Right.
Intelligence Failure
Brennan joined the CIA four years after voting for Gus Hall, the Communist party candidate, in the 1976 presidential election. He is a notorious climber, and former colleagues say, a vindictive one.15 Assigned to the National Security Council in President Bill Clinton’s White House, Brennan latched on to George Tenet, who had worked on Clinton’s transition and then been made the NSC’s director of intelligence programs. In 1996, Clinton made Tenet deputy director of the CIA. By 1997, after Director John Deutsch had fallen out of favor with Clinton and other possible replacements faltered, Tenet was made director. Tenet’s long tenure is best remembered for the CIA’s failure to develop an effective strategy against al-Qaeda prior to 9/11, and for Tenet’s own unfortunate “slam dunk” endorsement of the intelligence that Iraq had amassed prodigious quantities of weapons of mass destruction.16
Brennan had proved himself fiercely loyal, so when Tenet was moved to Langley, he brought Brennan along as chief-of-staff. He eventually acceded to Brennan’s desire to be made the CIA’s station chief in Saudi Arabia—an unusual move because Brennan’s career had been spent in the intelligence analysis side of the agency’s house, not its operations directorate. Shortly after Brennan’s arrival in Riyadh in 1996, al-Qaeda bombed the Khobar Towers, killing nineteen American airmen. The lack of precautions against to such an attack, the agency assessed, was the result of profound management failures, with Brennan and his staff cited for “significant shortcomings in planning, intelligence, and basic security [that] left American forces in Saudi Arabia vulnerable.”17
Two years later, with al-Qaeda having publicly declared war against the United States, Brennan helped convince Tenet to abandon an effort to capture its leader, Osama bin Laden, in Afghanistan. Brennan preferred a Saudi gambit to negotiate with the Taliban, al-Qaeda’s hosts and chief abettors, for bin Laden’s expulsion. Predictably, the negotiations broke down and the CIA never got another chance. Brennan later told a congressional committee that he didn’t believe the CIA’s capture plan “was a worthwhile operation”—and, even if it was, that he shouldn’t be blamed since “I was not in the chain-of-command at the time.”18
In the greater scheme of things, Brennan was a bit player in what was a series of intelligence failures over several years. Under bin Laden’s continued leadership, al-Qaeda bombed two American embassies in eastern Africa in August 1998, murdering over 200 people; struck and nearly sank an American destroyer, the U.S.S. Cole, in October 2000, killing seventeen U.S. navy sailors; and carried out the suicide-hijacking airliner attacks of September 11, 2001, severely damaging the Pentagon, destroying the World Trade Center, and slaughtering nearly three thousand Americans.
Tenet left the CIA in 2004, battered by failures in Iraq: weapons of mass destruction were not located (at least not in the quantities the CIA had predicted); and the ouster of Saddam Hussein, coupled with the futile cultivation of democracy in a fundamentalist Islamic society hostile to the West, enmeshed the United States in vicious civil strife, empowering Iran and triggering the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS). In the interim, Brennan had left Riyadh in 1999 and rose to the post of deputy executive director, staunchly defending the CIA’s enhanced interrogations program—the controversial post-9/11 initiative that eventually prompted congressional investigations and the agency’s aforementioned hacking of Senate computers on Brennan’s watch. With his patron gone and the agency reeling, Brennan departed for a private intelligence gig.
Narrative: An Islam of Their Very Own
When Senator Barack Obama was campaigning for the presidency, Tenet recommended Brennan as an adviser. The two hit it off. Brennan had come to regard the “war on terror” with disdain. This disposition was appealing to the Democratic nominee, as was Brennan’s positioning himself as “a strong opponent of many of the policies of the Bush administration such as the preemptive war in Iraq and coercive interrogation techniques, to include waterboarding.” But Brennan’s association with Bush policies he now pilloried made it politically impossible in 2009 for Obama to make him CIA director (a position requiring Senate confirmation). The newly elected president settled on a key White House post for Brennan: top adviser for counterterrorism.19
Obama-style counterterrorism was all about the narrative. By the alchemy of progressive piety, jihadist attacks morphed into “man-caused disasters,” and war against international terrorist networks into “overseas contingency operations.” The Muslim Brotherhood? Abracadabra! It was now a “largely secular” organization, as James Clapper, Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, told a bewildered congressional panel.
Indeed, the very term counterterrorism was now de trop. The new strategy was “Countering Violent Extremism.” CVE instructed that no particular brand of “violent extremism” should be singled out for special attention—jihadist terror was to be regarded as no more a threat to America than other sources of violence. What other sources of violence? In the first weeks of Obama’s administration, his Department of Homeland Security provided the answer in “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment,” a handy federal primer for state and local police departments. Potential perils, DHS explained, stemmed from fanatics of all religions, as well as America’s purported legions of racists, and its sundry anti-abortion activists, Second Amendment proponents, immigration opponents, veterans returning from, er, overseas contingency operations, and groups “that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely.”20
In this fairy tale, violence was mainly catalyzed by political opposition to Barack Obama. The only thing it seemed verboten to trace terrorism to was radical Islam. The administration miniaturized the threat of “al-Qa’ida’s hateful ideology,” as if that ideology were not rooted in a literalist construction of Islamic scripture and centuries of fundamentalist scholarship; as if the challenge to the West were a fringe movement rather than a sharia-supremacist interpretation of Islam that is at least prevalent, if not dominant, in many countries, regions, and communities with significant Muslim populations. In sum, Obama’s strategy was the apotheosis of the Bipartisan Beltway’s longstanding, mulish concoction of an Islam of its very own—a belief system the only discernible tenets of which are peace and anti-terrorism. “Countering Violent Extremism” holds that this imaginary Islam is the only viable one. Sun Tzu’s ancient maxim “know thine enemy,” notwithstanding, there is no need to master sharia-supremacism, to which a disturbingly sizable percentage of the ummah adheres, because it is a “false Islam.” Drawing attention to it (did I mention that it only exists because we draw attention to it?) only makes it more alluring. The palpable mainstream status of sharia supremacism in the Middle East and elsewhere is simply not to be spoken of. After all, if we ignore it, it will go away, right?21
Brennan was the perfect CVE avatar. “In all my travels,” he gushed in a 2010 speech, “the city I have come to love most is al-Quds,” invoking the Arab name for Jerusalem—the one preferred by Hamas jihadists whose “one-state solution” is the destruction of Israel. Indeed, as Brennan well knows, an annual “al-Quds day,” started by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini after the 1979 Iranian revolution, is marked by anti-Israeli demonstrations by Muslim communities throughout the world, and the jihadist specialists in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Khomeinist Iran are still known as the al-Quds forces.22 But no need to worry: Brennan’s policy plan included cultivating Iran, coupled with an initiative to “try to build up the more moderate elements” of, yes, Hezbollah—Iran’s forward jihadist militia that menaces Israel from its perch in Lebanon and that, prior to al-Qaeda’s 9/11 mass-murder attack, had killed more Americans than any terrorist organization in the world. In a 2012 policy paper, Brennan sermonized that American officials must “cease public Iran-bashing” and be willing to “tolerate, and even … encourage, greater assimilatio
n of Hizballah into Lebanon’s political system, a process that is subject to Iranian influence.”23
Brennan opined that terrorist recidivism after release from Guantanamo Bay was “not that bad”—as if the 20 percent rate (a low-ball estimate) represented a modest uptick in petty theft rather than significant reinforcement for mass-murderers. Terrorists were just “a small fringe of fanatics who cloak themselves in religion, try to distort [the Islamic] faith,” he twaddled in a speech at New York University. As such, the terrorists and the Americans they targeted were two sides of an “ignorance” equation—Muslims “clearly ignorant of the most fundamental teachings of Islam,” and Americans who respond to terror attacks with “ignorant feelings” that could lead us “back into this fearful position that lashed out, not thinking through what was reasonable and appropriate.”24
Speaking of ignorance about the most fundamental teachings of Islam … there is John Brennan on jihad. “President Obama [does not] see this challenge as a fight against jihadists,” Brennan told the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in the first months of the new administration. “Describing terrorists in this way, using the legitimate term ‘jihad,’ which means to purify oneself or to wage a holy struggle for a moral goal, risks giving these murderers the religious legitimacy they desperately seek but in no way deserve.” Brennan returned to CSIS the following year to hammer the theme yet again: We must not “describe our enemy as ‘jihadists,’” he admonished, because “‘jihad’ is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam.”
Well, there is no gainsaying that last part: jihad is indeed a legitimate Islamic tenet. Contrary to Brennan’s happy-face rendering of it, though, it is doctrinally rooted in the imperative of forcible conquest—which is how Bernard Lewis, the late, great scholar of Islam explicated it, and how untold millions of fundamentalist Muslims understand it. Thomas Patrick Hughes’s venerable Dictionary of Islam, first published in 1885, defines jihad as “a religious war with those who are unbelievers in the mission of Muhammad” and “an incumbent religious duty, established in the Qur’an and in the traditions as a divine institution.”
To be sure, there is a second, related understanding of jihad as an internal striving. Brennan, however, deracinates this concept—as if it were a quest for betterment in some new-age, universal sense, rather than in a strictly Islamic context. This personal “holy struggle for a moral goal,” Brennan maintains, is completely benign: jihad merely “mean[s] to purify oneself or one’s community.” To the contrary, Islamic scholarship gives the concept of “purification” a distinctly Islamic construction: as the Dictionary of Islam puts it, a “striving” that is “enjoined specially for the purpose of advancing Islam and repelling evil from Muslims.” The idea is to become a more sharia-compliant Muslim or Islamic community. Thus the vapidity of Brennan’s insistence that his airbrushed jihad proves there is “nothing holy or legitimate or Islamic about murdering innocent men, women, and children.” Down here on planet earth, sharia has ideas very different from ours in the West about what who is “innocent” and what uses of force are “legitimate.”25
Nevertheless, this narrative burnished by Brennan—Islam as the solution, not the problem—became the plinth of Obama policy. Intelligence was manipulated as necessary to serve it. Brennan became the administration’s liaison to Islamist activist groups demanding that U.S. military, law-enforcement, and intelligence agencies ban lecturers and purge training materials that they deemed “biased, false and highly offensive.” Brennan promptly acceded to the Islamist agitation. An interagency task force would direct that government agencies “collect all training materials that contain cultural or religious content … related to Islam or Muslims,” and consult with unidentified “subject matter experts” (i.e., Islamist organizations) to “ensure that such materials comply with core American values” (i.e., comply with the Obama/Brennan mythology of Islam). This, Brennan assured, would be “the kind of approach that builds the partnerships that are necessary to counter violent extremism.”26
American intelligence agencies were thus schooled. It was left to the Department of Homeland Security, from its Islamist-apologist nerve center, the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, to develop government-agency training programs that “bring together best Countering Violent Extremism practices.” One result was a handy two-page teaching guide of CVE “Do’s and Don’ts” [sic].27 The “Don’ts” tell agents to avoid, among other things, “ventur[ing] too deep into the weeds of religious doctrine and history” or examining the “role of Islam in majority Muslim nations” (which, despite articles of CVE faith, is not so peaceful and pluralistic). The guidance further admonished American agents and analysts:
Don’t use training that equates radical thought, religious expression, freedom to protest, or other constitutionally protected activity, with criminal activity. One can have radical thoughts/ideas, including disliking the U.S. government, without being violent; for example, trainers who equate the desire for Sharia law with criminal activity violate basic tenets of the First Amendment.
One is constrained to observe that this interpretation of the First Amendment was patent rubbish. There is no free-speech protection against having one’s words examined for intelligence or investigative purposes. Free expression principles protect Americans against laws that subject speech to penalty or prosecution. That, by the way is a protection that the Obama administration sought to deny to speech unflattering to Islam through a patently unconstitutional U.N. resolution it jointly sponsored with several Islamic nations28—when the administration was not busy intimidating critics into silence through such tactics as the afore-described political prosecution of Nakoula Basseley Nakoula; or when Obama’s second secretary of state, John Kerry, was not busy suggesting there was a certain “legitimacy” to the Charlie Hebdo massacre of cartoonists and writers who had satirized the prophet Mohammed.29
In sum, the CVE narrative spun by Obama officials, with Brennan in the lead, expressly compelled our investigators to consider only violent or criminal conduct. They were told to ignore radical ideology, particularly if it had the patina of “religious expression.” They were to turn a deaf ear to anti-Americanism and the desire to impose sharia, which just happens to be the principal objective of all violent jihadists, and of the Obama administration’s oft-time consultants, the Muslim Brotherhood.
Selling the Iran Narrative: ‘They Literally Know Nothing’
As night follows day, the narrative dictated—and thus distorted—intelligence assessments. On Brennan’s watch, Obama-administration national-security officials deceptively downplayed weapons threats posed by Syria, Iran, and North Korea.30 The president’s counterterrorism adviser put his office and reputation in the service of Obama’s absurdly counterfactual re-election theme that al-Qaeda was on the brink of defeat—concealing troves of classified and open source intelligence proving that the network was both gaining territory and recruits and still killing Americans in Benghazi, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
As extensively documented by former Weekly Standard editor Stephen F. Hayes and the Long War Journal’s Thomas Joscelyn, among the most compelling evidence of al-Qaeda’s resiliency was the intelligence seized from Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, when U.S. forces killed him there on May 2, 2011. Yet Brennan labored mightily to keep the information from public view. The haul consisted of reams and reams of documents, including computer files, bin Laden’s personal journal, and more. Brennan and Obama’s other top intelligence officials selectively released just 571 of them; the Trump administration, by contrast, made 470,000 available in its first year.31
The political reasons for withholding and warping this intelligence are patent. The Obama narrative was that al-Qaeda had been “decimated.” Therefore, the administration tirelessly depicted bin Laden as isolated and unable to control his network. The haul from the compound, however, proved that he was functioning at the time of his death as the manager of a global we
b of active jihadist groups, grooming new leaders to replace those being picked off by American forces and drone attacks. Similarly, Obama officials wanted the United States to withdraw from Afghanistan—both to project success in “combatting violent extremism” and to re-channel spending towards the administration’s ambitious domestic priorities. Consequently, they concocted a storyline that there was growing distance between al-Qaeda and the Taliban—which fed the related fiction that the Taliban was a viable negotiating partner, rather than an incorrigibly anti-American enemy bent on conquest over the United States–backed government in Kabul. The bin Laden files put the lie to the fable: al-Qaeda and the Taliban remained close allies, fighting side by side against Americans.
Most of all, President Obama wanted his nuclear deal with Iran. For that, too, a narrative was essential to lull Americans into the illusion that the mullahs of Tehran—the regime whose proud motto is “Death to America!”—were moderating. A realistic depiction of al-Qaeda would explode that story. The truth is that jihadists traditionally put aside the internecine Sunni-versus-Shia conflict when confronting the Great Satan. Sunni al-Qaeda became a transcontinental jihadist powerhouse because it was nurtured, abetted, and harbored at key junctures by Shiite Iran and Hezbollah.32 The bin Laden files showed that this alliance was not just a thing of the past; the Iranian regime remained a facilitator of bin Laden’s network, and both sides persevered in their lethal labors against the United States. To sustain the Obama narrative, then, the files had to be suppressed. “Brennan not only fought the public release of these documents,” Hayes notes. “[A]s CIA director he blocked other elements of the U.S. intelligence community from access to them.”33
The Iran deal—formally, the “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action,” an unsigned executive agreement, not a treaty—was the Obama administration’s most arrogant enterprise in narrative retail. The invaluable journalist Lee Smith has closely studied the interplay between the White House, the intelligence community, and the press. President Obama and his aides have been bracingly open regarding their contempt for what they called their media “echo chamber.”34
Ball of Collusion Page 10
