JOHN BRENNAN

Born in northern New Jersey on September 22, 1955, John Brennan earned a B.A. in political science from Fordham University in 1977, and an M.A. in government from the University of Texas in 1980. That same year, Brennan joined the CIA as an intelligence director, and in the '90s he served a stint as a daily intelligence briefer for President Bill Clinton. According to one former CIA official, Brennan in 1998 was “instrumental in preventing … an operation ... that would have killed or captured Osama bin Laden,” and instead advised the U.S. to “trust the Saudis to take care of” the al Qaeda leader. In 1999, CIA director George Tenet appointed Brennan as his chief of staff. From March 2001 until 2003, Brennan served as the CIA's deputy executive director. In 2003-04 he headed the newly created Terrorist Threat Integration Center, and in 2004-05 he directed the National Counterterrorism Center. In 2005 Brennan left government to become CEO of the Analysis Corporation, a Virginia company that supported the federal government's counterterrorism efforts. He also chaired the Intelligence and National Security Alliance. When news of the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping initiative made headlines in late 2005, Brennan defended the practice and maintained that the telecommunication companies participating in the program “should be granted ... immunity, because they were told to [participate] by the appropriate authorities that were operating in a legal context.” Brennan also supported “enhanced interrogation” techniques and described “extraordinary rendition” as “an absolutely vital tool” that “without a doubt has been very successful as far as producing intelligence that has saved lives.” Brennan subsequently departed from these positions when he served as a senior advisor to Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign. In a letter to Obama, for example, Brennan called himself “a strong opponent of many of the policies of the Bush administration, such as the preemptive war in Iraq and coercive interrogation tactics, to include waterboarding.” After Obama's election victory in 2008, Brennan was widely regarded as the leading contender for the position of CIA director, but he withdrew his name from consideration when alalysts noted that his previous support of enhanced interrogation was inconsistent with Obama's stated opposition to the practice. In January 2009, Obama appointed Brennan as deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism—a post that, unlike CIA director, did not require Senate confirmation. In August 2009 Brennan said that tactics like waterboarding were not only inconsistent with “our ideals as a nation,” but also “undermine our national security” because they “are a recruitment bonanza for terrorists, increase the determination of our enemies, and decrease the willingness of other nations to cooperate with us.” Further, Brennan detailed for the first time the Obama administration's decision to dispense with the term “global war on terror.” Emphasizing the need to target “extremists” rather than “jihadists,” he explained that “jihad” means "to purify oneself or to wage a holy struggle for a moral goal.” The use of that term, Brennan elaborated, “risks giving these murderers the religious legitimacy they desperately seek but in no way deserve. Worse, it risks reinforcing the idea that the United States is somehow at war with Islam itself.” Adding that it was vital “to confront the broader political, economic and social conditions in which extremists thrive,” Brennan called terrorism “the final murderous manifestation of a long process rooted in hopelessness, humiliation, and hatred.” Also in August 2009, Brennan said he was “pleased to see that a lot of Hezbollah individuals are in fact renouncing ... terrorism and violence and are trying to participate in the political process in a very legitimate fashion.” “Hamas,” he added, had “started out as a very focused social organization that was providing welfare to Palestinians,” but eventually “developed an extremist and terrorist element” that “unfortunately delegitimized it in the eyes of many” and diminished the chances of the Palestinian people getting “what they truly deserve, which is a Palestinian state side-by-side with Israel.” Nation reporter Robert Dreyfuss, meanwhile, revealed that Brennan had once told him that (as Dreyfuss paraphrased): “talking to Hamas and Hezbollah is the right thing to do.” On Christmas Day 2009, Nigerian al Qaeda operative Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab attempted, unsuccessfully, to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight (from Amsterdam to Detroit) in midair with a powerful chemical bomb. In the aftermath of the incident, Brennan explained that the Obama administration would treat it as a law-enforcement matter rather than as an act of war or terrorism; that the perpetrator would be offered a plea agreement in exchange for information about al Qaeda operations in Yemen; and that if such an agreement could not be worked out, Abdulmutallab would be tried in a federal court rather than a military tribunal. When some commentators subsequently complained that Abdulmutallab’s name had never been added to the U.S. "no-fly" list even though his own father had warned CIA officials of his son's radicalization, Brennan claimed that their “politically motivated criticism and unfounded fear-mongering” would “only serve the goals of al-Qaeda.” Brennan sought to try 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in a civilian court as well, stating, in a February 2010 speech to Islamic law students at New York University, that “we need to bring him to justice in an American court”—a goal the Obama administration eventually abandoned, due to the plan's unpopularity with the public. Also during his NYU speech, Brennan referred to Jerusalem by its Arabic name, “Al-Quds”; stated that the 20% recidivism rate of former Guantanamo detainees “isn't that bad” when compared to criminal recidivism trends generally; and called Hezbollah “a very interesting organization” whose “more moderate elements” the U.S. should strive to “build up.”[1] Three months later, Brennan again said the Obama administration was trying to establish a positive relationship with “moderate elements” of Hezbollah. When reporter Patrick Poole in September 2010 revealed that under Brennan's watch, a known, high-level Hamas official in the U.S. had received a guided tour of the top-secret National Counterterrorism Center and FBI Academy at Quantico, Virginia, several former intelligence and defense officials called for Brennan to resign. On January 7, 2013, President Obama nominated Brennan for the position of CIA director. For additional information on John Brennan, click here. NOTE: [1] Brennan was introduced at NYU by Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America.