Hayden To Stay on at CIA?

If you didn’t like John Brennan because of his alleged connections to torture, you’ll just love Mike Hayden, he of the warrantless surveillance program! Reports U.S. News and World Report:

As President-elect Barack Obama continues to build his national security staff, now focused on intelligence, it is possible that he might ask CIA Director Mike Hayden to stay on for a while, intelligence sources say. Much of the speculation about the CIA job has been that Obama wants a change, in part because he disagreed with the CIA’s detention policies. But officials are pushing back a little on that issue, suggesting that Hayden has been carrying out the policies backed by Congress and the president before he arrived at Langley, not freelancing on his own. “It’s unfair to blame Hayden for things that occurred long before he took the job. But he deserves credit for standing up for the folks over there at CIA, even though a lot of the stuff he has dealt with didn’t happen on his watch,” said an intelligence official. “Administration policy and American law shape what the CIA does. If the president says he doesn’t want something done, that’s it. These are his programs,” added the official.

I don’t believe this at all. This sounds like get-even pushback from embittered CIA people — of whom there are many, post-Brennan, and it’s surprised me — who want to kick progressives in the teeth. The idea of President-elect Obama being uncomfortable with Brennan for his apologies for the post-9/11 rendition program but being OK with Hayden — by his own account an architect of the warrantless surveillance program when he ran the NSA — is absurd. Someone’s having fun here. If this happens, I’ll buy you all a soda.

This all reflects the increasing alienation of the CIA from progressives, who defended the agency during the Bush years. It’s a highly worrisome development.