Dual loyalties stretch CIA chief

The gruff, tough-talking 25-year CIA veteran is also President Obama’s top national security official, and the two loyalties have stretched him thin this week.

Operating most days behind the scenes guiding covert operations or offering daily advice to the president on pressing intelligence concerns in the privacy of the Oval Office, Thursday afternoon Brennan was thrust into the awkward position of publicly responding to an exhaustive Senate report on the extreme and once-secret interrogation techniques the CIA used against terrorism suspects in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Holding a rare press conference at the agency’s headquarters, Brennan vacillated between defending his colleagues at the agency against charges of extreme forms of interrogation and supporting Obama’s ban on enhanced interrogation techniques and his belief that they undermined America’s standing in the world.

At one point, when responding to a reporter, Brennan made an off-the-cuff remark revealing just how irritated and uncomfortable he was with the Senate report’s public airing of the CIA’s dirty laundry. For that brief, unscripted moment, he didn’t seem to care if his clear frustration flew in the face of Obama’s pledge to run the most transparent administration in history.

“I think there’s more than enough transparency that has happened over the last few days — I think it’s over the top,” he grumbled before responding more directly.

After the brief moment of candor, Brennan quickly got back in line, acknowledging that the agency made mistakes in carrying out a program of extreme interrogation techniques in the wake of the 2001 attacks but denying that he or his colleagues systemically misled the public or Congress about the program’s effectiveness.

“In some instances, we failed to live up to the standards that we set for ourselves,” he said at a press conference at CIA headquarters Thursday afternoon.

Brennan held fast to the notion that CIA interrogations produced valuable intelligence but he said the agency has “not concluded that it was the use of [enhanced interrogation techniques] that allowed us to obtain useful information.”

He then repeated a point that White House officials previously made this week — that he believed it is “unknowable” whether the information could have been obtained through other means.

Some CIA officials deviated from operational guidelines and violated the agency’s interrogation limits, he said.

These extreme techniques “were abhorrent and rightly should be repudiated by all.”

But he also noted that it is “vitally important” to recognize that the vast majority of officers carried out their roles and followed the guidelines faithfully.

“They did what they were asked to do in the service of our nation,” he said.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee and led the nearly seven-year battle with the CIA over access to information about the extreme interrogation practices, was pleasantly surprised by many of Brennan’s points.

“CIA Director Brennan’s comments were not what I expected,” Feinstein said in a statement. “They showed that CIA leadership is prepared to prevent this from every happening again, which is all-important.”

Feinstein said it was important that Brennan acknowledged that the CIA was not prepared to effectively manage its enhanced interrogation program when it started and that many mistakes were made as it was implemented.

Most importantly, she said she was gratified that Brennan did not claim that the extreme methods produced actionable intelligence that helped make Americans safer that could not and was not obtained through other means.

“I disagree that it is ‘unknowable’ whether information needed to stop terrorist attacks could have been obtained from other sources,” she said. “The report shows that such information in fact was obtained through other means, both traditional CIA human intelligence and from other agencies.”

Brennan had served as deputy CIA director in the period after 9/11 when the extreme interrogations took place, and his perceived support for waterboarding forced him to withdraw his name for the director position during Obama’s first term.

Instead of running the CIA, in those early years of the Obama presidency, he served as the top White House counterterrorism adviser and met with Obama daily, developing a close relationship with both the president and Denis McDonough, a top official on the National Security Council who would later become Obama’s chief of staff.

McDonough and Brennan became so close during the process, knowledgeable sources say some White House staff refer to the pair as “blood brothers” who are in complete agreement on most national security matters, from closing the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay to relying on drone strikes to kill terrorism suspects instead of trying to capture more suspects for questioning that could end refilling the island prison.

Faced with fresh calls for Brennan to resign this week after the release of the Senate report, the White House repeatedly reaffirmed Obama’s close relationship with and trust in him.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest called him a dedicated public servant, a “patriot” and a “trusted adviser” who retains the president’s full confidence.

But the outpouring of White House support for Brennan prompted questions from human rights activists put off by what they argued was Brennan’s deep resistance to Senate oversight.

“There’s no question that the president has full faith in John Brennan,” said Raha Wala, senior counsel at Human Rights First. “The open question is why Brennan has taken such an antagonistic approach to the oversight committee and why the White House has permitted that to happen.”

The CIA accused the Senate staff of improperly removing a document from an agency facility they had access to and even filed charges against the aides with the Justice Department that were later dropped. A CIA inspector general later found that agency officials spied on the Senate staffers’ computers, which Brennan at first dismissed as far-fetched but was later forced to acknowledge and apologize to Feinstein.

“It’s strange that White House has not been stronger in saying that’s unacceptable,” Wala said. “That’s troubling.”

Feinstein and civil right activists also insist that the CIA systematically misled the public and Congress about the enhanced interrogation program and how effective it was, a point Brennan denies.

In releasing the report Monday, Feinstein recalled CIA briefings to the Intelligence Committee back in 2006 and 2007 on the enhanced interrogation techniques that downplayed the methods and “did not accurately reflect reality.”

Brennan never commented on that point directly. Instead, he spent most of his remarks Thursday defending the agency where he spent the bulk of his national security career.

“Whatever your view on enhanced interrogation techniques,” he said, “this agency did a lot of things right during this difficult time to keep our country and nation secure.”

But the highly unusual press conference also gave Brennan a chance to correct some misperceptions about him and the CIA.

Responding to a final question, he used his newfound soapbox to publicly agree with Obama’s decision to prohibit the use of extreme interrogation practices because he said they produce a lot of bad leads for agency officials to sort through.

“I tend to believe that the use of coercive methods have a strong prospect for resulting in false information,” he said. “Because [suspects] may say something to have those techniques stopped.”

“The agency has said those individuals subjected to those techniques provided useful information and false information,” he added. “[Gathering useful intelligence] is made more challenging if you get more false information.”