By
Douglas Lucas on Mar 17, 2013
In 1980, a 25-year old graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin wrote a
master’s thesis
called “Human rights, a case study of Egypt.” In it, he argued that the
aim of achieving and maintaining political stability justifies human
rights violations by apprehensive governments— including crackdowns on
unbridled journalists:
Since the press can play such an
influential role in determining the perceptions of the masses, I am in
favor of some degree of government censorship. Inflamatory [sic]
articles can provoke mass opposition and possible violence.
Why should we care what a 25-year old grad student wrote over 30
years ago? Because that student grew up to be John Brennan—recently
appointed director of the CIA. And because the theory he outlined in
his master’s thesis seems to have shaped his attitude toward the
exercise of power since then.
Four Months Make An Expert?
Brennan wrote the thesis, first made public by Charles C. Johnson, for an
article in the Daily Caller (additional pages
here),
to earn a master’s degree in government with a concentration in Middle
Eastern studies. The paper analyzed human rights in Egypt under the
1970s regime of Anwar Sadat — a regime Brennan experienced firsthand
while studying at the American University in Cairo for four months (from
September 1975 to January 1976).
Under Sadat, Egypt saw riots over the price of bread, a growing gap
between the rich and the poor, high unemployment, widespread
malnutrition, and other turmoil.
For the sake of stability, Brennan wrote, Sadat rightly introduced
legislation to restrict assembly, strove to replace the judiciary in
political trials with his own special prosecutor, and subjected the
press to frequent, extensive censorship.
The powerful have long used emergencies or purported emergencies as
excuses to seize power. In terms of Egypt’s dire conditions, Brennan
wrote,
Sadat’s authoritarian approach to the
democratic process has brought widespread criticism from his opponents.
The motivation for this approach is obvious: in limiting personal
liberties, Sadat has sought political order and stability in Egypt [...]
Looking at the present policies of the Sadat administration, one gets
the impression that democracy does not exist in Egypt. But if democracy
is a process rather than a state, the democratic process may involve, at
some point, the violation of personal liberties and procedural justice.
Sadat’s undemocratic methods, therefore, may aim at the ultimate
preservation of democracy rather than its demise.
We Had to Destroy Democracy to Save It
These Orwellian arguments should not be dismissed as the busywork of a
college student hurrying to get a grade. The thesis is written in the
same confident style —blunt sentences, few hedges — that he speaks with
today. Back then, the graduate student clearly saw himself as a
potential “decider,” like Sadat, tasked with picking whose human rights
get violated in the purported best interest of “the State.”
A long career has made Brennan that decider.
There is some question as to when his career at the CIA really started. He tells a
story
that seems a little improbable: while riding a bus to Fordham
University, where he earned a bachelor’s in political science between
1973 and 1977, he read “an ad in The New York Times and it said the CIA
was looking for a few good people.” Overseas travel had aroused his
wanderlust, he said, so he talked to a CIA recruiter.
A classmate of his from fourth grade to his undergraduate years
recalls that Brennan spent the summer after freshman year with a cousin
who worked for the Agency of International Development in Indonesia and
that he visited Bahrain on the way home. Brennan
was working
at the US embassy in Indonesia and researching the politics of oil. “I
wondered if he had even been recruited that early,” the classmate said.
If true, Brennan would have written the thesis while a CIA recruit. It
has also been
speculated that the American University in Cairo is a site of CIA recruitment and training.
***
Regardless of his actual recruitment date, Brennan did start his
official career at the CIA right out of college. He worked for the CIA
for 25 years, including as an analyst, as station chief in Riyadh from
1996 to 1999, as the agency’s daily intelligence briefer to President
Clinton, and as chief of staff for former CIA director George Tenet.
WhoWhatWhy has previously
examined the implications of Brennan’s Saudi connections.
While still at the CIA, he directed the Terrorist Threat Integration
Center from 2003 to 2004—charged with integrating intelligence from the
seventeen member agencies of the intelligence community on
counterterrorism issues. The center became the National Counterterrorism
Center (NCTC), where from 2004 to 2005 he was Interim Director.
Two months after he stepped down from the NCTC, The Analysis
Corporation (TAC), which specializes in databases and is now named
Sotera Defense Solutions, reportedly
secured a lucrative deal
to improve the NCTC terrorist watch-list. Like many defense contractor
firms, TAC was based in McLean, Virginia, close by the CIA headquarters
in Langley. Just one month later, in November 2005, Brennan conveniently
followed the watch-list’s path to TAC, where he became president and
CEO, making $760,000 a year.
His time in the government — including working in surveillance during
the time of the post-9/11 illegal warrantless wiretapping program — was
also marketable elsewhere in the private sector. Starting in April 2007
he spearheaded the private security industry as chairman of the
Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA), earning $30,000 a
year for an hour’s worth of work a week. INSA, representing 150 security
corporations, describes itself as a “catalyst for public-private
partnerships.”
“Certain Violations [of Human Rights] May Be Necessary”
In his master’s thesis, Brennan wrote that “absolute human rights do
not exist” — “with the probable exception of the freedom from torture.”
During his time at TAC, he left even that caveat behind,
defending
on television news the CIA’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques
(except for waterboarding) as well as the Agency’s rendition program.
Brennan appears to have been influential in moving the early Obama
administration to the right on security issues, and in protecting the
permanent intelligence establishment from legal accountability.
Interviewed
in early 2008 about advising Senator Obama’s presidential campaign, he
said that telecommunications companies should be granted immunity for
their past participation in illegal warrantless wiretapping and that
there should not be a “housecleaning” of intelligence. “Not just in
terms of people, but also programs. You don’t want to create upheaval,
because it will create a disruption in the system,” he said. “You don’t
want to whipsaw the [intelligence] community. You don’t want to presume
knowledge about how things fit together and why things are being done
the way they are being done.”
When President Obama first proposed Brennan for CIA director in 2008, liberal
anger
at his public support for CIA torture led to Brennan withdrawing his
name from consideration. Obama instead appointed him Assistant to the
President for homeland security and counterterrorism, a post which did
not require Senate confirmation and made him the Administration’s top
counterterrorism official. He
worked in a windowless room in the White House a few steps from the Situation Room, and met with Obama several times a day.
When the
NCTC provoked controversy
in 2011 with its database containing millions of records of U.S.
citizens — casino-employee lists, flight records, the names of Americans
hosting foreign-exchange students, and much more
—
Brennan seems to have been the one to decide to move forward with the
program. Homeland Security privacy and civil liberties officials had
raised concerns at the White House over new guidelines that allowed the
NCTC to “mine” the database for possible criminal behavior, even without
reason to suspect any wrongdoing by the Americans under surveillance.
“Mr. Brennan considered the arguments,” the Wall Street Journal
writes. “And within a few days, the attorney general, Eric Holder, had signed the new guidelines.”
As adviser to President Obama, Brennan often appeared at the
nexus of intelligence and public relations. He was the chief source of the shifting, contradictory panoply of details about
what actually happened
in the raid on Osama bin Laden. The raid occurred in the afterglow of
the royal wedding, and the press was all too ready to embrace his
manipulations,
as WhoWhatWhy previously reported.
In his years as counterterrorism czar, Brennan was the driving force
behind the CIA’s drone program, in which unmanned aircraft, operating
overseas but piloted remotely from the US, fire missiles at terrorist
targets in Yemen, Pakistan, and
elsewhere, often
hitting
civilians gathered in tribal councils, wedding parties, and other
non-combatant assemblies. Sometimes these instances of “collateral
damage” result from so-called “
signature strikes,”
in which a person whose name is unknown is targeted based entirely on
the “signature” of his behavior patterns — in other words, killer drones
sometimes target patterns, not people, but it is people (often the
wrong ones) who get killed. It
appears Brennan has been the last person to sign off on drone strikes before Obama gives the final go-ahead.
As the president’s top counterterrorism official, he took the
targeting decisions for drone strikes and moved them deep into the White
House, further shielding the process from public view.
At the same time he orchestrated a propaganda campaign about the purported care that went into compiling “
kill lists.”
Asked at the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in
June 2011 about targeted killings — a reference in this case to CIA
drone strikes — he
replied:
“In fact, I can say that the types of
operations that the US has been involved in, in the counterterrorism
realm, nearly for the past year, there hasn’t been a single collateral
death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the
capabilities we’ve been able to develop.”
This was an outright lie. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, in an analysis of that past year,
found
that 116 CIA drone strikes in Pakistan alone resulted in at least 45
civilian deaths, six children among them. Given the difficulty in
obtaining on-the-ground data, the Bureau says it is likely many more
civilians died in additional strikes there.
Brennan’s office and the White House refused to respond to the
Bureau’s findings. Further, the Obama administration categorizes any “
military-age male”
in the vicinity of a strike target as a combatant, thereby removing
these victims from the official civilian casualty figures. While the
carnage of the drone program serves as a recruiting tool for al-Qaeda
(in Yemen, with the Predators and Reapers buzzing overhead for weeks on
end, terrorists approach survivor families and offer a path for
revenge), much of mainstream media has been content to portray Brennan
as a civil-liberties-minded member of the administration pushing for
reform, in laudatory profiles with such titles as “
Hawk with a Heart.”
“Certain violations [of human rights] may be necessary in order to
insure against violence and instability,” Brennan wrote in his master’s
thesis. “Human rights, therefore, does [sic] not take precedence over
all other political goals.”
Killing the Messenger
Journalists who take seriously the mission of a watchdog press have
suffered retaliation at Brennan’s hands, according to an internal memo
of the private intelligence firm Stratfor. (WikiLeaks began releasing
internal Stratfor emails in February 2012; some were published for the
first time in conjunction with a
WhoWhatWhy article about General David Petraeus.)
A
September 2010 Stratfor email
with the subject line “Obama Leak Investigations (internal use only –
pls do not forward)” focuses on Brennan’s work against the press. This
memo, from Stratfor’s vice president for intelligence Fred Burton, went
to the firm’s “secure” list for senior analysts discussing continental
US matters. While Burton seems at times prone to hasty judgment and
exaggeration, he has close connections to the national security
powerbase from his long career in counterterrorism and intelligence.
The email reads in full:
Brennan is behind the witch hunts of
investigative journalists learning information from inside the beltway
sources. Note — There is specific tasker from the WH [White House] to go
after anyone printing materials negative to the Obama agenda (oh my.)
Even the FBI is shocked. The Wonder Boys must be in meltdown mode…”
The Obama administration has accelerated the George W. Bush-era
war on whistleblowers and journalists, a fulfillment of the young Brennan’s call in his thesis for restraining the press to achieve national security aims.
Where is This Heading?
Today’s CIA is an increasingly paramilitary spy agency. Some Brennan apologists have
said
he favors moving “the bulk” of the Agency’s drone program to the
Pentagon (which already has its own drone program), where it would
supposedly be under tighter rein. The ramifications of such an
inter-agency shuffle, even if it comes to pass, are nevertheless
difficult to ascertain.
Brennan hasn’t had time to put his signature on the CIA, but
reassurances about his devotion to the rule of law in the espionage
jungle are hardly justified, given his career to date. And his early
beliefs: as Brennan noted in his 1980 thesis, political stability is a
need that “can provide a convenient excuse for any authoritarian leader
in any country of the world.”
And Egypt? Near the conclusion of his thesis, Brennan made a bold
prediction: “Paradoxically, Egypt appears to be heading in a direction
that will eventually lead to an increase in human rights.”
Over thirty years later, Egypt has seen revolution and further
turmoil. During the Arab Spring, in January 2011, President Hosni
Mubarak
blacked out the Internet almost entirely, an unprecedented act of censorship. And his vice president Omar Suleiman, a man who
collaborated in torture with the CIA and whom the US once backed as a replacement for Mubarak,
blamed journalists for encouraging dissent when pro-government forces assaulted them and burned down an Al-Jazeera facility.
Today, Egypt is in an official
state of emergency, amid riots, factory closings, and strikes, including
a possible bakers’ strike
that could lead to bread riots like those in 1977. This reminds us that
the stability promised by Brennan as the payoff for human rights
violations just somehow never seems to come to fruition.
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