Update: The CIA officer in question has been promoted to the top position in the clandestine service as of Thursday, according to The New York Times.
John Brennan, the man Obama appointed to head the CIA, is reportedly on the verge of promoting an undercover agent to be director of the CIA’s clandestine service, despite the fact that she helped run the CIA’s illegal torture and detention program after 9/11 and “signed off on the 2005 decision to destroy videotapes of prisoners being subjected to treatment critics have called torture.”
“The woman, who remains undercover and cannot be named, was put in the top position on an acting basis when the previous chief retired last month,” reports The Washington Post. “The question of whether to give her the job permanently poses an early quandary for Brennan, who is already struggling to distance the agency from the decade-old controversies.”
As we know, Brennan himself played an integral part in the CIA’s lawless torture and rendition program during the Bush administration. Obama’s embrace of Brennan had independent-minded critics shouting “Aha!” and “I told you so,” noting the President’s clear contradiction of the sentiment he road into office on and his supposed repudiation of torture in his Executive Order banning it. Obama supporters, as a matter of course, refused to acknowledge any inconsistency.
Brennan’s seemingly impending appointment of an agent at the center of the torture program – and, disgracefully, the decision to obstruct justice by destroying evidence of it – is a perfect exemplification of the scandalous Obama-era effort to shield Bush-era government criminals from any accountability. This unnamed woman, like Brennan, is not only shielded from justice, she is up for promotion.
See former CIA officer Ray McGovern on Brennan’s “heavy baggage” and former FBI agent-turned whistleblower Coleen Rowley on Brennan’s tortured past (no pun intended).
