i do think it sort of eyeballs like john brennan is at the center: he is the fact that the torturers are still in charge. how in the name of god did he survive after it was revealed that the cia was hacking feinstein's committee to delete files etc? there has never been a clearer occasion on which someone should have been fired instantaneously, outright. if one really took the cia in that event to have been acting qua part of the executive, it is impeachable. and yet it faded in everyone's mind but feinstein's. she surely demanded brennan's resignation months ago and got nothing, so she's also pissed at obama, and may well have issued her report despite his attempts, at brennan's behest, to redact it in its entirety. but anyway, i don't think brennan could possibly have survived that if he actually served at the pleasure of the president, because a president is going to respond to the utterly justified outrage of a major figure in his own party. obviously, every day all day, you have to understand that john brennan has access to the last fifteen years of barack obama's communications.
brennan is part of the group that mobilized immediately, that was already poised, to respond to the report. it is all one voice in many bodies: cheney, alberto gonzales (who you bring in only when you're down to your very last lawyer), hayden, jack rizzo, porter goss, mike rogers, and a swarm of staffers; brennan and all of them are saying the very same sentences. the republicans on the committee and the cia itself released complementary replies to the report instantaneously. now, does all that strike you as odd, when brennan serves at the pleasure of a president whose first act was to end the program and who calls it torture plainly, even as all these people still deny or evade even that? it's almost like brennan is part of another government, one consisting of supposedly former intelligence and homeland security and anti-terrorism officials now lodged here and there, maybe working for homeland security or whatever as consultants or in state-in-waiting thingtanks, and also the republican intelligence establishment in congress. it might not be entirely clear whether that group or the white house actually controls the intelligence services of the united states. and info is power, baby.
