Brennan Comes In From the Cold

By Marc Ash, Reader Supported News

22 August 18

t was interesting to see former CIA director John Brennan sitting down with Rachael Maddow, doing his best to be engaging and sincere. It’s a new look for him. Brennan’s been a pretty aloof guy over the years. He always gave you the impression he knew more than you knew, and you knew all you needed to know.

The CIA has been a very secretive organization throughout its history. That has been necessary for reasons both good and bad. That secrecy is explicitly endorsed by Congressional overseers to a degree that has kept the American people largely in the dark, when sunlight would have allowed them to see the great harm being done.

On a good day, the CIA monitors and counters the activities of foreign governments and non-governmental players who are actively attempting to undermine US national security, and many are. On their bad days, they coordinate assassinations of foreign leaders and dissidents, orchestrate the overthrow of democratically elected governments who do not kowtow to “US interests,” and generally look for new and ever more inventive ways to justify diminishing the Constitution in the name of national security.

The apex of harm in which the CIA was complicit occurred during the 1970s and 1980s in South America. The overthrow of Chilean president Salvador Allende that led to the bloody reign of right-wing strongman General Augusto Pinochet was emblematic of the role the CIA played in supporting right-wing autocrats and suppressing left-leaning leaders, governments, and supporters throughout Latin America. Pinochet was later convicted of human rights violations relating to the abuse of power that the US and the CIA helped him achieve. But such operations continue today and were on full display in the overthrow and assassination of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. The Libya affair was on Brennan’s watch.

Some have suggested that what Donald Trump is doing somehow reforms the national intelligence community or is at least justified by the misdeeds of the national security professionals on his enemies list. That’s not the criteria for inclusion on the Presidential Enemies List.

The Presidential Enemies List

To be included on the Presidential Enemies List, you have to threaten in a material way Trump’s grip on power. Specifically, you have to have or have had direct access to and knowledge of classified evidence of Trump’s collusion and conspiracy with players in Vladimir Putin’s orbit. The Presidential Enemies List is exactly that, a who’s who of people who have direct knowledge of the classified evidence.

Reforming the US Intelligence Community

Yes, the US intelligence community needs to be confronted. My colleague, frequent RSN contributor, and friend John Kiriakou, former CIA Counterterrorism Operations officer, courageously spoke out about the CIA’s role in the Bush-era torture program. According to Kiriakou, Brennan was the catalyst, the driving force behind the Obama administration’s unprecedented whistleblower campaign.

The story Kiriakou tells is a hair-raising one. Brennan was obsessed with whistleblowing and whistleblowers. As CIA director, he pressed the administration and President Obama directly to make leak-plugging a top Justice Department priority. Over the next few years, they would embark on the most aggressive campaign of whistleblower prosecution the country has ever seen. In cases like Bradley (Chelsea) Manning, Edward Snowden, Thomas Drake, Jeffrey Sterling, Stephen Kim, and Kiriakou himself, the Obama administration, the Justice Department and the courts steamrolled whistleblower protection statutes.

Brennan Now Becomes the Whistleblower

In a simple twist of fate, Brennan now finds himself treated by the White House as a whistleblower and dissident. It is now Brennan whose actions, statements, and public revelations are depicted as a threat to “all Americans” by the president and his loyalists. Brennan is now the one harassed, badgered, marginalized and threatened. Now Brennan fully understands the price of speaking out as his conscience so compelled him. Now Brennan comes in from the cold, of his own volition or not. It’s an object lesson in the abuse of power, the value of whistleblowers, and the importance of the laws specifically designed to protect them.

Corrupt Intent

There’s a temptation here to see some benefit in Trump’s confrontation of Brennan and the others on his Presidential Enemies List. That would be a serious miscalculation. Trump acts and has always acted exclusively in what he believes to be his own personal self-interest. Donald Trump is under criminal investigation for the most serious crimes an American president has ever been suspected of. He is using the power of the presidency to wage war on the members of law enforcement tasked with investigating those suspected crimes. It is in Trump’s own interest and his interest alone that he acts.

The “reform” that Trump seeks is an intelligence community, an entire US government beholden to him and him alone.

Brennan’s newfound struggle is the struggle all whistleblowers have fought throughout time. Now he knows. It is time we know too.

Marc Ash is the founder and former Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.