile the report. Brennan's moral indignation in his book
predictably focuses on Feinstein and a 2019 film depicting these events
called The Report which he derides for being "way beyond the pale."
In one of his last acts as CIA Director, Brennan oversaw the writing of a
report by the major intelligence agencies which claimed to have "high
confidence" that Russia hacked the computers of the Democratic National
Committee and supported Donald J. Trump in the 2016 election. The report,
however, did not provide any significant evidence to support its own
allegations and merely provided "an assessment" which journalist Robert
Parry notes is "an admission" that the classified information blaming Russia
was "less than conclusive because, in intelligence world speak, to 'assess'
actually means to 'guess.'"[i][8]
Russia Gate is best understood as a major volley in a long war between the
social democratic wing of the U.S. intelligence establishment, led by
Brennan and Obama, and the neofascist wing, which is aligned behind Trump.
Most troubling has been the politicization of the intelligence agencies and
their interference in partisan domestic politics-which Brennan claims to
vehemently oppose. Russia Gate has also contributed to a Russophobic climate
driving a new Cold War.
Early into Trump's presidency, Brennan issued a public warning to Trump
about his Russia policy, telling Fox News: "I think Mr. Trump has to
understand that absolving Russia of various actions that it's taken in the
past number of years is a road that he, I think, needs to be very, very
careful about moving down."[9] When an unelected intelligence official can
intimidate a president into backing away from efforts at diplomatic
engagement, then democracy has been destroyed and a permanent warfare state
institutionalized.
Brennan has promoted disinformation about Russia and the Russia Gate
narrative from his perch as a commentator on supposedly liberal MSNBC.
[Source: americanindependent.com]
Brennan's place in history is generally as an heir to past agency directors
who have abused constitutional liberties, deceived the public, and carried
out policies that helped devastate Third World countries.
His memoir, Undaunted, shows him to be a particularly close contemporary of
Richard Helms (1966-1973), who helped protect the agency's secrecy, as
opposed to William Colby (1973-1976), who went public with information that
appears to have led to his assassination.[10]
The comparison between Brennan and Speer becomes resonant when one considers
Brennan's fixation with career advancement and service to power, his
disregard for the human consequences of the policies he is tasked with
carrying out, and his effort to institutionalize state killing under the
drone war through a bureaucratic process that applies heavily sanitized
language.
What is so dangerous about the two "organizational men" ultimately is the
normalcy through which they carry out their duties and satisfaction that
they gain from bureaucratic triumphs and advancement irrespective of the
human costs. Their psychological archetype enables large-scale killing
machines to operate expeditiously, now and into the foreseeable future.
Jeremy Kuzmarov is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and author of
four books on U.S. foreign policy, including The Russians Are Coming, Again,
with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), and Obama's Unending Wars
(Clarity Press, 2019).
