Why Hasn't Obama Fired John Brennan Yet?

We've been going through Michael Gurnow's book, The Edward Snowden Affair and finding some pretty awful facts about domestic spying. Basically, Cheney put a system in place they allowed for no privacy from government snooping for anyone for any reason at any time. Neither Bush nor Obama was completely comfortable with it-- but comfortable enough to leave it in place.

Microsoft, Yahoo and Google, for example, accounted for 98% of PRISM data intake. They and all the commercial internet firms were facilitating the government to spy-- unconstitutionally-- on their own customers. And then they lied about it.

Speaking on behalf of Apple, Steve Dowling announced, "We have never heard of PRISM" while the chief security officer for Facebook, Joe Sullivan, declared, "We do not provide any government organization with direct access to Facebook servers," despite the PRISM slide which includes the phrase, "Collection directly from the servers of."

A couple weeks ago, Conor Friedersdorf, writing for The Atlantic asked an uncomfortable question: Does John Brennan Know Too Much for Obama to Fire Him?. Brennan's broken a lot of law and lied his ass off, as you can see in the BraveNewFilms clip up top. And he's pissed off a lot of senators. But Obama says, he still has confidence in his CIA chief. The two of them were certainly in cahoots in regard to drone strikes of dubious legality.

When John Brennan assured the country that the CIA hadn't improperly monitored the Senate team that compiled a report on Bush-era torture, he fed us false information. That much is clear from Thursday's news that "the C.I.A. secretly monitored a congressional committee charged with supervising its activities." Either the CIA director was lying or he was unaware of grave missteps at the agency he leads. There are already calls for his resignation or firing from Senator Mark Udall, Trevor Timm, Dan Froomkin, and Andrew Sullivan, plus a New York Times editorial airing his ouster as a possibility.

President Obama could surprise the country by axing his former counterterrorism adviser, explaining that under Brennan's management, employees broke laws and undermined the separation of powers core to our democracy. Obama may well make a good-faith effort to act in the national interest. But it's impossible to believe that he won't be aware of the following: No U.S. official knows more than Brennan about Obama's many drone killings. Some of the killings were solidly grounded in international law. And others may have violated the Fifth Amendment, international law, or the laws of war.

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. What if he grew more forthright, either in public statements or by anonymously leaking information?

…I am not suggesting that Brennan is blackmailing Obama, or even that he would necessarily retaliate if fired. Still, if Obama is like most people in positions of power, he fires no subordinate without first asking himself, "Could this person damage me?" If Obama is a normal person, rather than an unusually principled person, the answer factors into his decision. Look at what Brennan said in March, immediately after denying that the CIA spied on the Senate Intelligence Committee, when Andrea Mitchell asked if he'd resign his post if that turned out to be wrong: 

... if I did something wrong, I will go to the president, and I will explain to him exactly what I did, and what the findings were. And he is the one who can ask me to stay or to go. 

He's a smart man.

All this may be irrelevant to his continued tenure. Perhaps Obama has always believed and continues to believe that Brennan is doing a heckuva job. But just as secret torture acted as a cancer on the U.S. government, encompassing acts so barbaric and criminal that, even recently, the CIA spied on a Senate subcommittee investigating the subject, America's semi-secret policy of semi-targeted killing rendered everyone involved complicit in activities sufficiently dubious that all desire their secrecy. Would you fire a guy who knows as much about your most morally fraught acts as Brennan knows about who Obama has killed in secret? Yeah, me neither. This isn't the biggest cost of presidents who hide arguably illegal actions by declaring them state secrets. But it is certainly one of the costs.

There's inevitably a need to review the job performance of people party to these secrets. They typically keep their jobs. So George W. Bush left us a CIA staffed partly with people willing to torture, and Obama will likely leave us with a CIA that includes torturers, people willing to kill American citizens in secret without due process, and people willing to spy on their Senate overseers. The Senate intelligence committee was established precisely to stop this sort of thing from playing out, but it is failing in its duties, as yesterday's crimes spawn today's efforts to spin or suppress those crimes. If the Senate doesn't act now to rein in the CIA, what will it take?