john brennan

President Obama will host this morning what’s expected to be his final meeting with his national security team on Afghanistan strategy ahead of a revision of/re-commitment to what the strategy will be and how to resource it. Attendees will include the chairmen of the military services, which means that this meeting will focus on how [...]

The White House just announced the leadership of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board: former Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), a big Obama supporter, and former Sen. David Boren (D-Okla.), a former intelligence committee chair and mentor of disastrous ex-CIA Director George Tenet. Their reactions, as per a White House release:
“I appreciate the privilege and opportunity that [...]

Here’s the guest list for today’s White House meeting to discuss Afghanistan and Pakistan strategy. New additions to the discussion: Amb. Susan Rice, a close Obama adviser turned ambassador to the U.N.; and Lt. Gen. Doug Lute, the “war czar” who will oversee interagency policy coordination. Wait, isn’t that Richard Holbrooke’s job…?

So it seems that Robert Gibbs today inelegantly tried to distinguish between al-Qaeda and the Taliban — sigh, that shouldn’t have been too difficult — and in the process of that explanation, used the word “jihadist,” a term that the Obama administration strenuously avoids. Carol E. Lee at Politico tries to explain:
Jihadist is seen as [...]

If it’s true, as reported, that the question of the CIA’s drone strikes against al-Qaeda in Pakistan is bolstering support for the so-called counterterrorism option in the Obama administration’s Afghanistan/Pakistan strategy, then tomorrow’s meeting at the White House looks, from the attendance sheet, like it’ll debate precisely that issue. Here’s the just-released list of scheduled [...]

Writing about the role Deputy National Security Adviser John Brennan played in the Bush counterterror surveillance program, Marcy Wheeler, blogging for Glenn Greenwald at Salon today, argues that as NSA adviser, rather than CIA director (a position Brennan was nominated for, but Glenn helped torpedo the nomination by highlighting his previous role in the Bush [...]

Marc Ambinder follows up on my question to John Brennan, President Obama’s chief counterterrorism aide, about what role Brennan played in domestic surveillance during the Bush administration. From 2003 to 2005, recall, Brennan ran two organizations — the Terrorist Threat Integration Center and then the National Counterterrorism Center — whose analysts prepared threat assessments that [...]

Above all, Brennan emphasized that the U.S. was not locked in a struggle with the world’s billion Muslims.

I’ll have a broader piece up soon about John Brennan’s speech about counterterrorism, which in many ways represented a stark departure from several key tenets of the Bush administration’s approach. But on one issue that I asked Brennan about, the president’s chief adviser for counterterrorism and homeland security seemed reluctant to clear up an issue [...]

Live from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, here’s John Brennan, President Obama’s assistant for homeland security and counterterrorism, articulating the administration’s counterterrorism strategy. I’ll be liveblogging the speech and, unless the Fail Whale foils me, tweeting it as well.
… and we’re off. First part of the speech: counterterrorism reform. Obama’s refocused on “a [...]