Obama Taps Bush CIA Official

Out with the old, in with the… old? President Barack Obama may say he’s against the Bush administration’s interrogation policies, but he’s just tapped a key Bush-era CIA insider, John Brennan, to oversee his new interrogation policies. Brennan, who was in the CIA for 25 years and who served as the CIA’s deputy executive director during the period of "enhanced interrogation techniques," will be Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser. He'll oversee a new interrogation corps, which will be focused on the most important detainees. While Brennan was not in a decision-making position during the period of enhanced techniques, former CIA officials say that he was likely privy to discussions about certain tactics. According to Melvin Goodman, former intelligence analyst who worked at the CIA for 20 years, Brennan “supported everything with great enthusiasm—apparently he did make claims in-house … against waterboarding, but he was defending detentions, defending extraordinary renditions, enhanced interrogation techniques and secret prisons.” He added that Brennan getting the new job “shows that Obama is politically deaf or doesn’t care.”