People in the news

John O. Brennan

Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism (since May 2009)

Why He Matters

Brennan boasts a 25-year intelligence career and an expertise in counterterrorism, skills that should aid President Barack Obama as deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism. But his presence in the White House is also troubling to some who question his involvement in Bush-era interrogation tactics.

A fluent Arabic speaker, Brennan is known for being smart and tough-as-nails. According to George W. Bush CIA director George J. Tenet, Brennan once confronted a top Iranian spy in the streets of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Read more

Background

At a Glance

Career History: Analysis Corp. (2005 to 2008); National Counter-Terrorism Center, Chair (2004 to 2005); CIA deputy executive director (2001 to 2003)
Birthday: Sept. 22, 1955
Hometown: New Jersey

Alma Mater: Fordham University, B.A. (political science), 1977; University of Texas at Austin, M.A. (government), 1980
Spouse: Katy Pokluda
Web site

Path to Power

New Jersey native Brennan graduated from Fordham University in 1977 after a year of intensive Arabic and Middle Eastern studies in Cairo. He earned his M.A. from the University of Texas at Austin before joining the CIA as an intelligence director in 1980.

Brennan held a series of positions at the agency in America and abroad; he worked in Saudi Arabia and in Washington on Near Eastern and South Asian analyses. In the 1990s, he led counterterrorism efforts for a variety of programs and worked closely with Tenet, who appointed him as his chief of staff in 1999.

Read more

Brennan was named CIA deputy executive director in March 2001 and served in that post until 2003. In 2004, he accepted a job at the National Counterterrorism Center, where he revamped the government's monitoring of terrorist activity by incorporating information from across agencies. He also increased the number of analysts and compiled one of the most comprehensive reports on terrorism across the world. "We want to make sure that we are looking at it [terrorism] openly and as exhaustively as possible," Brennan said in 2004. He also created the terrorist watch list, which contains names and data on thousands of suspected terrorists and is accessible to law-enforcement officials.

In 2005, Brennan left government for Analysis Corp., a Fairfax company that provides support to the government's counterterrorism efforts.

He returned to politics in 2008 as a senior adviser to Obama's presidential campaign. He was the top contender for the CIA director before he withdrew his name in November 2008 amid concerns that Brennan had condoned the CIA's harsh interrogation techniques of high-value terrorist detainees.

Obama Administration

In January 2009, Obama appointed Brennan deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism.

Brennan's first major test came in December 2009, when an Algerian tried to blow up an airplane in Detroit. The unsuccessful attacker was quickly arrested and questioned by the FBI. This was not enough for right-wing critics, who charged that terrorists should be treated as prisoners of war and denied access to a lawyer and a civilian trial.

In a pointed op-ed, Brennan argued that these criticisms were not only inaccurate, but politically motivated. "Cries to try terrorists only in military courts lack foundation," he wrote. "There have been three convictions of terrorists in the military tribunal system since 9/11, and hundreds in the criminal justice system - including high-profile terrorists such as Reid and 9/11 plotter Zacarius Moussaoui."

Brennan's comments ignited a partisan flame war. Sen. Christopher S. Bond (R-Mo.) summed up Republican sentiment when he said "the national security team has become a bench of political spokespeople." He called on Brennan to resign.

The Issues

Brennan's number-one priority will be protecting the U.S. from terrorist attacks. He sees the "war on terror" not as a battle, but rather a global campaign to stamp out terrorism.

In an August 2009 speech before the Center for Straegic and International Studies, Brennan outlined the ways in which Obama's war on terror is different than George W. Bush's, pointing specifically to diplomatic efforts, the decision to close Guantanamo Bay prison, and attempts to mend fences with important U.S. allies. He said Obama was actively confronting al-Qaeda in what amounts to the group's safe haven in Pakistan.

Read more

"Tactics such as waterboarding were not in keeping with our values as Americans," Brennan said, "and these practices have been rightly terminated and should not, and will not, happen again," he continued, describing them as a "recruitment bonanza for terrorists."

Brennan also sought to portray Obama as a decisive commander-in-chief who was unafraid to aggressively confront al-Qaeda, saying that he approved a "number of actions and initiatives against al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups" since becoming president.

Though he didn't name Bush, Brennan said that his new boss "rejects an absolutist approach or the imposition of a rigid ideology on our problems. Like the world itself, [Obama's] views are nuanced, not simplistic; practical, not ideological."

Killing bin Laden

Under Brennan's watch at the National Security Council, the world's most-wanted terrorist, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin-Laden was killed by U.S. special forces after years of painstaking intelligence work. Brennan was one of the administration's most visible spokespeople in the aftermath of the risky operation, giving details of its undertaking.

On May 1, 2011, Obama ordered a risky special-operations raid on a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan that U.S. intelligence officials had been monitoring for months. Inside the compound, they found and killed bin-Laden, the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the target of a massive and frustrating 10-year manhunt.

Brennan said that Obama made "one of the gutsiest calls" of his presidency when he decided to move on the heavily-fortified compound, and described the scene where the president's top advisers monitored the action in real-time from the White House Situaton Room where "the minutes passed like days."

bin Laden's body was removed from the compound, idenfitied positively through DNA evidence, and buried after administering Islamic rites and rituals, at sea.

"I think we can all agree this is a good day for America. Our country has kept its commitment to see that justice is done. The world is safer. It is a better place because of the death of Osama bin Laden," Obama said.

Torture

Brennan was a top aide to former CIA head Tenet after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11; since then, it has been revealed that the CIA used harsh interrogation methods against terrorist detainees, including waterboarding, sparking a controversial political debate over the meaning of torture. But Brennan has since sharply distanced himself from the CIA program.

In August 2009, President Obama handed Brennan ultimate power over the conduct of his war on terror when he named him the head of a new task force that would be charged with overseeing the Justice Department's high-value detainee interrogation program.

In an August 2009 interview with ABC's "Political Punch Podcast," Brennan answered critics who have attacked him for his role at the CIA while such tactics were employed.

"I personally was always opposed to waterboarding and certain types of techniques, and I think there were people who supported me in that and were able to acknowledge that I was a critic of that when I was in the agency," Brennan said. "What I want to do is make sure that the United States really projects an image, and its actions convey its strong commitment to individual rights and dignity and waterboarding was not in keeping with that."

Speaking about his CIA tenure, Brennan told ABC: "I was involved in a lot of things supporting our national security. I felt good about them, and I wanted to maintain my involvement in these national security initiatives and programs so I don't have any regrets about what I did while I was in the Agency."

He added: "I'm frequently surprised at what I see I am reported to have been involved in or to have said because there's quite frankly a lot of misrepresentations out there in the press."

But Brennan has previously defended the CIA's tactics. In a 2005 interview with Jim Lehrer, Brennan called extraordinary rendition"an absolutely vital tool." Critics of the practice, which involves arresting detainees in one country and transporting them to another (often without any public notice of the arrest), charge that it is used to move suspects to countries that are willing to use torture. On CBS in November 2007, Brennan said that enhanced interrogation techniques have generated "a lot of information that the agency has in fact used against the real hard-core terrorists."

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Brennan changed that stance, saying repeatedly that the Obama administration wouldn't condone torture. He also called himself a "strong opponent" of the CIA's techniques in 2008, and spoke out against waterboarding.

However, these assurances weren't enough to assuage bloggers and some human-rights advocates, who called Brennan's CIA director candidacy dangerous. "Appointing John Brennan to a position of high authority would be to affirm and embrace, not repudiate, the darkest aspects of the last eight years," wrote Glenn Greenwald, a liberal lawyer and blogger for Salon.com.

When he withdrew his name from consideration for CIA head, Brennan cited these criticisms as the reason, saying he didn't want to distract from the work of the transition team.

Wiretapping

Brennan, like many intelligence community members, is a staunch supporter of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that allows the U.S. to collect information through wiretapping and other methods.

National Public Radio reported that Brennan convinced then-Sen. Obama to support reauthorizing the FISA bill in July 2008, with some new restrictions, arguing that the program is "essential to the fight against terrorism." Brennan supported granting telecommunications companies immunity from prosecution for providing information to the government after 9/11 because they were "told to do so by the appropriate authorities that were operating in a legal context."

Brennan has suggested that a team of executive, legislative and judicial representatives work together to oversee the implementation of FISA and review the process in order to ensure that it is being implemented appropriately.

Civil Liberties

Brennan has argued that the government should have the right to view citizens' records and eavesdrop on their communications "if there is probable cause, reasonable suspicion, about the involvement of a U.S. person in something."

He has also said that the government should be able to utilize information gathered by private companies (like car rental records or purchases from web sites) in extreme circumstances.

Iran

In a July 2008 paper, Brennan called on the U.S. to soften its rhetoric towards Iran without relenting on its demands for Iran to cut ties to terrorists. He also called on American officials to reach out to the country and establish a direct dialogue.

Brennan has advised the U.S. to offer "meaningful carrots, as well as sticks" in its negotiations with Iran. He contends that U.S. officials could afford to relax their stance on certain issues, such as loosening sanctions on the sale of spare airline parts and offering to help negotiate key issues like Israeli-Palestinian relationships.

The Network

Right now, Brennan is most famous (or some say infamous) for his ties to George J. Tenet, former CIA director under President George W. Bush.

Brennan, who was a top adviser to President Barack Obama during the 2008 campaign, is close to Anthony Lake, a national security adviser to President Bill Clinton who ran the Obama campaign's foreign policy effort.

Read more

Additional Resources