Category Archives: CIA

Book Review: The Company of Shadows

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by Steven Emerson:

Reviewed by IPT News
March 1, 2013

From The Company of Shadows by author Kevin Shipp offers a fascinating insider’s view of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from the perspective of someone who lived in the agency’s top echelons from the end of the Cold War to the War on Terror.

The book reads like a James Bond novel, only the characters and situations are real. It delves into the CIA’s internal politics and abuses of power that he contends has made America less free and less safe.

Shipp should know, having served in roles ranging from working as a security officer assigned to the protection detail of the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) and Deputy Director of Central Intelligence (DDCI) to being a counter-terrorism instructor for the agency’s Counterterrorism Center. He was a decorated CIA officer whose view of the agency shifted from one of idealism to one of sobriety about its real nature as his career progressed.

Shipp joined the CIA in 1985 and had a front-row seat as the Iran-Contra scandal emerged two years later. The author attributes the momentum behind the scandal to late CIA Director William Casey’s personal devotion to William Buckley, the CIA’s station chief in Beirut, Lebanon who had been kidnapped by the Islamic Jihad terrorist group and was tortured daily before being murdered in 1985.

Casey felt responsible for Buckley’s predicament and wanted to ensure that Buckley and the other hostages being held by terrorists in Lebanon were rescued, but the plan backfired.

Shipp describes the late CIA director as “one of the last real servants of democracy” who was willing to take personal risks. But Casey’s death marked a turning point for the agency, which soon found itself looking for its mission after the Cold War.

The arms-for-hostages episode served as a warning to Shipp that there was no negotiating with religious fundamentalists.

There is no one better than Shipp to bring the agency’s internal secret wars of the past 30 years into public, and the book gives the reader a first-hand view. He provides a glimpse into the cloak-and-dagger life of a CIA operator with an eye on the agency’s internal politics.

His view of the agency started to change after the start of the Clinton administration when the focus shifted from serving national security to serving political correctness. A move in this direction already had begun back in the Carter administration when CIA Director Stansfield Turner slashed the number of spies on the ground in favor of satellite and electronic surveillance.

Turner’s decision to eviscerate the CIA’s human intelligence capabilities touched off series of disastrous decisions that led the agency to heavily rely on unreliable defectors who fed it bad intelligence.

President Bill Clinton gave the agency’s decline an additional push, Shipp writes.

In addition to recruiting substandard new hires, it issued an order prohibiting CIA officers from having contact with foreign nationals engaged in human-rights abuses.

This contributed to intelligence failures leading up to the Iraq war and even the 9/11 attacks, Shipp writes.

By the time the 9/11 attacks took place, the CIA was “deaf, dumb and blind” about Islamist extremist groups and agents scrambled to gather intelligence from open-source materials, Shipp writes. CNN frequently had better sources about what was happening overseas than the CIA.

The same holds true about other Islamist terrorist groups.

Many of these groups such as Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Muslim Brotherhood have established a strong foothold in the United States working through front groups such as the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Muslim American Society (MAS) and Muslim Public Affairs Council, Shipp writes.

These groups have succeeded in getting the Obama administration to declare there is “no War on Terror” and adhere to the view that Islam has nothing to do with terrorism.

Read more at IPT

National Security Experts Warn: Reject Brennan

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Center For Security Policy:

Washington, D.C.: With the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence scheduled to vote tomorrow on John Brennan’s nomination to become the next Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, it has become clear that Senators simply do not have all the information necessary for an informed decision on so sensitive an appointment. In an effort to illuminate the nominee’s shortcomings that demand – but have yet to receive – close scrutiny, the Center for Security Policy convened avirtual press conference featuring video-taped comments by six of the country’s preeminent experts on, among other things, the threat of Islamism and Brennan’s blindness to it.

The video includes powerful statements by Steve Emerson, Executive Director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism; Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, President of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy;Chris Farrell, Vice President for Investigations and Research for Judicial Watch; Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin, USA Ret., former Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; Andrew C. McCarthy, former federal prosecutor and author of The Grand Jihad and Spring Fever; andStephen Coughlin, Senior Fellow at the Center for Security Policy and author of the forthcoming book, Catastrophic Failure.

The video, National Security Experts Warn: Reject Brennan, compliments the Center’s other efforts to educate the public, media and policymakers about the dangers of a possible Brennan tenure at the CIA, including a collection of Brennan-related resources and several investigative pieces.

Andrew McCarthy–who successfully prosecuted the Blind Sheikh who, twenty years ago yesterday, conspired to blow up the World Trade Center–said:

Making John Brennan the director of the Central Intelligence Agency is the most monumental mismatch of man and mission that I can imagine. The point of having our intelligence agencies is to make sure that we have a coherent, accurate idea of the threats that confront the United States. Unfortunately, Mr. Brennan’s career, and certainly the signature that he has put on the national security component of the Obama administration has been to blind the United States to the threats against us.

Steve Emerson, one of the country’s preeminent counter-terrorism experts added:

John Brennan, CIA director nominee, is uniquely unqualified to be the CIA director as evidenced by him being the architect of the outreach program to the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States as well as in the Middle East. In the course of the investigation conducted by the Investigative Project on Terrorism, we discovered that there were at least four hundred visits in the three years between 2009 and 2012 to the White House of radical Islamic groups, some of whom were unindicted co-conspirators in terrorism trials, but all of whom had been involved in establishing radical Islamic rhetoric, including support for Hamas, Hezbollah, denigrating the US, calling this a war against Islam by the United States.

Zuhdi Jasser, a leader of anti-Islamist Muslims in America, warned that:

…The reports put out from [John Brennan's] counter-terrorism office at the White House…did not recognize the [Islamist] ideology. They noted a “radical ideology,” but didn’t name what it was — even though the word ‘ideology’ was mentioned twenty times. Our American-Islamic Leadership Coalition, that includes over 20 different reform-based organizations that are anti-Islamist, were not consulted. And, you can see from the report, that it seems to be very similar to things put out by groups like the Muslim Public Affairs Council and the Islamic Society of North America. Unfortunately, John Brennan has had a very cozy relationship to these groups and has often used their talking points when speaking out about Islam, Islamism, jihad, and the threat…. In every position Brennan has been it, he has been more a facilitator of Islamist groups rather than a counterweight to them, in order to oppose them and confront them.

The Center today also released a letter signed by fifteen conservative leaders – many of whom have extensive experience with national security policymaking and practice – calling on congressional leaders to launch a bicameral select committee to investigate the Benghazigate scandal. John Brennan’s involvement in the run-up to the murderous attack on September 11, 2012, his conduct during that seven-hour engagement and his role in the subsequent cover-up must be addressed before he is allowed, as Rep. Trent Franks recently put it “anywhere near the CIA, let alone running it.”

 

You can view the transcript at Center For Security Policy

 

Brennan: Unfit to Be CIA Head

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330x198xM6moHahe9c7Z_jpg_pagespeed_ic_qACD3l0mhw By Clare Lopez:

Trentovision.tv set off a firestorm of commentary on its February 8, 2013 show when it broke the story about CIA Director nominee John Brennan having converted to Islam while he was the CIA station chief in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

John Guandolo, a former Marine Corps platoon commander and senior FBI expert on the Muslim Brotherhood who retired in 2008, appeared via Skype with radio show host Tom Trento and reported that Brennan had been converted to Islam in a process observed by more than one U.S. official at the Riyadh Embassy that ought to have raised counterintelligence questions—but apparently didn’t.

The important take away from this startling account is actually less about a conversion/recruitment, though, and more about how Saudi and Muslim Brotherhood conditioning about Islam may have shaped Brennan’s thinking and understanding about Islam in a way that made him the perfect (even if unwitting) agent of influence whose subsequent rise within U.S. national security ranks placed him in key positions from which to direct U.S. policy on Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Much more at Radical Islam

Clare Lopez is a senior fellow at RadicalIslam.org and a strategic policy and intelligence expert with a focus on the Middle East, national defense and counterterrorism. Lopez served for 20 years as an operations officer with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Guandolo: Brennan’s Terrorist Associations, Gross Ignorance, and Lack of Candor Make Him Unfit for Duty as CIA Director

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brennan 5by John Guandolo:

Amid the Administration’s rush to:  apologize for and disregard America’s founding principles; financially and militarily support America’s enemies like Hamas and other Muslim Brotherhood entities (read “Egypt”); embrace noxious regimes like Iran; handle the assassination of the U.S. Ambassador in Benghazi in Carteresque fashion; shrink America’s nuclear capabilities as well as the fighting forces of the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps; and host terrorists in the White House while simultaneously allowing known Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood operatives to serve inside DHS, it should be no surprise to readers that President Obama has nominated a John Brennan to be the next Director of Central Intelligence (DCI).  Mr. Brennan’s inability to discern friend from foe, his ignorance of our enemies, and his shadowy behavior make him unfit for government service in any national security capacity, specifically as Director of Central Intelligence.

As the senior advisor to the President of the United States for Counterterrorism, John Brennan has maintained close relationships with Islamic organizations in America which operate on behalf of terrorist organizations.  Senior Hamas operatives, such as Nihad Awad of the Hamas entity the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), and leaders of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood (See Fear the Muslim Brotherhood by Andrew C. McCarthy) have been given access to senior National Security staffs and provided input to U.S. counterterrorism strategies for the White House at the direction of John Brennan.

Mr. Brennan does not keep his support of the Muslim Brotherhood quiet.  He has spoken publicly on numerous occasions at Muslim Brotherhood events in his official government capacity.  As a matter of record, he has been a keynote speaker at a number of conferences and functions applauding the efforts of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and its leadership:

 

Evidence presented in a federal court in the largest terrorism financing and Hamas trial in U.S. history (US v HLFRD, Dallas 2008), and upheld by the appellate court, revealed the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) is a Muslim Brotherhood organization and a financial support entity for Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.  Despite this, Mr. Brennan continues to work with ISNA, gives its leaders access to senior government officials, and supports their appointment to key positions inside the U.S. Intelligence Community.   The current President of ISNA, Imam Mohamed Magid, sits on the Homeland Security Advisory Committee, which reports directly to Secretary Napolitano.  With the support of John Brennan, Imam Magid works with the National Security Council which has publicly applauded this Hamas supporter (Magid) in official government functions.  See The Muslim Brotherhood in America: Deputy National Security Advisor McDonough Meets with Hamas Support Entity.

This past summer, Members of Congress led by Congresswoman Bachmann sent letters to the senior Inspectors General in the United States (Department of Justice, Department of Defense, etc.) requesting they investigate the Muslim Brotherhood’s penetration of the United States government.  When asked about the Congressional request, Mr. Brennan laughed and acted as if the request was absurd despite the mountain of evidence of the Muslim Brotherhood’s penetration at the Pentagon, FBI, White House, DHS, CIA, and other key government agencies.  Mr. Brennan literally laughed.  This reveals his gross ignorance of the problem or that he intends to do nothing about it.  He is either ignorant beyond all reasonable belief or grossly (and I argue criminally) negligent.

Mr. Brennan also appears to be ignorant on basic matters concerning Al Qaeda and their global strategy aimed at bringing down the West.  Because Mr. Brennan believes Al Qaeda is our primary enemy, he should be well versed in these matters, especially since he worked as an analyst for the CIA, as the head of the Counter Terrorism Center, and as the President’s “Counterterrorism Czar.”

In official press conferences, Brennan has stumbled when asked WHY Al Qaeda does what it does.  According him, “Al Qaeda has perverted Islam, and has corrupted the concept of Islam so that they are able to attract these individuals” (e.g. “Underwear Bomber” Abdulmutallab).  See video below:

Al Qaeda’s own leaders and strategic documents definitively state Al Qaeda is waging a global war on the West because it is a requirement of Islamic Law (Shariah) to wage Jihad until the world has submitted to Islamic Law (Shariah) and the global Islamic state (Caliphate) is re-established.

Read the rest at Understanding The Threat

 

Shock claim: Obama picks Muslim for CIA chief

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JBby Drew Zahn:

One of the FBI’s former top experts on Islam has announced that President Obama’s pick to head the Central Intelligence Agency, John Brennan, converted to Islam years ago in Saudi Arabia.

As WND has reported, former FBI Islam expert John Guandolo has long warned that the federal government is being infiltrated by members of the radical Muslim Brotherhood. But Guandolo now warns that by appointing Brennan to CIA director, Obama has not only chosen a man “naïve” to these infiltrations, but also picked a candidate who is himself a Muslim.

“Mr. Brennan did convert to Islam when he served in an official capacity on the behalf of the United States in Saudi Arabia,” Guandolo told interviewer and radio host Tom Trento.

“That fact alone is not what is most disturbing,” Guandolo continued. “His conversion to Islam was the culmination of a counterintelligence operation against him to recruit him. The fact that foreign intelligence service operatives recruited Mr. Brennan when he was in a very sensitive and senior U.S. government position in a foreign country means that he either a traitor … [or] he has the inability to discern and understand how to walk in those kinds of environments, which makes him completely unfit to the be the director of Central Intelligence.”

Brennan did indeed serve as CIA station chief in Riyadh in the 1990s and today holds the official title of Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism. On Jan. 7, Obama nominated Brennan as the next director of the CIA, though he has yet to be confirmed.

“Are you kidding me?” Trento balked at Guandolo’s allegations. “The head of the CIA is a Muslim? For real? … Are you sure?”

“Yes I am,” Guandolo asserted. “The facts of the matter are confirmed by U.S. government officials who were also in Saudi Arabia at the time that John Brennan was serving there and have direct knowledge. These are men who work in very trusted positions, they were direct witnesses to his growing relationship with the individuals who worked for the Saudi government and others and they witnessed his conversion to Islam.”

Read more at WND

Drew Zahn is a former pastor who cut his editing teeth as a member of the award-winning staff of Leadership, Christianity Today’s professional journal for church leaders. He is the editor of seven books, including Movie-Based Illustrations for Preaching & Teaching, which sparked his ongoing love affair with film and his weekly WND column, “Popcorn and a (world)view.”

John Brennan Speaks on National Security at NYU

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The top 10 ObamaLeaks John Brennan needs to explain

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p010713ps-0304By :

When John Brennan appears for his confirmation hearing as the next CIA director tomorrow, he needs to explain to the Senate these ten major leaks of classified national security information from the Obama administration — including the strange timing of most of these disclosures.

  1. EXPOSURE OF US-ISRAELI ROLE IN “STUXNET” ATTACK ON IRAN. On June 1, 2012, the New York Times reported that “President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities.” The story exposed the top secret codename for the program (“Olympic Games”) and the involvement of Israel, a US ally. At one point in the story, the Times directly quotes one of the president’s briefers telling him, “We think there was a modification done by the Israelis,” adding, “Mr. Obama, according to officials in the room, asked a series of questions, fearful that the code could do damage outside the plant. The answers came back in hedged terms. Mr. Biden fumed, ‘It’s got to be the Israelis,’ he said. ‘They went too far’” (emphasis added). In other words, it was leaked by someone “in the room” when the president was briefed on this cover action program.
  2. EXPOSURE OF US-ISRAELI ROLE IN DEVELOPING “FLAME” VIRUS TO SPY ON IRAN NUCLEAR PROGRAM. In addition to the leak to the Times about the Stuxnet virus, a second leak to the Washington Post revealed on June 19, 2012 that the “United States and Israel jointly developed a sophisticated computer virus nicknamed Flame that collected intelligence in preparation for cyber-sabotage aimed at slowing Iran’s ability to develop a nuclear weapon, according to Western officials with knowledge of the effort.”
  3. EXPOSURE OF SAUDI DOUBLE AGENT IN YEMEN. On May 8, 2012, a leak to the Associated Press revealed the role played by a double agent, recruited in London by British intelligence, in breaking up a new underwear bomb plot in Yemen. As a result of this disclosure, the double agent had to be extracted. The leak is being investigated by the Justice Department.

Read more at American Enterprise Institute

Oppose Brennan for CIA Director

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imagesCAGPSB1RBy Andrew C. McCarthy:

To cut to the chase, a country that was serious about its national security would never put John Brennan in charge of its premier intelligence service.

Of course, it is by no means clear that the United States is any longer a serious country in this regard. Serious countries do not fund, arm and “partner with” hostile regimes. They do not recruit enemy sympathizers to fill key governmental policy positions. They do not erect barriers impeding their intelligence services from understanding an enemy’s threat doctrine – in conscious indifference to Sun Tzu’s maxim that defending oneself requires knowing one’s enemies. All of these malfeasances have become staples of Obama policy, under the guidance of Brennan, the president’s counterterrorism guru.

Still, the installation of a Beltway operator whose métier is misinformation as director of central intelligence would be an epic mismatch of man and mission. It would expand unseriousness to new frontiers of self-inflicted peril.

The reason is as elementary as it gets: The purpose of intelligence is to see what your enemy is trying to hide, to grasp how your enemy thinks, and how he cleverly camouflages what he thinks. That, to be certain, is the only security against stealthy foes who specialize in sabotage, in exploiting the liberties that make free societies as vulnerable as they are worth defending.

Mr. Brennan, to the contrary, is the incarnation of willful blindness. His tenure as Obama’s top national security advisor has been about helping our enemies throw sand in our eyes and thus enabling the sabotage.

As I detail in The Grand Jihad, which recounts the Muslim Brotherhood’s history, ideology, and self-proclaimed “civilization jihad” against the West, sabotage is the Brotherhood’s defining practice. Indeed, “sabotage” is the word the Brothers themselves use to describe their work. It appears in an internal memorandum, which elaborates that the organization sees its mission in the United States as “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within.” Besides that long-term goal, the Brotherhood’s network of American affiliates have pursued the more immediate aim of materially supporting Hamas, a formally designated terrorist organization to which the provision of material support is a felony under federal law.

None of that is new. It was not merely well known but had been proved in court by the Justice Department a year before Obama took office. I refer to the Justice Department’s 2008 Hamas financing prosecution, the Holy Land Foundation case. Yet, counterterrorism czar Brennan remains undeterred, a driving force of the Obama administration’s “Islamic outreach” – a campaign to give Islamist organizations influence over U.S. policy. That several of those organizations were proved in the HLF case to be members of the Muslim Brotherhood’s American network is clearly of no moment.

Read more at PJ Media

 

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Spooky pick for CIA

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A close relationship Brennan (seated at right) working with Obama after Hurricane Irene hit during a presidential vacation on Martha’s Vineyard.

A close relationship: Brennan (seated at right) working with Obama after Hurricane Irene hit during a presidential vacation on Martha’s Vineyard (MAI / Splash News)

By MICHAEL A. WALSH

The Senate — and the nation — should think long and hard before agreeing to President Obama’s choice of veteran spook John Brennan to head the Central Intelligence Agency.

As I’ll explain below, the move would finalize the militarization of the agency — but that’s only the biggest problem.

Brennan, 57, is a careerist who spent a quarter-century with the CIA and now serves as Obama’s top counter-terrorism adviser. In his agency days, he was an architect of “enhanced interrogation” techniques and overseas “rendition” prisons — history that put him under fire from left and right when his name was floated for CIA director in 2008, forcing him to withdraw.

A contradictory careerist, actually — since he’s long publicly proclaimed his opposition to waterboarding and other coercive methods of information-gathering.

The Arabic-speaking son of Irish immigrants, Brennan’s also an unabashed supporter of the killer-drone program, which he’s called “legal, ethical and wise.” Yet he’s also publicly soft on Islamic extremism, opposing use of the term “jihadists” and even calling jihad “a legitimate tenet of Islam.”

Throughout the intelligence community, he’s regarded as an empire-building, credit-grabbing apparatchik who’ll stop at nothing to get to the top of the greasy pole. For example, as head of the agency’s Terrorism Threat Intelligence Center in 2004, Brennan actively undercut his counterparts in the IC and at the Pentagon as he lobbied to become head of the new National Counter-Terrorism Center. (He only got to be acting director for a time.)

The hot-tempered Brennan also blew the existence of — and then tried to grab the credit for — a joint British-Saudi operation that disrupted a second underwear-bomber plot originating in Yemen last spring. By making it public, he risked exposing sources and methods in the ongoing fight against al Qaeda.

Civil libertarians should also be nervous. As the nation’s top counter-terrorism officer, Brennan oversaw last year’s decision (approved by Attorney General Eric Holder) — to allow the NCTC to access the government files of any US citizen, even without probable cause that they’re involved in terrorist activities.

That’s right — despite the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures, and the Federal Privacy Act of 1974, which was designed to prevent just such a thing — everything the feds know about you is now fair game for the spooks. (And they can keep it in their files for five years.)

Indeed, the ACLU has called for Brennan’s nomination to be put on hold; it also wants his role in enhanced interrogation and the drone program clarified.

On the right, Sen. Lindsey Graham has urged delay until the administration provides more details about what really happened in Benghazi last fall, when ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed in a terrorist attack that Brennan ought to have seen coming.

In short, despite Brennan’s on-paper qualifications for the job, it’s a nomination that ought to be stopped — and for reasons that go far beyond one man.

Read more at New York Post

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Noxious Nominations: The Four Horsemen of the American Foreign Policy Apocalypse

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imagesCATT3GCQBy Barry Rubin

Excerpt:

Brennan is no less than the father of the pro-Islamist policy. What Obama is saying is this: My policy of backing Islamists has worked so well, including in Egypt, that we need to do even more! All those analogies to 1930s appeasement are an understatement. Nobody in the British leadership said, “I have a great idea. Let’s help fascist regimes take power and then they’ll be our friends and become more moderate!” That’s the equivalent of what Brennan does.

********

Brennan’s only life accomplishment has been to propose backing radical Islamists. As a reward, he isn’t just being made head of intelligence for the Middle East but for the whole world! Has Brennan any proven administrative skill? Any knowledge of other parts of the world? No. All he has is a proximity to Obama and a very bad policy concept. What’s especially ironic here is that by now, the Islamist policy has clearly failed and a lot of people are having second thoughts.

With Brennan running the CIA, though, do you think there will be critical intelligence evaluations of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizballah, or even Hamas? Is the CIA going to warn U.S. leaders about the repression against women, Christians, and moderates? Will there be warnings that Islamists are taking over Syria or reports on Islamist involvement in killing Americans in Benghazi?  Can we have confidence about U.S. policy toward Iran?

To get some insight into his thinking, consider the incident in which a left-wing reporter, forgetting there were people listening, reminded Brennan that in an earlier private conversation he admitted favoring engagement not only with the Lebanese terrorist group Hizballah, but also the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. Ask yourself this question: when an American intelligence chief told Congress that the Muslim Brotherhood was a moderate, secular group, who approved that line of argument?

Kerry, of course, was the most energetic backer of sponsoring Syrian dictator Bashir al-Assad before the revolt began. Now he will be the most energetic backer of putting the Muslim Brotherhood into power in Syria. Here is a man who once generalized about American soldiers in Vietnam as being baby-killers and torturers (such things certainly happened but Kerry, made the blame collective, except for himself of course).

As for Hagel, suffice it to say that the embarrassing quotes and actions from him in the past — including his opposition to sanctions against Iran — fueled a response to his proposed nomination so strong that the administration had to back down for a while.

What would have happened if President Harry Truman turned over American defense, diplomacy, and intelligence in 1946 to those who said that Stalin wanted peace and that Communist rule in Central Europe was a good thing?

Obama has been president of the United States for four years. Yet in foreign policy, having some decent and competent people in high positions mitigated the damage. Well, the reins are now loosed; the muzzle is off.

I apologize for being so pessimistic, but look at the cast of characters. When it comes to Obama administration foreign policy’s damage on the world and on U.S. interests, one can only say, like the great singer Al Jolson, folks, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

To get a sense of his thinking, check out Brennan’s article, “The Conundrum of Iran: Strengthening Moderates without Acquiescing to Belligerence,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 618, Terrorism: What the Next President Will Face (Jul., 2008), pp. 168-179. Here’s the conclusion:

If the United States actually demonstrates that it will work to help advance rather than thwart Iranian interests, the course of Iranian politics as well as the future of U.S.-Iranian relations could be forever altered.

The Obama administration followed this advice during its first two years with the result being total failure. The theme of the 2008 article carries over to his view of the Muslim Brotherhood. If the United States shows it is friendly, helpful, and does not oppose their taking power, then revolutionary Islamists will become moderate.

For example, he also proposes a U.S. policy “to tolerate, and even to encourage, greater assimilation of Hezbollah into Lebanon’s political system….” This step, he suggests, will reduce “the influence of violent extremists in the organization.”

Of course, Hizballah does not need to stage terrorist attacks if it holds state power! Terrorism is only a tactic to seize control of countries. If you give revolutionaries their goal, then why do they need to continue using such a tactic? Yet putting them in power does not increase stability, improve the lives of people, or benefit U.S. interests. If al-Qaeda, for example, overthrew the Iraqi or Saudi government, you would see a sharp decline in terrorist attacks! If the Muslim Brotherhood rules Egypt, Tunisia, or Syria, it doesn’t need to send suicide bombers into the marketplaces.

The same, by the way, would apply to anywhere else in the world. If Communist rebels took power in Latin American or Asian countries, you wouldn’t find them hanging out in the jungles raiding isolated villages.

In Brennan’s terms, that means the problem would be solved. Instead, the correct response is parallel to Winston Churchill’s point in his 1946 Fulton, Missouri, speech: “I do not believe that Soviet Russia desires war. What they desire is the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines.”

This is what Brennan — and the Obama administration — fails to understand regarding this point. The danger is not terrorism but a dangerous revolutionary movement that becomes even more dangerous if it controls entire states, their resources, and their military forces.

Read it all at PJ Media

 

Did CIA pick sanitize Obama’s passport records?

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spyby Jerome R. Corsi

NEW YORK – John Brennan, the Obama counter-terrorism adviser nominated this week to head the CIA, played a controversial role in what many suspect was an effort to sanitize Obama’s passport records.

On March 21, 2008, amid Obama’s first presidential campaign, two unnamed contract employees for the State Department were fired and a third was disciplined for breaching the passport file of Democratic presidential candidate and then-Sen. Barack Obama.

Breaking the story, the Washington Times on March 20, 2008, noted that all three had used their authorized computer network access to look up and read Obama’s records within the State Department consular affairs section that “possesses and stores passport information.”

Contacted by the newspaper, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack attributed the violations to non-political motivations, stressing that the three individuals involved “did not appear to be seeking information on behalf of any political candidate or party.”

“As far as we can tell, in each of the three cases, it was imprudent curiosity,” McCormack told the Washington Times.

The spokesman did not disclose exactly how the State Department came to that conclusion.

By the next day, the story had changed.

The New York Times reported March 21, 2008, that the security breach had involved unauthorized searches of the passport records not just of Sen. Obama but also of then-presidential contenders Sens. John McCain and Hillary Clinton.

Again, the New York Times attributed the breaches to “garden-variety snooping by idle employees” that was “not politically motivated.”

Like the Washington Times, the New York Times gave no explanation to back up its assertion that the breaches were attributable to non-political malfeasance.

Still, the New York Times report indicated then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had spent Friday morning calling all three presidential candidates and that she had told Obama that she was sorry for the violation.

“I told him that I myself would be very disturbed if I learned that somebody had looked into my passport file,” Rice said.

The newspaper quoted Obama as saying he appreciated the apology but that he expected the passport situation “to be investigated diligently and openly.”

According to the New York Times report, Obama’s tone of concern was obvious.

“One of the things that the American people count on in their interactions with any level of government is that if they have to disclose personal information, that is going to stay personal and stay private,” Obama told reporters. “And when you have not just one, but a series of attempts to tap into people’s personal records, that’s a problem, not just for me, but for how our government is functioning.”

The New York Times noted that the files examined likely contained sensitive personal information, including Social Security numbers, addresses and dates of birth, as well as passport applications and other biographical information that would pertain to U.S. citizenship. Only at the end of the article did the New York Times note that State Department spokesman McCormack had emphasized the most egregious violation appeared to have been made against Obama.

Obama was the only one of the three presidential candidates involved who had his passport file breached on three separate occasions. The first occurred Jan. 9, 2008, followed by separate violations Feb. 21 and March 14, 2008. Moreover, all three of the offending employees had breached Obama’s files, while each of the passport files of McCain and Clinton had been breached only once.

The Brennan connection

The New York Times noted the two offending State Department contract employees who were fired had worked for Stanley Inc., a company based in Arlington, Va., while the reprimanded worker continued to be employed by the Analysis Corporation of McLean, Va.

The newspaper gave no background on either corporation, other than to note that Stanley Inc. did “computer work for the government.”

At that time, Stanley Inc. was a 3,500-person technology firm that had just won a $570-million contract to provide computer-related passport services to the State Department.

Analysis Corporation was headed by Brennan, a former CIA agent who was then serving as an adviser on intelligence and foreign policy to Sen. Obama’s presidential campaign.

Read more at WND