Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "John Brennan (CIA officer)" in English language version.
Obama considered Brennan for the top CIA job in 2008. But Brennan withdrew his name amid questions about his connection to enhanced interrogation techniques while serving in the spy agency during the George W. Bush administration.
One of the things that President Obama has been insistent on is that we're exceptionally precise and surgical in terms of addressing the terrorist threat. And by that I mean if there are terrorists within an area where there are women and children or others, we do not take such action that might put those innocent men, women, and children in danger. In fact I can say that the types of operations that the US has been involved in, in the counterterrorism realm, that nearly for the past year there hasn't been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities that we've been able to develop.
Obama considered Brennan for the top CIA job in 2008. But Brennan withdrew his name amid questions about his connection to enhanced interrogation techniques while serving in the spy agency during the George W. Bush administration.
Well, what I said was that over a period of time before my public remarks that we had no information about a single civilian, a noncombatant being killed. Unfortunately, in war, there are casualties, including among the civilian population.
Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.
In the past, Brennan has been willing to lie about those drone strikes to hide ugly realities. For example, he stated in the summer of 2011 that there had been zero collateral deaths from covert U.S. drone strikes in the previous year, an absurd claim that has been decisively debunked.
Claims by the Central Intelligence Agency's new director-designate that the US intelligence services received 'no information' about any civilians killed by US drones in the year prior to June 2011 do not appear to bear scrutiny ... Nine months later, George Stephanopoulos of ABC News challenged Brennan on his original claims. 'Do you stand by the statement you have made in the past that, as effective as they have been, [drones] have not killed a single civilian?' the interviewer asked. 'That seems hard to believe.' Brennan was robust, insisting that 'what I said was that over a period of time before my public remarks that we had no information about a single civilian, a noncombatant being killed.' ... A later report in the New York Times provided a possible explanation for Brennan's robustness. The paper revealed that Washington 'counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.' ... The Bureau has now raised its estimate of the number of civilians killed in the period Brennan claimed none had died to 76, including eight children and two women. The new figures are based in part on our own research and on studies by Associated Press and Stanford and New York universities.
To date, the Bureau has identified 45–56 civilian victims across 10 individual strikes – the most recent in mid-June 2011. The dead include six children.
As it typically does in the US National Security State, all of that deceit and radicalism is resulting not in recrimination or loss of credibility for Brennan, but in reward and promotion. At 1 pm EST today, Obama will announce that he has selected Brennan to replace Gen. David Petraeus as CIA chief: the same position for which, four short years ago, Brennan's pro-torture-and-rendition past rendered him unfit and unconfirmable.
Jack Goldsmith, former assistant attorney general in the George W Bush administration and now a professor at Harvard Law School, argues the past decade shows that the United States needs a new statutory framework governing how it conducts secret warfare. Perhaps that would be a positive step, but a new domestic statutory scheme would not make a civilian working for a civilian agency a lawful combatant entitled to immunity under the law of war for acts committed outside the United States.
{{cite magazine}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)As it typically does in the US National Security State, all of that deceit and radicalism is resulting not in recrimination or loss of credibility for Brennan, but in reward and promotion. At 1 pm EST today, Obama will announce that he has selected Brennan to replace Gen. David Petraeus as CIA chief: the same position for which, four short years ago, Brennan's pro-torture-and-rendition past rendered him unfit and unconfirmable.
{{cite magazine}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)Claims by the Central Intelligence Agency's new director-designate that the US intelligence services received 'no information' about any civilians killed by US drones in the year prior to June 2011 do not appear to bear scrutiny ... Nine months later, George Stephanopoulos of ABC News challenged Brennan on his original claims. 'Do you stand by the statement you have made in the past that, as effective as they have been, [drones] have not killed a single civilian?' the interviewer asked. 'That seems hard to believe.' Brennan was robust, insisting that 'what I said was that over a period of time before my public remarks that we had no information about a single civilian, a noncombatant being killed.' ... A later report in the New York Times provided a possible explanation for Brennan's robustness. The paper revealed that Washington 'counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.' ... The Bureau has now raised its estimate of the number of civilians killed in the period Brennan claimed none had died to 76, including eight children and two women. The new figures are based in part on our own research and on studies by Associated Press and Stanford and New York universities.
To date, the Bureau has identified 45–56 civilian victims across 10 individual strikes – the most recent in mid-June 2011. The dead include six children.
Jack Goldsmith, former assistant attorney general in the George W Bush administration and now a professor at Harvard Law School, argues the past decade shows that the United States needs a new statutory framework governing how it conducts secret warfare. Perhaps that would be a positive step, but a new domestic statutory scheme would not make a civilian working for a civilian agency a lawful combatant entitled to immunity under the law of war for acts committed outside the United States.