John
Brennan’s Politicized Intelligence
By WSJ Staff
Wall Street Journal
April 9, 2015
Remember when the left accused the Bush
Administration of politicizing intelligence to justify its invasion of Iraq? It
wasn’t true, but someone ought to remind CIA director John Brennan.
Because in attacking critics of the President’s Iran policy Tuesday, he
sounded more like a White House communications director than a CIA chief.
During remarks at Harvard’s Institute of
Politics, Mr. Brennan said anyone who knew the facts and believes the deal with
Tehran “provides a pathway for Iran to a bomb” is being “wholly
disingenuous.” If we take him at his word, former Secretaries of State George
Shultz and Henry
Kissinger, who wrote on our pages Wednesday,
must be dishonest in their detailed, careful critique.
Think about that for a moment. A CIA director
claims that any disagreement over a highly complicated and controversial deal
must come from base motives. Think of the signal that sends to the CIA analysts
who will be responsible for monitoring the deal and ascertaining whether Iran is
violating it. Better not speak up!
Then again Mr. Brennan has been carrying water
for President Obama for a long time. After he left the CIA in the 2000s, he
denounced waterboarding as something that “goes beyond the bounds of what a
civilized society should employ,” which nicely fit the Obama campaign
narrative. But Mr. Brennan still insisted it had provided vital intel. The 2008
campaign help earned Mr. Brennan a White House job in 2009, then a promotion to
the CIA in 2013, where the White House seems still to be writing his talking
points.
Regarding facts and nuclear weapons in the
Middle East, Mr. Brennan would better spend his time making sure the CIA
doesn’t repeat its past mistakes. Before the first Gulf War the agency greatly
underestimated Saddam Hussein’s nuclear programs, then in 2003 it vastly
overestimated them. A few years later it wrongly concluded Iran had given up its
nuclear ambitions.
Mr. Brennan’s naked public
partisanship harms the CIA by making whatever it now says about Iran simply
unbelievable.