by Derrick Broze, Activist Post:
On Wednesday November 9th, the World Affairs Council of Houston held a public conversation with John Brennan, former director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. The conversation was essentially an hour of friendly dialogue between Brennan and Stephen B. Slick, a member of CIA’s clandestine service for 28 years and later as the Director for Intelligence Programs and Senior Director for Intelligence Programs and Reform for the National Security Council.
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According to their website,
the World Affairs Council of Greater Houston is a member of the World Affairs Councils of America, a national organization with chapters in more than 95 U.S. cities. The councils were first established in the U.S. at the end of World War I as a result of America’s increased role on the international stage. The need for U.S. citizens to be informed about international affairs became more apparent after World War II, and yet again after the Cold War.
Essentially, the WAC operates as a voice for the military-industrial complex and intelligence community. Interested parties pay yearly dues for access to events like the meeting with John Brennan so they can feel informed about the world. The WAC – Houston is known for bringing neoconservatives from the Bush administration to Houston for tea and softball questions of little merit. Also, over the summer WAC – Houston held a conversation with well-known fearmonger and advocate of untested injections, Dr. Peter Hotez.
I encourage more research into the World Affairs Council, their funding, and their events.
I attended the WAC event with the intention of asking Brennan for a short interview to drill him on a number of consequential decisions he was involved with. As is typical of the WAC events, audience members do not get to ask questions directly. Rather, attendees are instructed to write down questions on note cards and submit them to the staff so they can decide what to ask and what to ignore.
As you might imagine, it is very rare for difficult or controversial questions to be asked of the guest speakers. Because of this, I contemplated interrupting the event and loudly calling out John Brennan for his crimes. I opted against this tactic because the 250 people in attendance — including high school students — were largely, if not completely, in Brennan’s fan club. Instead, I waited until the event was over and walked right up to Brennan as he walked towards the elevators.
Confronting a War Criminal
As I walked up to the former CIA Director I asked, “How do you respond to the claims that your decisions under the Bush and Obama administrations led to unnecessary torture?” This was a direct reference to Brennan’s role under the Bush administration and his new role under the Obama administration. In a 2013 opinion piece published in the NY Times, Glenn Greenwald wrote:
President Obama has expended extraordinary efforts to protect from accountability all Bush-era officials responsible for torture, rendition and warrantless eavesdropping, programs that numerous human rights groups have insisted constitute war crimes and violations of U.S. criminal law.
The president’s nomination on Monday of John O. Brennan, a Bush-era C.I.A. official, to head the C.I.A. illustrates how complete this disturbing process now is. In late 2008, when Brennan was rumored to be Obama’s leading choice as C.I.A. director, a major controversy erupted because of Brennan’s overt support for Bush’s programs of rendition and torture.
Brennan’s pro-torture-and-rendition views were clear and amply documented. In 2007, Jane Mayer of The New Yorker described Brennan as a supporter of the “C.I.A.’s interrogation and detention program.”
In a Dec. 5, 2005, ‘NewsHour with Jim Lehrer’ appearance, Brennan admitted he was ‘intimately familiar now over the past decade with the cases of rendition” — the practice used by the Bush administration to abduct terrorism suspects and send them to other countries to be tortured — and praised rendition as “an absolutely vital tool.”
In fact, Brennan was not only responsible for approving the torture of suspected terrorists — many of whom have never been charged with a crime — but he also played a role in spying on the senators who were investigating the Obama administration’s torture and lied about it for several months.
Brennan did not appear interested in answering for his record on torture so I went to my next topic: his role in Obama’s drone program and kill list, known as the “disposition matrix.” I told Brennan,
You said ya’ll strive not to have any civilian deaths (under the drone program), but the documents leaked by Snowden show another story, show the disposition matrix was not as accurate as you represented it.
In 2012, Foreign Policy wrote of Brennan’s role in the drone program in an article titled The Seven Deadly Sins of John Brennan:
Whereas George W. Bush’s administration never discussed any aspects of its targeted-killing policies, Barack Obama’s administration has been marginally more forthcoming, beginning with its first official acknowledgment of the practice of targeted killings by drones in a speech this April by Brennan.
The speech referred to was a talk Brennan gave at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars titled “The Ethics and Efficacy of the President’s Counterterrorism Strategy.” This speech on “drone ethics” was the first public acknowledgement of the secret drone assassination program by the Obama administration. After the speech, CNN called Brennan Obama’s “Drone Warrior.” In 2013 documents proved Brennan had lied publicly when he claimed there were zero civilian deaths from drones.
