Brennan’s CIA bid chance to strike back at critics

In this photo from Oct. 29, 2010, Deputy National Secu­rity Adviser for Home­land Secu­rity and Coun­tert­er­ror­ism John Bren­nan briefs reporters at the White House in Wash­ing­ton. Bren­nan, now Pres­i­dent Barack Obama’s nom­i­nee to be CIA direc­tor, with­drew from con­sid­er­a­tion for the job in 2008 amid crit­i­cism over the agency’s use of harsh inter­ro­ga­tion tech­niques, like water­board­ing, against ter­ror­ist sus­pects. This time, in 2013, he’s mak­ing it clear he strongly opposes such prac­tices. For­mer and cur­rent U.S. intel­li­gence offi­cials say Bren­nan wasn’t so vocal a decade ago. (Asso­ci­ated Press file | Charles Dharapak)

KIMBERLY DOZIER

AP Intel­li­gence Writer

WASHINGTON — A Sen­ate hear­ing on John Brennan’s nom­i­na­tion to head the CIA could lay bare some parts of the secret war against al-Qaida: lethal drone strikes from covert bases against even Amer­i­can ter­ror sus­pects, harsh inter­ro­ga­tion meth­ods and long deten­tion of sus­pects with­out due process.

Some of the prac­tices pro­duced revul­sion among some in Con­gress and the pub­lic, but the out­cry has been muted because Bren­nan and oth­ers say that these harsh and secre­tive meth­ods have saved Amer­i­can lives.

Those issues will be front and cen­ter in the Sen­ate Intel­li­gence Com­mit­tee hear­ing Thurs­day for Bren­nan — a chance for him to answer crit­i­cism that he backed the deten­tion and inter­ro­ga­tion pol­icy while he served at the CIA under Pres­i­dent George W. Bush, charges that stymied his first attempt to head the intel­li­gence agency in 2008.

In answers to ques­tions from the Sen­ate Intel­li­gence Com­mit­tee before the hear­ing, Bren­nan said he was “aware of the pro­gram but did not play a role in its cre­ation, exe­cu­tion, or over­sight,” and added that he “had sig­nif­i­cant con­cerns and per­sonal objec­tions” to the inter­ro­ga­tion techniques.

He wrote that he voiced those objec­tions to col­leagues at the agency privately.

Bren­nan also described how indi­vid­u­als are tar­geted for drone strikes, say­ing whether a sus­pect is deemed an immi­nent threat — and there­fore appro­pri­ate for tar­get­ing — is made “on a case-by-case basis through a coor­di­nated inter­a­gency process” involv­ing intel­li­gence, mil­i­tary, diplo­matic and other agencies.

He defended the mis­sile strikes by Preda­tor or Reaper drones as a more humane form of war. Aides have por­trayed him as cau­tious in their use, restrain­ing oth­ers at the CIA or mil­i­tary who would use them more often, even though as the White House’s coun­tert­er­ror czar he has presided over an explo­sion of drone strikes in Pak­istan, Yemen and Soma­lia. Less than 50 strikes took place dur­ing the Bush admin­is­tra­tion while more than 360 strikes have been launched under Pres­i­dent Barack Obama, accord­ing to the web­site The Long War Jour­nal, which tracks the casualties.

Admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials say Bren­nan would fur­ther limit the use of drones by the CIA and leave the major­ity of strikes to the military.

Sen. Dianne Fein­stein, D-Calif., and oth­ers have pressed the White House to show them the clas­si­fied legal memo that out­lines specif­i­cally when drones and other lethal strikes may be employed against al-Qaida. An unclas­si­fied Jus­tice Depart­ment white paper was made pub­lic this week, out­lin­ing America’s author­ity to kill sus­pected ter­ror­ists with drones, even U.S. cit­i­zens, if a case can be made by the CIA or mil­i­tary that they are linked to al-Qaida and have taken part in plots against Americans.

A senior admin­is­tra­tion offi­cial said late Wednes­day that Obama now has directed the Jus­tice Depart­ment to pro­vide the Sen­ate and House intel­li­gence com­mit­tees access to clas­si­fied advice from its Office of Legal Coun­sel on which the white paper was based.

The CIA’s drone strikes pri­mar­ily focus on al-Qaida and Tal­iban tar­gets in the tribal regions of Pak­istan, while the mil­i­tary has launched strikes against al-Qaida tar­gets in Yemen and Somalia.

The CIA also car­ries out strikes in Yemen from a base in Saudi Ara­bia, includ­ing one that killed three Amer­i­can cit­i­zens: Anwar al-Awlaki, his 16-year-old-son and Samir Khan. Al-Awlaki was linked to the plan­ning and exe­cu­tion of sev­eral attacks tar­get­ing U.S. and West­ern inter­ests, includ­ing the attempt to down a Detroit-bound air­liner in 2009 and the plot to bomb cargo planes in 2010. His son was killed in a sep­a­rate strike on a sus­pected al-Qaida den. Khan was an al-Qaida propagandist.

The loca­tion of the drone base was first dis­closed by The New York Times in a story that pre­viewed Brennan’s hear­ing, high­light­ing the sen­si­tive issues that the hear­ings will bring into the open. The Asso­ci­ated Press first reported the con­struc­tion of the base in June 2011 but with­held the exact loca­tion at the request of senior admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials. Once it was dis­closed, the AP con­sid­ered the agree­ment to be no longer in place.

Democ­rats in Con­gress have begun to express stronger oppo­si­tion to the use of drones, but on Wednes­day Obama found an unlikely ally in Repub­li­can Sen. Lind­sey Gra­ham, who expressed his “100 per­cent” sup­port of the use of drones against ter­ror suspects.

Bren­nan will also face ques­tions about charges that White House offi­cials leaked details of the administration’s national secu­rity poli­cies, includ­ing its cyber­at­tacks against Iran’s nuclear infra­struc­ture, to bur­nish Obama’s stand­ing as com­man­der in chief ahead of last year’s pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. Bren­nan him­self has come under fire by Repub­li­can law­mak­ers who believe he gave the media too many details in news con­fer­ences after the 2011 killing of al-Qaida mas­ter­mind Osama bin Laden.

The Obama White House launched a sweep­ing inves­ti­ga­tion led by two Jus­tice Depart­ment lawyers in response to con­gres­sional ire over the leaks. But White House offi­cials have defended brief­ings given by Bren­nan as autho­rized and backed by the pres­i­dent him­self, who they say has the ulti­mate author­ity to declas­sify information.

Bren­nan told the Sen­ate com­mit­tee in his writ­ten answers that he was ques­tioned as a vol­un­tary wit­ness in the leak inves­ti­ga­tion. He also said that in his cur­rent role, he is “vig­i­lant about not dis­clos­ing clas­si­fied intel­li­gence mat­ters with unau­tho­rized per­sons, includ­ing reporters and media consultants.”

House Intel­li­gence Com­mit­tee Chair­man Mike Rogers, R-Mich., who has strongly crit­i­cized the administration’s release of infor­ma­tion on its national secu­rity pro­grams, pre­dicted “lots of ques­tions about leaks and deten­tion” at the Sen­ate hear­ings, but he also pre­dicted that Bren­nan would ulti­mately be confirmed.

When Bren­nan joined the White House as the top coun­tert­er­ror­ism adviser in 2009, he pub­licly decried the inter­ro­ga­tion prac­tices, say­ing they back­fired and pro­duced more ter­ror­ists, lead­ing him to urge the newly elected pres­i­dent to stop them.

That rep­re­sented an evo­lu­tion from ear­lier state­ments to the media.

In a CBS News inter­view in 2007, Bren­nan acknowl­edged that the prac­tices came close to tor­ture, but he seemed to defend them. “There has been a lot of infor­ma­tion that has come out from these inter­ro­ga­tion pro­ce­dures that the agency has, in fact, used against the real hard-core ter­ror­ists,” Bren­nan said. “It has saved lives.”

Bren­nan told the com­mit­tee in his writ­ten responses that “a lot of infor­ma­tion, both accu­rate and inac­cu­rate, came out of inter­ro­ga­tion ses­sions con­ducted by (the) CIA,” and that he believed the tech­niques were legal but “counterproductive.”

“These tech­niques would not be used again by the CIA if I were the direc­tor,” he wrote.

In a let­ter Wednes­day, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., asked Bren­nan whether there was “any record from this period of time of your alleged oppo­si­tion to water­board­ing” and whether he had expressed his “alleged oppo­si­tion to water­board­ing or other enhanced inter­ro­ga­tion tech­niques to (then-CIA) direc­tor George Tenet or his successors.”

McCain, a mem­ber of the Sen­ate intel­li­gence panel, also asked Bren­nan to “spec­ify which detainees were sub­jected to enhanced inter­ro­ga­tion pro­ce­dures who as a result offered infor­ma­tion that ‘saved lives.’”

After 25 years at the CIA, Bren­nan moved from his job as deputy exec­u­tive CIA direc­tor in 2003 to become direc­tor of the Ter­ror­ist Threat Inte­gra­tion Cen­ter, and then interim direc­tor of its next incar­na­tion, the National Coun­tert­er­ror­ism Cen­ter. When Bush’s sec­ond term began, Bren­nan left gov­ern­ment to run The Analy­sis Corp., which pro­vides coun­tert­er­ror analy­sis to gov­ern­ment agen­cies, from 2005 to 2008. After Obama’s elec­tion, he returned to the gov­ern­ment pay­roll, in 2009, as the White House coun­tert­er­ror adviser.

Bren­nan was nom­i­nated to replace CIA direc­tor David Petraeus, who resigned late last year, cit­ing an extra­mar­i­tal affair.

Fein­stein has sig­naled she will sup­port Brennan’s nom­i­na­tion, but con­gres­sional staffers say both she and her Repub­li­can coun­ter­parts will ask Bren­nan to explain pub­licly if he objected to the inter­ro­ga­tion pro­gram, and whether he believes it pro­duced any use­ful intelligence.

Feinstein’s com­mit­tee just pro­duced a 6,000-page clas­si­fied report on the inter­ro­ga­tion pro­gram that says it did not. Con­gres­sional aides said she would seek Brennan’s sup­port in future, if the com­mit­tee votes to declas­sify por­tions of it after the White House and CIA fin­ish review­ing the document.

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