New CIA director John Brennan’s policies fuel terrorism

New CIA director John Brennan’s policies fuel terrorism

A political analyst says that if the objective is to decrease terrorism, then Brennan is exactly the wrong person to pick for that purpose because with all these targeted killings and assassinations, he is creating more terrorists.

The comments came after the US Senate confirmed John Brennan, the top White House adviser on the so-called war on terror and purported architect of Washington’s drone operations, as next director of the CIA. On Thursday, the Senate voted 63-34 in favor of Brennan, overcoming Republican Sen. Rand Paul’s filibuster of the nomination to demand an answer from the White House over its use of assassination drones.

Press TV has conducted an interview with Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst, to further discuss the issue. What follows is an approximate transcription of the interview.

Press TV: You know Mr. Rand Paul has obviously been spoken very highly of in many circles for this filibuster of sorts. How do you assess what really happened?

McGovern: Well I think he made a constitutional stand here because these targeted assassinations violate our constitution and when it came to targeting of Americans here in American soil he was due an answer from the Attorney General. He says he got some kind of answer but he voted against Brennan in any case.

It is very important to emphasize that 34 votes against the CIA nomination is unprecedented. A closer state come in the past was 31 votes against another very suspicious fellow named Robert Gates and usually these nominations sail through rather rapidly.

I think the Senators really kind of sensed that if the objective is to decrease terrorism, then Brennan is exactly the wrong person to pick for that purpose. And with all these targeted killings and assassinations, he is creating more terrorists and the figures are very persuasive.

He is an expert on Yemen, okay. Three years ago there was about two hundred, three hundred al-Qaeda in Yemen, now the number well over a thousand. Talking about Pakistan, he lied about the fact that there were no collateral deaths in Pakistan. The Pakistanis, a nation of a hundred and eighty million people are really kind of upset about this. There used to be about half and half in favor or disfavor of the United States. Now it is seventy five percent that hate the United States. That is big. The only good that comes out of that are for the arms manufactures who continue to profit from feeding these incessant wars.

There is one other concern that I have about Brennan. He is not really known for his truthfulness and that became very apparent actually in the hearing, his first nomination hearing on February 7. I was quite astounded, I was listening on my car radio and this is the sentence that astounded me. “And the regimes in Tehran and Pyongyang remain bent on pursuing nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missile delivery systems”. Hello, where did he get that?

That is what 16 US Intelligence Agencies have said with high confidence. They have said that Iran stopped working at nuclear weapon at the end of 2003 and have not resumed work on that. So what is Brennan doing?

This is mischievous. Brennan knows full well there are a lot of people in Congress, the people who had to confirm him who would very much like to bomb, bomb, bomb Iran as Senator McCain so famously song back during his campaign for president.

So this is very mischievous indeed. It is very, very puzzling as to why Brennan would say those things and if indeed he means to come into the CIA and change the assessment.