brennan

Here’s one thing that bears mentioning now that it appears Leon Panetta is President-elect Barack Obama’s to head the CIA. Given the worries about whether John Brennan might have been too soft on torture — put aside the merits of that contention for a moment — no one can have that fear about Panetta. Here’s [...]

Lord knows I had my disagreements with Glenn Greenwald over the John Brennan affair. But this extremely obnoxious comment from a nameless Obama “transition observer” on the episode to the Washington Post’s Al Kamen is repugnant:
The episode bothered a lot of Brennan fans in the Obama operation, where he still heads the CIA transition team. [...]

The mostly smooth Obama transition has hit a stumbling block as it seeks a CIA head. Criticism from the left led likely candidate John Brennan to withdraw his name from consideration.

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:

So much for John Brennan, the former CIA official who wasn’t actually an advocate of torture but who was pilloried for being so in the blogosphere. The Associated Press reports he’s taken himself out of the running to be Obama’s CIA director or director of national intelligence in a letter to the president-elect: