Sartre Batar: John O Brennan, CIA Drone Director!

Well, Barak Obama got his wish on the second try. With the confirmation of John Owen Brennan by the Senate, the CIA has a new director from their own ranks. Brennan's 25 years with the CIA, included work as a Near East and South Asia analyst, as station chief in Saudi Arabia, and as director of the National Counter terrorism Center. He proudly attests, "I am neither Republican nor Democrat. I've worked for the past five administrations." Imagine a non partisan spook as D/CIA. If this development is intended to restore confidence in the agency, just what kind of organization will emerge from a careerist covert agent at the helm? The role of a spy network is to obtain intelligence, and analyze the significance of information on advocacies bent on causing harm to our national security. Notwithstanding its long history, the CIA has departed from the art of spying, and often substituted the belligerent waging of combat outside the international general rules of war. The aftermaths of condoning a sub rosa intervention, in place of a declared military action, has transformed and prevented the meaning and legitimacy of a valid national security function. The net result of sanctioning operations outside the command of the military branches, has allowed the CIA to evolve into a free lance warfare entity, that often betrays the constitutional republic. Loyalty to the "Agency" often supersedes a pledge of allegiance to the nation. Within this context, the Brennan appointment signals a dangerous escalation of black op missions, using mercenary contractors, which conceal political fallout, and provide the cover of plausible deniability. The use of CIA drones to assassinate expected terrorists with impunity, is a major technological departure from intelligence gathering. The indiscriminate elimination of suspected targets with drone bombing, that knowingly causes collateral damage, is a war crime. The institutional operatives of the agency discard the fact, that America is less secure from the inevitable blow-back, that such killing produces. The recent Drone Strikes Protest provides some of the real inconvenient truths about the reign of terror from Hellfire missiles. Brennan has continuously denied that drones cause collateral damage, claiming in a July 2011 speech, that not a single collateral death had taken place as a result of drone strikes in Pakistan, a view he continued to uphold during his Senate hearings.