Did the CIA Chief Just Dare Obama to Fire Him?
So, will Obama have the guts to cut Brennan loose and rein in the spies or will he be too afraid of becoming a whistleblower?
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/03/11/did-the-cia-chief-just-dare-obama-to-fire-him.html
But the CIA chief also left open the prospect that he may have been wrong. “If I did something wrong,” Brennan said. “I will go to the president and I will explain to him what I did and what the findings were. And he is the one who can ask me to stay or to go.”
Throughout Obama’s presidency, Brennan is a bridge between the intelligence community and the White House. While he was never part of the president’s inner circle during the 2008 campaign, Obama began receiving briefings from Brennan as he prepared for the presidency after the 2008 election. He liked Brennan so much that he initially wanted to make him CIA director in 2009, but that nomination was scuttled after progressives in his own party objected that Brennan was too close to the program to harshly interrogate suspected terrorists in “black site” secret prisons all over the world.
That black site program is once again at the center of controversy for the CIA. But this time, Brennan is the agency’s director and it’s the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that is trying to declassify its own report that is expected to show the rendition, detention and interrogation practices during the last administration were far more brutal than the CIA has previously acknowledged. The documents the CIA said the Senate was not supposed to receive comprised an internal review by the CIA, according to Feinstein, and its conclusions bolster her committee’s own harsh assessment of the agency’s black site program.
If the CIA and the broader intelligence community come to feel the same way about Obama, the White House could find itself as under siege as Bush was in his second term. Then Obama would not only have to face opposition to his foreign policy from Republicans in Congress, but also the bureaucracy of spies that know many of his darkest secrets.
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