Post from Truth Social

There's so much sketchy stuff about John Brennan. He was the station chief in Saudi Arabia, and actually signed the visas for half of the people, half of the terrorists that crashed the planes into the twin towers. And then he comes back to the U.S., and he ends up director of the CIA, and now we see that his fingerprints are all over Crossfire Hurricane. They lied to Congress, they lied to the American people, and they did it out of pure sheer greed and lust for power. It's got to stop, and it's you and me and the American people that have got to stop it. It's not our representative, it is we, the people, have to take a stand. John Brennan, 25-year CIA veteran who currently serves as Obama's top counter-terrorism advisor. Brennan has played a key role in the expansion of Obama's secret drone war and has been dubbed by some to be the "assassination czar." Brennan was a rumored pick for the job when Obama was first elected in 2008, but was forced to withdraw from consideration amidst protest over his role at the CIA under George W. Bush. Brennan had publicly supported the CIA's policies of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques and extraordinary rendition. Marcy, welcome to Democracy Now! Tell us who John Brennan is. So, if Barack Obama had the equivalent of a Dick Cheney, so somebody who is involved in all of the national security decisions is the last person to speak to Obama before he makes these decisions, if we trust him. I want to turn to John Brennan's remarks when he publicly confirmed the United States has used drones to conduct targeted killings overseas. That John Brennan has lied explicitly about drones in the past, in 2011, 2010, he basically said there had been no civilian casualties at all from drones. So when John Brennan makes public statements, he also had a famous press conference right after the killing of Osama bin Laden, where he made a lot of misleading statements as well. So when John Brennan says something, you shouldn't necessarily believe John Brennan. And we know from what he said in that speech, there were specific details that were inaccurate. So Obama's notion of being transparent with John Brennan, a proven liar, doesn't fly. Moreover, given that we know now, we didn't know when he made that speech, that John Brennan is the guy who's basically, like I said, the last decision-maker before Obama signs off on drone strikes or not, he has a pretty big incentive to spin the process in such a way that he's protected legally. Because if, in fact, they're not using rules as they appear not to be in all cases that would abide by international law, he's at quite a bit of exposure. So now we can go out there and claim to be transparent and make the speech about these great standards they're using, which they're not, because the speech he made doesn't account for signature strikes, which involve patterns rather than specific intelligence. And it protects him, but it's not transparency. And the administration has repeatedly refused to be transparent about the most basic issues with regards to their program. Medea Benjamin referenced two 16-year-olds who were killed, one of whom is a Pakistani who was an activist basically against drone strikes. And shortly after he made some public statements, he died in a drone strike. And the second one is Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, who, as she said, was an American citizen. And he was killed in a drone strike just a couple weeks after his father. What about John Brennan's role under George W. Bush? Right. I mean, so he was George Tenet's chief of staff and then went on to be kind of the precursor to what's now called the National Counterterrorism Center. And in that role, he touched the early moments of the torture program and I think, more importantly, was involved in the targeting for Chinese illegal wireless—weren't-this-wiretapping program when it was working without any legal sanction at all. So, as you said, at the top of this story, Brennan was considered unacceptable four years ago to lead the CIA. Since then, we've learned about his role in the illegal wiretapping program. We've learned about his role in drone strikes, and yet now he's supposed to be an acceptable candidate. I don't understand how—I mean, I guess that's a testament to what kind of hard-nosed person Barack Obama has become and the degree to which his policies really are just a continuation of the Bush chain policies. The 9/11 hijackers who were given visas in Saudi Arabia had those visas approved by John Brennan. Why aren't we talking about that? I don't understand why we're not. John Brennan knew that we were under threat of a massive attack. He was reading the same intelligence that all the rest of us were reading. So how was it that he approved these visas? And one thing I heard—I don't know if it's true, but I heard it from a CIA colleague—that the State Department consular officer who turned some of these guys down was overridden by John Brennan and the visas were then granted. Why is that not being investigated? I have no idea. That seems to me like it should be a top of mind that we need to get to the bottom of this, especially because of everything that happened after that relationship that he had there in Saudi Arabia. How could he not know? And then, of course, we never even talked about Saudi Arabia after we went right to Iraq. That's right. So, you know, this is unfinished business. I led the raid that captured Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan, Faisalabad, Pakistan in March of 2002. One of the things that we also confiscated that night when we raided his house was his diary full of important actionable information. One of the things that we found in that diary were the private cell phone numbers of three Saudi princes. So we went to the Saudi government and we said, "What the heck is this? You better give us answers that we believe or we're going to move against these guys." The Saudis said, "We'll take care of it." Within months, one of them died on the operating table during bariatric surgery. One of them was killed in a one-car accident on the Riyadh to Jeddah highway. And one of them went camping in the desert and died of thirst. Wow. So we were never able to interrogate any of these Saudi princes. Well, where was John Brennan when that was all happening? He was the station chief at the time, for God's sake. Yes. I mean, something's very, very disturbing about his time in Saudi Arabia and this is even more going in that direction. And mind you, this is a guy who spent at the time, 25 years in analysis, had never recruited a source in his life and had never been in an operational position in his life. But he's the station chief in Riyadh. I mean, I don't even understand. His whole history makes no sense at all. Like he seems like a phantom, kind of like Obama. Oh, it's because he and George Tenet were in a bromance starting in the 1990s. George was his rabbi and took care of him like I had never seen one who kind of promoted him and took him under his wing after he was already not doing well. Getting a little deeper into the Obama administration and John Brennan himself, there's a couple things you need to consider. See, John Brennan was a known communist. I mean, he voted for Angela Davis and Gus Hall in the 1980 election. Angela Davis and Gus Hall were both well-known communists. Angela Davis was also a member of the Black Panthers and on the FBI's most wanted list. So this is who John Brennan is voting for, okay? So not only was he allowed to join the CIA, but then he rose to be its actual director. I mean, that alone should tell you something about just how far back and how deep the rock goes in this country. I mean, it's absolutely disgusting. And then just to throw the cherry on top, James Comey. James Comey, ladies and gentlemen. This comes out of New York Magazine, okay? This is what he said. He said, "In college, I was left of center, and through a gradual process, I found myself more comfortable with a lot of the ideas and approaches the Republicans were using. I voted for Carter in 1980, but in '84, I voted for Reagan. I had moved from communist to whatever I am now. I'm not even sure how to characterize myself politically. Maybe at some point, I'll have to figure it out." This, ladies and gentlemen, is the Obama administration. They're all communists. In the Obama administration, John Brennan had the Tuesday morning kill list meetings because the tech got sophisticated enough that you could just write up a list of people that you want to kill that week, and you dish out the assignments. The teams go out, they kill everybody that's on the list, and then they meet next Tuesday and get that kill list, and you just do it week after week. Well, if you're not having to devote armies of targeting analysts to finding these guys, if your computers can find them, just based on their email messaging, text messaging, whatever, metadata, there, your job's easy. You just fire a missile from the drone, or you drop a guy in that does a close in shot, and then you get back on the helicopter and fly home. I hate to sound cynical like that, but that's just the way it is. I think that's just calling it how it is. What year or years was Brennan doing that Tuesday morning kill list? He started in '09 and kept it going. I have no idea if Donald Trump kept it or Joe Biden kept it or revived it, but it was something that they were very proud of in the Obama administration. They were just going out whacking everybody. Well, nobody dropped more missiles from drones than Obama did. No, nobody. Nobody. I naively said, "The oversight committees need to be on this," and then a friend of mine said, "To say what in their re-election campaigns? We need to kill fewer terrorists." You and John Brennan are not the biggest fans of each other, right? No, sir. Why not? John and I have always hated each other. I never liked him. I never trusted him. I believe that he is the archetypal sociopath. Somebody just by dint of his sociopathy has been able to rise to the top. Yeah. When we go back to 1990, I mean, I've known John for what is that now, 35 years. Never liked him. Never trusted him. Never respected him, but he had a rabbi in George Tennant, and the next thing you know, he's at the top of the heap. It was John Brennan who literally put me in prison. John had a Nixonian obsession with national security leaks except when he was the one doing the leaking, and now it's come back to bite him in the ass, and we can get into that if you want, but after I blew the whistle on the torture program and John became the deputy national security advisor for counterterrorism in Obama's first term, he went on to be CIA director in the second term. John asked the Justice Department to secretly reopen the case against me. The Bush administration said I had not committed a crime, they closed the case. I had no idea that my phones were tapped, my emails were intercepted, FBI guys following me everywhere, and then John wrote a memo to Eric Holder who was the attorney general at the time, and he said, "Charge him with espionage," and Holder wrote back and said, "My people don't think he committed espionage." And then Brennan wrote back and said, "Charge him anyway and make him defend himself." So they arrested me, charged me with five felonies, three counts of espionage, waited until I went bankrupt, and then dropped the espionage charges. So I ended up taking a plea to a lesser charge, I did 23 months in prison, and it was because I had revealed the CIA's dirty laundry and this illegal, immoral torture program. And now it's John's turn to be on the hot seat. John and all his cronies like Jim Clapper and Jim Comey and Hillary Clinton and all these other ones who thought they were untouchable, now they're going to have to answer for their actions.

Transcribed automatically. Expect errors in names and numbers.