Ugh! Senators Warren and Franken Vote to Confirm Brennan to Head CIA

by John Spritzler

March 9, 2013

 

If anyone doubts that liberal politicians in Congress with a reputation for being "for the little guy" are in fact the opposite, the fact that the darlings of the liberal left--Senators Elizabeth Warren and Al Franken--voted Yea to confirm John O. Brennan to head the CIA should remove any doubt.

 

 

Brennan is famous for being President Obama's right-hand man and "spiritual" advisor behind Obama's use of drones to kill, with not even any judicial process, anybody he wants to kill, including the American citizen and American-born sixteen year old, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, along with his 17-year-old cousin and seven other people.

The New York Times reported:

Beside the president at every step is his counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, who is variously compared by colleagues to a dogged police detective, tracking terrorists from his cavelike office in the White House basement, or a priest whose blessing has become indispensable to Mr. Obama, echoing the president’s attempt to apply the “just war” theories of Christian philosophers to a brutal modern conflict.

The reprehensible nature of Obama's killing policy was made quite evident by the manner in which his Press Secretary, Robert Gibbs, defended the murder of the 16 year old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, reported in The Atlantic here:

But Abdulrahman al-Awlaki wasn't on an American kill list.

Nor was he a member of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninusla. Nor was he "an inspiration," as his father styled himself, for those determined to draw American blood; nor had he gone "operational," as American authorities said his father had, in drawing up plots against Americans and American interests. He was a boy who hadn't seen his father in two years, since his father had gone into hiding. He was a boy who knew his father was on an American kill list and who snuck out of his family's home in the early morning hours of September 4, 2011, to try to find him. He was a boy who was still searching for his father when his father was killed, and who, on the night he himself was killed, was saying goodbye to the second cousin with whom he'd lived while on his search, and the friends he'd made. He was a boy among boys, then; a boy among boys eating dinner by an open fire along the side of a road when an American drone came out of the sky and fired the missiles that killed them all.

How does Team Obama justify killing him?

The answer Gibbs gave is chilling:

ADAMSON: ...It's an American citizen that is being targeted without due process, without trial. And, he's underage. He's a minor.

GIBBS: I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well being of their children. I don't think becoming an al Qaeda jihadist terrorist is the best way to go about doing your business.

Again, note that this kid wasn't killed in the same drone strike as his father. He was hit by a drone strike elsewhere, and by the time he was killed, his father had already been dead for two weeks. Gibbs nevertheless defends the strike, not by arguing that the kid was a threat, or that killing him was an accident, but by saying that his late father irresponsibly joined al Qaeda terrorists. Killing an American citizen without due process on that logic ought to be grounds for impeachment.

Obama's selection of Brennan, who was George W. Bush's CIA Deputy Executive Director from March 2001-March 2003, makes it clear that Obama is simply carrying out the same ruthless policy of Bush, which is to demonize Muslims and make them the new bogeyman to frighten Americans into obeying our ruling plutocracy in the name of "national security." Brennan's loyalty to the old Bush policy is revealed by his own testimony at his Senate confirmation hearing, as reported in a NYT editorial:

Yet, at his Senate confirmation hearing in February, he appeared to be one of the few people (apart from maybe Dick Cheney and some other die-hard right-wingers) who thinks there is some doubt still about whether the Bush administration tortured prisoners, hid its actions from Congress and misled everyone about whether coerced testimony provided valuable intelligence.

Mr. Brennan told the Senate Intelligence Committee that he was surprised by the findings of a 6,000-page Senate report on detention and interrogation. Scott Shane reported in The Times on Thursday that the report concludes that the interrogation of Al Qaeda detainees involving torture and abuse “was ill-conceived, sloppily managed and far less useful in obtaining intelligence than its supporters have claimed.”

Mr. Brennan’s response, after having one of the top C.I.A. jobs during the period when the torture agenda was at its apex (when Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was subjected to waterboarding 183 times), was: “I don’t know what the facts are or what the truth is. So I really need to look at that carefully and see what C.I.A.’s response is.”

Anybody who thought that Senators Warren and Franken are for the "little guy" should learn from their Yea vote for Brennan how very wrong they were.

The people who are truly for the "little guy" are the little guys, not big shot politicians. We need the little guys to remove the big shots from power, and to do this we need to start Thinking about Revolution.